Paper Girl and the Knives that Made Her by Ari B. Cofer

Author:Ari B. Cofer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Central Avenue Publishing
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

when our skin is too much

my husband is a black man.

he is beautiful

and dark-skinned

and puts the earth’s soil to shame—

not because his melanin is darker than the ground,

but because he is better than mother nature at growing beautiful things

from his pores

and this is not to say he’s perfect.

black culture taught him the best way

to deal with trauma was to bury it down like seeds,

and those seeds are still very much alive,

sprouting and rooting through his veins

and making him into a growing living thing,

this is to say i’m afraid for him.

i had a dream that one day,

men dressed in blue came to our garden.

they yelled, all lives matter

as they planted mines into the earth,

created earthquakes through the ground,

uprooting everything in the land trying to

bloom,

this is to say i am scared of cops.

afraid one day i’ll get a call

saying my husband’s melanin was too

dark for the cops to see where they were

going,

too dark for the cops to see the bruising,

too dark for the cops to see all he was trying to do

was shine.

my biggest fear is that i will become a black widow.

that i will have to take my husband’s blood and mark myself with red,

a scarlet letter and a warning that i will devour the weak things around me.

a black widow is not seen as a black queen.

we are feared and not worshipped,

everyone tries to crush our homes instead of

giving us support

and i look at my black husband.

i wonder if i am already a widow.

already so scared of his death

i am covering myself in web,

wondering if these cops fear a black queen so much

that they are hell-bent on taking her king,

this is to say i love my husband.

there will not be a day where i don’t tell him

to stay safe,

because there are men out there with tools

who will stop at nothing to kill your growth.

this is to say my husband is a black man.

his melanin is more night sky than black hole

and as king and queen we will create constellations

that litter your sky and remind you

beautiful things come from the dark.

this is to say i am not afraid.

and we will continue to grow.

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