Imani Marshall-Stephen
How Do I Fight?
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves
And blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
—Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”
Listening to Billie Holiday weep “Strange Fruit,”
I asked myself a question.
In the wake of the brown fruit plucked
and wasted on the concrete,
I asked myself a question: How do I fight?
How do I fight
when the lump in my throat feels like a mountain
lodged in a twisty straw,
my mouth open wide in silence,
darkness lying dormant inside
like the words that got stuck there?
How do I fight
when my feet are paralyzed
in a pool of my very tears
and compassion fills me up more now
than the fire in my belly?
How do I fight
when I can’t master the form my fingers should take
to make a proper fist;
my thumb sticks out,
clumsy and too smooth to make an imprint?
How do I fight
when I can’t save
their sons, brothers, fathers, husbands,
my son, brother, father, husband
from the sharp teeth
ripping through their veins, spilling their blood?
How do I fight
when my enemy is invisible,
when my enemy is cloaked
in the ideology of hate,
in the practice of loathing,
in the sorrow of insecurity,
in the emerald of jealousy,
in the illusion of life,
even after it’s been ripped
from the very concaved chest of a “him”
too carbon to be worth the trouble of caring?
How do I fight
when as I write this,
I’m chocking on the very air that allows me
to write, to live, to fight...but how?
when everything seems too big for this 5’3” frame to reach,
when I’m too engulfed by the massiveness of the thing
to know where to begin,
when this thing seems to be as endless as the horizon,
when this thing lives behind smiling faces
who see “him” and actually want the world to exist without him
...no, better yet, think it should?
How do I fight
when I’m afraid to die,
afraid of what I’ll miss,
afraid of who won’t miss me
because we forget over time?
The souls thrown from this plane
because they were too plain to fit in
fly from our memories
when the now and then have enough clock ticks between them.
How do I fight
when it won’t bring “him” back,
and the lump in my throat grips my tongue,
and I want to hug my husband
and chain him to the couch in here.
Don’t go out there
where black barrels scream
behind metal shields sworn to keep us safe,
where you are the indigenous prey of a foreign hunter,
the dark stain on the fabric of fabricated truth,
the shit they can’t wait to scrape off their shoe.
How do I fight?
What do I do
to make just one ripple in the revolution
that promises to make something beautiful
from the splattered red paint strewn across this concrete canvas,
to clear the weeds from our minds
and ingest their nutrients for the strength
to keep coming for them,
coming for more,
coming for blood,
not just theirs but ours,
to keep our blood warm,
...no hot and untouchable?
How do I fight?
I don’t know the answer yet.
But I’ll keep asking the question
until I do.