Quintin Collins
Dear White People, Don’t Ask Us How to Stop It
Don’t ask us to undrown / brown faces saltwater-bloated / across the Atlantic. We were born with mouths / full of cotton and police tape. Don’t ask us to speak / wisdom on how to un-Jim Crow our bodies. Our words / ghosted in grandparents asking why / their grandchildren, children asking why their parents / fear them walking in blue / moonlight in too-white neighborhoods. / We’re too busy keeping our skin / from fertilizing gravestones. We’re too occupied / with peeling back our hoods to police / perceptions. Don’t ask us how to undead / those noose-necked. Ask these boughs / how they bowed to bear our bodies. Ask the body / camera playbacks of children chalked-outlined. Ask the immortalized / and memorialized martyrs, Twitter hashtags, protester- / choked traffic that transfigures names / into monuments. Ask nigger / as it toes your tongue’s edge. Ask the melanin / bleached and burned. Ask the skin. Ask ashes / of every black church set ablaze. Ask torches, / Confederate flags, Nazi patch parades in our streets. / Our hands are too caked in coffin splinters to bury / more of these bones. If you still don’t know / how to stop racism, ask yourself.
Quintin Collins has works that have appeared or are forthcoming in Threshold, Glass Mountain, Eclectica, Transition, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Solstice MFA program, Quintin is a managing editor at a digital marketing agency, where he publishes writing craft blogs. If Quintin were to have one extravagance, it would be a personal sommelier to give him wine pairings for books.
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