Evelyn F. Katz
Walking While White
My body at 4:28
A rusted bicycle chain—
Disjointed, squeaky, off-track.
I want to believe cracking joints
Realign bones as I mask up
and set out into a day
That has mostly gotten away from me.
I walk without purpose.
I walk without direction.
I am a white woman and have this privilege.
I weave a capillary of streets
Adorned with purple, yellow, white flowers
Spilling from window boxes,
Children’s artwork roped around trees.
American flags
Heaps of garbage piled at curbs.
When street snatches pavement under my feet
I turn back, climb footbridge and keep walking
Blocks beyond home.
I walk these streets so familiar
I don’t see them and they don’t see me.
Until I do.
Chalked in blue and white a half city block
Names. Names of the brutalized. Names of the dead.
I walk this sidewalk graveyard
Careful not to step on the dead.
Abner Louima white lettered less than
Half a mile from the precinct he was
Sodomized and beaten almost to death.
Amadou Diallo’s name spills like blood in blue
To the curb and I step into the street so I don’t
Step on his name.
Breonna Taylor rests in chalk next to George Floyd.
I want to gather rocks and place them on names
Markers marking they are not forgotten.
I want to outwalk the rhetoric, lend my voice
To the voices of reason and speak each name but
The sirens…the fucking sirens…like foot to throat
Crushes breath formed around embryonic words,
Asphyxiating them before they become viable.
—Submitted on 06/06/2020
Evelyn F. Katz is the author of What I See at Red Lights (CreateSpace, 2019). She taught English and ESL for fifteen years before becoming an assistant principal. Katz founded The Falcon Pen Literary Magazine, showcasing student poetry. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Riverrun Literary Magazine, The Voices’ Project, Coffee Shop Poems, Tell Us A Story Blog, and other publications, as well as in the anthology Dinner with the Muse: The Anthology of the Green Pavilion Poetry Event (Ra Rays Press, 2019), edited by Evie Ivy.
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