When I say God is a cop, I mean to say god
is a sergeant of sapphire and riot. He loves me
is a sergeant over at the local precinct. He keeps following me
like a meteor hurling itself into my muddy emollient,
like he’s looking for a good reason to pick me up
my fated impermanence.
or shoot.
I can’t just say it plain. Not this. Not the terror of my lineage.
I was designed to die—of course—but see how He charges
I know how this ends, with me flat on my face again
across my threshold & into my womxn, tearing through
and some story about my indecency,
the many etches of my face, a symphony of lead
my criminal record—my history of theft
playing into the palette of my ivory, blistering my cheeks
playing out perfectly in the headlines—I’m sure they’ll see me
until I evaporate under the gas-doused kiss of yet another one
as another one of those wannabe anarchists
of His greedy nights.
talking too much shit.
I can’t say it plain. Not this. Not that which has always been.
My womxn is a glass marble He eternally cut out
What will I tell my niece about the gun
from the breast of an Eon or a She,
and about the handcuffs and about what happens when
a god of another name now forgotten,
a Black girl is the victim of anything,
plummeting wet and unwanted
especially when she is soft and kind
into the gaping mouths of our descendants
out in a world that believes she is
branched out in the flushed indigo desert of here,
some terrible threat to innocence,
a place compressed through His filtered memory
a liar looking for lies in what has already been fact-checked
of our mutual existence, leaving scratches in the zodiac
by god, by the sergeant, and the judge
and on the lids of their eyes, a single flake
and the president, dammit, the congress
of Hir original form survived,
of our country
—a universe unceremoniously unraveled.
—a democracy dying.
I can’t say it plain. Not this.
In His murderous light-stained hands
And yet, after he has consumed
everything,
everything
anything able to move
we have yet to move anything,
—is moved.
—still.
