My First Black Lives Matter Event
Plaza de Las Cruces
New Mexico
9.12.20

The restaurant patio on the corner
was at capacity and clapping emphatically
for a white woman and her accompanist
after their set of covers including
Tracy Chapman. Not “Fast Car”
but the one that goes,
give me one reason to stay here
and I’ll turn right back around.

I didn’t see any Black people.

I didn’t see any police but so many men
cruising down Main Street
revving their engines
half zombie/half yeoman farmer.
Yeoman farmers were the farmers
in Alabama too poor for slaves—
but don’t worry, they were fiercely
independent.

I saw a man heading south
in a Conestoga wagon
into what is now South Carolina
with a Bible in one hand
and Shakespeare in the other.

bell hooks said, white slaveowners
punished their slaves regularly
for simply looking at them.

I was in the basement
of the Sigma Nu house in Tuscaloosa;
the pledge master said, never make
eye contact with an active.
Eyelashes last about 150 days.

You know Stone Mountain?
Robert E. Lee’s as tall as a nine-story building.
Jeff Davis’ thumb’s the size of a sofa.
The largest bas-relief sculpture in the world
can’t be that hard to uncarve.

The potato salad,
the baked beans, the stewed okra,
the collard greens, the mac-n-cheese
with the breadcrumb topping
smelling of dead bodies.

The human nose can detect
about 1 trillion smells.

A swimming child approaches your feet
from the bottom of a mushroom cloud.
In her mouth a Confederate blood diamond.

I’ve never been inside a Black person’s house.

My therapist says, white guilt
doesn’t help the movement.