Black People Deserve Beautiful Sentences. We Really Do.
by Arianne Elena
I returned to righteous riots, a realm
of crossroads for a college grad.
Chaos. Niggas violated
cause we had been violated. The bars
of the beauty supply bent like a wilted
bouquet, a topsoil of glass for a dad.
We wanted justice. My mom made gumbo
in waiting. Fixed a thick roux dark as Truth.
The okra seduced the onions & delivered
bell peppers covered in an ancestral storm.
Andouille sausage rolled dice on the corner
till the chicken came home to stew.
Fabulous, flush, & late—the shrimp
strutted in. The rice was seated.
An experiment in searching for warmth,
this meal caressed a desert
as if to say, I don’t have the answers
& I’m as scared as the fire is red—
but I have this heart to share. I imagine
my granny packed a pot for her daughter:
this mirror now veiled by hard love showing me
beauty as what I was born for. Outside, designs
for tomorrow, endings like grass blades,
a hood heavy with sentences.
The title comes from Kiese Laymon’s Twitter on 10/29/2020
Arianne Elena Payne is a cultural worker, strategist, and multidisciplinary artist from Chicago, IL. She received the 2022 Virginia Downs Poetry Award and the 2019 Frederick Hartmann Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured in Voicemail Poems and is forthcoming in The Shenandoah Review. Situated in the complexities and lyricism of Blackness and girlhood, her work strives to take Black communities seriously.