There are corpses on the streets of New York. Ambulance song in the air
every few minutes. I am groundless when a friend tells me
is dead. I keep thinking of his three sons, how his low voice now must live in their memories.
*
is dead. I watch the last few seconds of his life in landscape mode on my cellphone.
I know, then, I have had enough. I can never willingly see the end for anyone else Black.
I am too full on death to want to witness any more.
*
is dead because of the police.
I haven’t breathed deeply since February.
I haven’t let a night pass without crossing my body in the dark & begging God to help us all.
*
Holy, the spirits.
Holy, the Grey Goose, the Elijah Craig Small Batch.
Holy, the Patrón that awakens the burn in my throat, chest & liver.
Holy, their touch that brings, for a moment, the bite of something more than dread.
*
The fever comes one summer night.
Unsure if this is only regular sickness or the sickness that killed ,
I start imagining my life without me. After I sweat through the cotton bedsheets,
I tell the swaying shadows I am afraid to die – to live air-hungry, then not at all.
*
The next morning,
I take the interstate into Georgia & don’t think about where to stop or turn around.
I want to commit everything the sun is holding to my blood
in case the dark comes for me within the next two weeks.
*
The day after the election,
someone white throws our morning paper onto the roof of my family’s home.
Someone white, again, wants us not to have what is ours
because of the spirits they cradle inside them.
My family has been Black & Southern long enough to expect this.
The spirits parading inside us won’t let us forget or be surprised.
*
The spirits parading inside us won’t let us forget or be surprised when the president won’t concede.
Where we live,
when white people cannot accept the world,
often, it means the world will burn.
*
After my dies,
my tells me my can’t stop sobbing.
I don’t hear him, but knowing he is mourning unknits me.
I don’t remember the last time he’s been this exposed, this human.
*
Hours after I bend my knee in the late fall & ask my love to marry me, my dies.
I am afraid to cry, to open myself, to give any emotion to this barbed, new world.
I am afraid of the release, of feeling empty if it all oceans out.
*
The year ends
with fireworks in the distance & Johnnie Walker Black Label
in a Styrofoam cup. The year ends.
My dead are still gone. The year ends.
I’ve yet to stop feeling the brown earth dying beneath my feet.
———————
Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, TN. He is the author of the forthcoming chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade from Bull City Press. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Grist Journal, and elsewhere.