
This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Sally Rosen Kindred, is from Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley, released by W. W. Norton & Company in 2021.
My Whitenesses
Whiteness as my body’s
spent currency:
hair that holds no melanin,
which I pluck out;
an overlong fingernail
that I tear away;
what once blistered,
collapsed flat to my heel.
And what then?
Skin picked, flicked
under my bed—
strands dropped to tile—
the keratin crescents folded,
tucked in couch-crevice.
My performative strip
of self, still
trashing up the place.
Down by Richmond,
how you pronounce a thing
sets stake in the land.
Do you elaborate
a tribe’s Pow-hite?
Or does 300 years
of muscle memory
guide the tongue?
Po’white Creek.
Po’white Parkway.
One man uses cracker
as absolution,
as proof of brotherhood,
while another uses cracker
because someone,
three great-grands ago,
cracked a whip.
Virginia, my ghosts
need gathering.
Come to the table
and sit, goddammit. Sit.


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