Gender Bend
Sankofa
they will
tell you that gender bending
is a new
sickness had by the wicked
the
overzealous feminists and faggots
the academic
freudians and foulcaltians
i know of
black women in loose skirts
who lower
their bottoms to the earth
they bear
down to bring up a day’s crop:
cotton,
cane, children
“today i
think i will be a mother,” one says
her breasts
are full they will be loosened by days end
when master
whips the milk out of her chest
she will
bend
she will
bend within the trench
dug for her
pregnant belly
her back
curves to cradle the
unborn deep
in the earth
electric
lashes slice neon reds
through the
brown of her skin
beneath the
curl of the whip she will bend
our bodies
are pliable,
they try to
shape us into negative space
we are the
mould against their bodies
our dark
curves invert pale frailty
we are the
anti-woman
so fucking
bad we must be men
men with
pussies who fight confederate soldiers
steal away
to freedom in between blackouts
butch dykes
and bulldaggers
who witness
to self deprecating torch songs
plead the
fifth. you got to prove it on me
prove, that
I have been nothing more than what I claim to be
navigating
this uneven terrain of being a black woman
we’ve bent
around laws and the middle passage
born
children in the pissy hulls of slave ships
been
mattresses to white masters invisible to our
brothers
declared
manifestas in the crosshairs of an enemy’s gun
careful not
to leave our pens in another’s blood
we have made
love to women in cotton fields and back alleys
built the
dance floor and dropped it like its hot
written
passages and cried floods
parted seas
daily in our girl-children’s heads
harvested
the rows of corn that grow there
then, we
bent again
pulled the
hem of our wide skirts
tucked it in
our waists to protect
what makes
us w/hole
we bend back
so far back
we shame the matrix
(which was
written by a black woman anyway)
so far back
our spines
scream our
names
we bend
we gender
bend..
we bend our
gender
and grab
the truth
by our
heels
