The Way You Talk About Love: A Found Poem Like What Is Discovered at Autopsy After a Massive Coronary Thrombosis

by stephanie roberts

            for Shay Stewart Bouley

At 1:51PM, on 02 July 2017, @blackgirlinmain said, To all the white
folks who are waking up, stop blocking and ignoring your racist peeps.
Talk to them, work with them. That’s your work.

The first comment was from self described Owner/Attorney, “Learning to
do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the
fatherless; plead the case of the widow. Isaiah 1:17.” Artesia, New
Mexico [population 72.25% white, 1.44% African American*]

That’s not my work, Owner/Attorney/Bible Quoter said, Nope, Thats
not my work any more than it’s your. They won’t listen & I’m not wasting my
breath on them.

Once termed, hang out to dry, when such quaint actions were more
common, now we say thrown under the bus, a strengthened idiom, with
its visual of mangled body inevitable result of washing one’s hands of
one’s responsibility. Pontius Pilate gleams evergreen.

What I’ll never understand about the way white people talk about love is
how it hurts so to hear it and what little energy it has to hold me free.
Love and hate are first cousins, not opposites, and thus shouldn’t marry.
White love bounces as de facto beach ball of indifference. Who doesn’t
enjoy beach ball? The Black and Latinx shuttled from school to prison
wish they could, while good people see having conversation over this
pipeline of tears as, wasting my breath.

At night, I pray love and hate hold hands and strangle indifference in his
bed. Bury the body in the graveyard of Bible Quotations. I am singing,
into a starry abyss, hoping hate outfits love with ice axe, ushering her
toward courage-free suburban ice castles, where love wreaks justice.

*Wikipedia

stephanie roberts is a 2018 Pushcart Prize nominee and a Silver Needle Press Poem of the Week Contest winner. Her work is featured or forthcoming in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including, Verse Daily, Atlanta Review, The Stockholm Review of Literature, L’Éphémère Review, and Crannóg Magazine. She was born in Central America, grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and is a longtime inhabitant of Québec, Canada. Follow her on the following: twitter: @ringtales, instagram: @ringtales, and soundcloud.

If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. – Debbie Millman

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash.