OUR WHITE MOTHER

I appear upon a stage, though I do not realize

I am performing

My mother watching carefully from her seat

Among so many other people gazing at me,

shades of white and pink

But I can only see her-

Her needy eyes, her nails tapping impatient

I once heard that mothers are more likely

to pass on culture to their children than fathers

And on stage, I'm reminded that maybe

she has nothing to give to me

Except her bitter tongue, her harsh critique:

Don't you know you're black? Why don't you act it?

She asks the director to tweak my costume

That's where so much of blackness lies, 

my scalp red underneath the fingers of a stranger

She hopes something recognizable will be braided into my knowing 

Afterall, her friends are here watching and

She told them I was black, real black, blackity black

Born to a white mother, sure, 

but sometimes she wonders if she too is a little black or 

Maybe she was in a past life or something

You don't just lose those things, do you?

Which is how she knows I'm failing

And perhaps she is right since the kids at school, the white ones say, 

I'm blacker than you

As if being black isn't just being, existing

Sitting around while everyone tells you what it means

AM I TOO OLD TO REALIZE THAT I AM ANGRY?

I feel like one of those women who barks at men- 

nape of my neck covered in fur, canines bared; a real bitch

the type of woman that drags men out to sea and then

cracks their bodies over the tides

I tell everyone that I am afraid but they don't believe me

they say, look in the mirror, aren't you tired? 

yes! always! I spend my nights crouching over my old body

tearing out my hair and looking for God whose caught in my throat

and yet, they just see a girl who, perhaps,

likes feeling like shit and that's why she's wearing her skin

like a wound 

like something she could discard if she hates herself enough