the four-year-old gives her first
protest of the morning whether intentional
or the default position of her mother's resolve
her fist is balled in the way a boy would grip her hair
in a kindergarten class or at any age that boys
put their names on things
she says, hey I like that song and Beyoncé has already finished
saying I'm gonna [ ] me up a [ ] so
I turn the volume back up to five seconds ago
before a father once told a Black woman she was too loud to
fill his daughter's lungs before the tabernacle
of mist filled the car until all we knew to breathe was
gunsmoke and the ire of men interrupting the choir of crows
that ain't meant for their ears and I know
it doesn't take much to get this little girl's blood
into a spell because it was once her grandmother's
blood which means there will be
a day when someone some man tries to pull it
out of her and she becomes a wound where the curses her
father hid from her come tumbling out of the
same
tomb where she once buried a woman with a too quiet face
2016
Regular
Contemporary
2021
Family
Pop Culture
Allusion
an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference
Asyndeton
the absence of a conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so…) between phrases and within a sentence
Caesura
a break between words within a metrical foot