May 2019
Someone asked me how it feels
to be black.
No joke.
It happened.
Yesterday.
Yesterday
my best friend asked me
if he could have
an "N-word pass."
No joke.
Yesterday
someone came up
and put their hand
in my hair
and started messing with it.
No joke.
They were like
"How do you get your hair
so curly?"
And in my head I was like
'Um... Youuu.. Ugh!?!How do you get your hair
so straight? How do you get your skin
so white?"
How do you not know
that our worlds might be very different
or closer to the same
than you might ever
want to believe?
Not actually yesterday. I wrote this poem a really long time ago. Well not really, but kind of a long time..? Is 2 years long? I don’t even know when it was, but anyway, the world still feels this way. It annoys me that even though a kind of long time has passed, it still feels this way to be black.
