At the scene, the Angels PD urge Mr. Du to sir, lower your hand! During the death, Mr. Du was asleep in the family van. The bark of the shot, the snitch of surveillance, it conceives Ali butterfly bee under which Soon Ja promptly dissolves. Knuckles were no foreign performance in their marriage. In mine, wifebeaters yank back my wigcaps all the time. Above each assault, White Jesus lit His loosey, and I became the cameraman involved. All I could think was Ellis the island and mammie the mast, a ton in our shooting deaths. Blood orange and blood of baby girl whiffed up from the sill, both swearing in patois and smelling lilac good. But then Jesus ashed His cig and clocked outta His shift. He no longer needed women of color to make His point about obedience; He had mammograms and Florida Man for that. A city’s number one killer of people is people who are obedient to their senses. Sense outlawed—now wouldn’t that be trife? Jesus would need us so pathetically then! But in any life, it’s never my business why the savior is the color of a wedding dress and not tap shoes. I’ll have my book of light and He’ll have His. For killing anyone, He and mammograms have their lofty reasons and our men have theirs, tenderized as they are. But any afterlife— a Paradise—is no killer of colored girls, even when pushed. The skies of that sort of nirvana are innocent and inconsolable as we laze forward, inventing simultaneous gods to save us. Ornery gods of pansex, midterms, safe medications. We create gods without penises, without which they are made only of air and belief. No punishment.
Courtney Faye Taylor is the winner of the 92Y Discovery / Boston Review Poetry Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2020, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Adroit Journal, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Courtney is a graduate of the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program and is the Poetry Editor of SLICE Magazine. Find more on her website.
