Rice: Poems

Pluck

80 Pluck 1. to summon up one’s courage; rouse one’s spirits. n. the heart, liver, and lungs, esp. of an animal used for food. 2. courage or resolution in the face of difficulties. syn. bravery, fortitude, boldness, determination It does not take courage to watch a screaming television illuminate another Technicolor rape of myself to myself with a one-way screen that I cannot step inside the action of and say Stop. Wrong. Incorrect. Before you look again batten down your lashes It isn’t bravery that’s required to watch a television hang cable around another Black defiant man while his son coos and drools helplessly in the hooded hands of the killer It is not fortitudinous of them to pay someone brown to write then give to someone brown to say that they lied and stole deceived and didn’t care I refuse to watch The Coward Show anymore Queen the movie was a white mammy in blackface and my eyes shut down like solar gates ears stepped drum major half time high 81 for other ground oh no not this time what I did for Dynomite! and Julia I can’t for Halle queen of the Roots I say No to a camera being pointed there again at faces I long to see and cheer faces brown and family round Sometimes when they know we are starving they will throw stale bread but don’t eat right then hold out turn away refuse and reach for your heart your liver your lungs I won’t look anymore having reached the point even if the car is moving rather than ride the exciting flaming roof of something pretty I step off and wait free by the side of the road past the tragic mulatto Hollywood self and refuse to look again at the only place on stage where they will point a light Before you ever look again close your eyes Say No to this only way they want to know Black people absolutely Not to this all they want to archive rape us before our children’s growing senses why not do on television what is performed in somebody’s metro golden dreams so that we might keep sitting 82 shaking our heads to the others in the room to the television in the room and do nothing and be the fifth generation of victim I say Refuse It does not take a resolute heart to watch an electric tube iridescently portray the pain of my slavery of my Chicken George accepted self I won’t watch Black women baiting white men daring them to go back to their wives or else close up their legs how dare this scene be created then sent Nielsen express to me and how dare we look Slavery was no opera soaped or staged was no historical moment when African women conceived children out of love for white men African women were raped by men who hauled them away from the auction block like red-hot vaginas on wheels children came forth of this violence This is biology not Broadway This was no love story how dare the illusion the intimation of such 83 the sacredness be included be even considered when speaking of the ownership of one human being over another it is incomprehensible criminal to watch what money has been put on the table and what we are paying for still It is not a true rouse to simply throw something at the screen when they steal another brown child it never resolves anything to get up and leave momentarily because another brown foot is about to be chopped and missing not if you peep back through your fingers and sit back down when it’s over it is not big of you to watch white men keeping African women as bed warmers bred as fancy slaves then sold downtown as Cheapside blacks It is pluck to cut it pluck to keep it off Why not five days of Cinque the baddddass I’m-not-taking-this-anymore African or Gullah Jack Griot of the Sea Islands where is our weeklong Ida B. Wells miniseries adventure she of the Stop-Hanging-Our-Men-or-Else Club Where are my brash buffalo braves that really lived who keeps track of Black men who fly-fish in Montana who love their mothers and keep a space for...