20/20
Why are you squinting?
The picture has come into focus
Far too many times
Before you were willing to look at it
Before it was clear that
Your America won’t allow itself
To be mine
It’s clearer now more than ever, isn’t it?
How many times must
Our blood stream through asphalt
Before you question
Why the boys in white and those in blue
Have the same faces
It’s clearer now more than ever, isn’t it?
Yeah, we feel chaotic.
Will you blind your own eyes to it
Or will you open them
To see what has been killing us
Sleeps in your bed at night
And you face away from it
So you can sleep, too.
It’s clearer now more than ever, isn’t it?
Why are you squinting?
Grayscale
If these borders had mirrors
What would you see?
I know what you’d expect to see:
The rolling waves of amber gray
Where the flowers and people grow unfettered and free
A place where you only hang
By your own unused bootstraps
Where only enablers help you down from your nooses
That same pastoral scene you told us was waiting for us down at those windows to our nation’s soul
You may be shocked to know
That the reflection looks a bit different
Down in those mirrors
If you dare peer into them
Unfortunately
You won’t see a paradise of freedom, an oasis as sweet as lilac
No, if you were to take a look
The dreadful eyes of a beast would stare back
You’ll say you haven’t seen it
But, I’d argue, it’s pretty hard to miss
Perhaps you haven’t watched how it prowls as it watches our every step, as we walk, talk, eat, sleep,
Live inside our black flesh
It’ll wait for any, and I mean any reason
To choke us by the neck
Maybe you haven’t seen it skulk us
In the shadows
Looking for the vulnerable among us it can steal away
Or you haven’t witnessed it lunge at the chance it has to put us, confused and afraid,
Back into our place
It’s scarier than fiction
Because there is, truly, nothing fictional about it
So forgive us for wondering
How you can claim to not notice it yet
You’ll say the beast is mythological
And that, if it were real, maybe it’s our fault since
No such creature has ever attacked you
So perhaps we’re partially responsible,
At the very least
Which leads me to ask
Do you see yourself reflected in the teeth of the beast?
Maybe it too closely resembles the faces
Of your fathers and sons
So you are not as bothered
When it crushes our lungs
Do you look into canines that tear through families like butcher knives into meat
And force mothers to dress in black
And see your own hungering eyes staring back
Do you see yourself in claws
That wish to uproot
Those you don’t think belong?
Or whose presence within these borders
You see as wrong?
Is this why you don’t speak
When you see it prepare for rampage?
Why you refuse to cage it
Restrain it
Stop it
Or name it it’s true name?
And would rather prefer blaming its human prey?
In all this
Did you forget, it’s prey was human, like you?
Did you forget that we fear, and cry, and bleed too?
Or is color of our skins
Too deep of pools for you to swim in
Would the feeling of being knee deep in our humanity be too uncomfortable to try?
More uncomfortable, even, than watching us die?
If these borders had mirrors
They would capture what you didn’t want to see
Just as they always have
You’d rather break the glass before peering into it
Maybe you’d paint over it stark white
Hoping, this way, the picture would be less terrifying to witness
Perhaps you’ll scream yourself dizzy that the mirror never existed
And failing that, you’d just avert your gaze
Just as you avert mine
Either way
The result would be the same
“My artwork is wholly centered around the experience of black people, with a specific focus on the black femme/woman identity, as a means of both connecting with them and giving them art that is grounding to their experience. As the black femme identity is at the center of what I do, the Black Lives Matter movement plays an integral role in the work that I make, either indirectly or directly, as the goals of both my artwork and the movement are around the humanization of black life.“
You can find Jasmine Green at @bgapgh on Instagram.