so much thanks to VONA/Voices Against Racial Injustice: An Arts Forum. please, please send your work, art, poems, and prose here. more info is on the page. From Melissa R. Sipin we bring the music For Mike Brown #blacklivesmatter “It is hard on the other hand to blame the policeman… he too, believes in good intentions and is astounded and offended when they are not taken for the deed… He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country; which is precisely what, and where, he is. … He can retreat from his unease in only one direction: into a callousness which very shortly becomes second nature. He becomes more callous, the population becomes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased. One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed, editorials, speeches and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like [human].” — James Baldwin ________________________________ today, i cleaned my house without music because music isn’t what it used to be anymore. today, i cleaned my house for the thousandth time without music because today is the day after the grand jury gave no indictment to a white man who shot a unarmed black child. today, i cleaned my house without music because i knew i wasn’t made for cleaning, i came from a house of brown black women who always cooked and cleaned but cleaning became an existence i was not and instead an action i performed when i was sad and pained, and today, i cleaned my house without music because outside it rained in the south, outside the red leaves drowned, outside another black boy black girl is dying. today, i cleaned my house without music and the vacuum screamed loud and i pictured mike brown’s face and how he felt when that white cop swung the car door into his body. today, i cleaned my house without music and remembered the white cop’s testimony and how a mostly white jury believed that a black boy could walk through bullets. today, i cleaned my house without music because i felt the 107 cities in 37 states stand up and yell DON’T SHOOT when the verdict exposed yet another black child dying ‘cause the state said he never had the right to live. today, i cleaned my house without music as i recall the double consciousness it takes to remember who i am and where i was born and how i am educated and how the media and the courts and the police and the state and the schools and the universities and the banks and the corporations and the housing market and this american history need to remind me, need to remind us, that the bodies we own that the bodies we love don’t mean a thing. today, i cleaned my house without music and heard the rain fall because i knew the world outside was dead and needed to live. today, i cleaned my house without music and remembered mike brown’s face, this big black boy who was headed to college, this big black beautiful boy who stole cigarettes and who cares that he stole cigarettes when a white cop saw him jaywalking and because this white cop felt irritated that this beautiful black boy was jaywalking he drove his car straight up to mike brown and slammed his door against the beautiful black boy’s body. i don’t care what the media or the courts or the grand jury or the state or the police say, ‘cause i know this black beautiful boy looked back at that white cop and decided it was enough, that he had enough, that he needed to live, that he couldn’t walk through bullets, that he wanted a smoke, and i cleaned my house today thinking of his eyes his smile his laughter his need to live his need to say no more his need to say don’t shoot. hand ups or not, hands up or not. today, i cleaned my house without music because music can’t bring back to life this beautiful black body and music can’t bring back to life the millions of bodies that lay beneath us. today, i cleaned my house without music because music, i sing, ain’t music ain’t music ain’t music ain’t music. tomorrow, i march with a million bodies still standing still yelling still loving the black brown beautiful bodies that forever will say: tomorrow, we make the music. tomorrow, we chant the music. tomorrow, we sing the music. we matter. we matter. we matter. our lives. our black lives. our lives. we matter. we matter. we matter. our lives. our black lives. our lives. tomorrow, we clean the streets of the blood beneath us. tomorrow, we clean the streets of the blood beneath us. tomorrow, we march and we bring the music. ________________________________ Melissa R. Sipin: Batibot: small but terrible. Melissa is a writer from Carson, CA. She won First Place in the 2013 Glimmer Train Fiction Open. Her work is published/forthcoming in Guernica, Glimmer Train Stories, PANK, Kweli Journal, Eleven Eleven Journal, and HYPHEN, among others. She cofounded and is editor-in-chief of TAYO Literary Magazine. As a Kundiman Fiction Fellow, VONA/Voices Fellow, and U.S. Navy wife, she teaches at ODU and Tidewater Community College and blogs at msipin. She’s working on a novel.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 05:27:16 +0000
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