I want to believe black girls don’t commit suicide

I tell myself the thought is wrong
when our grandmothers rise from the soil to feed
our existence.
For us…
Strength is flour that coats the calloused fingertips
of Female bread winners, so we
eat the frustrations and
swallow the bitterness within these
unhealthy relationships we love.

The old folks say:
Pain thickens the skin.
It makes it harder for death to expel
the sadness of never getting your prayers right or
the irritation that bubbles in your chests when you realize
there are too many churches to prey in and
not enough people to relate to.

Sitting beside a stranger in an unfamiliar space
is a form of loneliness— so we cry
just to be interrupted by our mothers’ voices
ringing reality back into our ears.
We repent for being ungrateful, then thankful
for the constant shortness-of-breath.
At least I’m living.

Black girls don’t commit suicide.
Our voices become stolen, then hidden
in the whiteness of our teeth.
Our prudent smiles are the only times we become
angelic, acceptable to a world that has no idea
we see ghost when we look in the mirror.

If we are as truly beautiful as our grandmothers say:
Why do we feel so ugly inside?
We continue to step on the edge of happiness,
balance the weight of the world on our shoulders
while clutching fragments of hope we watched being
shot out of the sky and wished
we could be just as free.

If we chose to die,
our bodies will become one with traffic
as our dark limbs take flight to the part where
life is good. Our blood will recoil back to the sea
to meet the maker, and we will ask him.
Black women don’t commit suicide, right?

Right.

I Can’t Talk...

...Inside the classroom, my lips fly in the breeze.
The air plays with my voice,
stuffs cotton down the hole
in my throat,
while my sentences become brittle sticks
erected from my neck like dead flowers in a vase.
I choke on tobacco fields
cough up sugar canes while
a switch from my mother’s hand, lashes my tongue.

It hurts to talk about where I come from.