Justin Phillip Reed

after Tafisha Edwards To disappear Black girls at a low volume of sustained public panic is to insinuate the inconstancy of Black girls. The disposability of Black girls who are prone to disappearance. A body bag somewhere waits with little hoopla about its lot. Absence becomes the lot of Black girls. _________ will eventually accept as fact that absence becomes a lot of Black girls. In what becomes the normal day-to-day, Black girls are harder to find, _________ would think first, not that there are few attempts to find them. The question isn’t whether Black girls often go missing. If no one else, Black girls miss each other. _________  would be remiss to not recognize how everything is made less in the absence of Black girls, if _________ could miss what _________ have never been required to recognize, such as: Unlike missing Black girls, taking Black girls is a Western custom. It seems likely that such a statement will soon appear inaccurate: the white space in new textbook editions will have nothing to say about it, if the white spaces behind those textbooks have anything to say about it. That Black girls are quintessential American palimpsests is not a question but an anxiety. _________ would rather forget that Black girls were made receptacles for what the authors of Liberty and Independence would not speak. That Liberty and Independence were imaginable only in the absent-presence of taken Black girls, enslaved Black girls, Black girls on whom a foundational economic system so depended that white men would kill each other and take taken Black girls. The constancy of Black girls is someone’s anxiety. The soil is thick with hidden Black girls, the myth that only quiet Black girls are worthwhile Black girls. The soil turns as _________  turn away from loud Black girls and their cacophonic insistence on Black girls. _________ have not insisted enough upon the fact of Black girls, are often loudly shocked to find Black girls disappeared. Loud, unsustainable shock has a way of disappearing Black girls. Outrage, too, has a way of being disappeared.

The first step is to stop just beyond the weight of organs. The sense of gravity sitting in tissue is like the space between carcass and curb, before the reek worms into rock pores: a sleeplessness there, that continual niche-trash. You too once knew what it was to feel impressive. As the bed dissolves into the walls, the walls disrobe themselves of their edges and your resolve is now acute in the locking jaw of darkness. Beg to be let. You, like bravery, leave behind the breath-inflated lump, its depths, and its refusal to lace the cells of scars over even the metaphorical guttings. To manage the act exceeds the box- and-whisker of lately’s along-going. You’ve grown so accustomed to mereness that what you call a life no longer houses the sublime. It seems easy to leave. It seems this easy to leave. After a second you’ll want to consider the centimeters of resistance stitching air between here and all of elsewhere. But, still, inhabit the bodiless second. To possess it is a bearable joy.

Let the blood if your belly must have it, but let it not be of me and mine. Let my momma sleep. Let her pray. Let them eat. Let the reverend’s devil pass over me. Let the odds at least acknowledge us. Let the breasts be intact, the insulin faithfully not far, and let the deep red pinpoint puddle its urgency on a pricked fingertip. Let the nurse find the vein the first time. Let the kerosene flow and let my grandma praise her bedside lord for letting her miss another winter. Let me be just a little bit bitter so I remember: Your columns and borders aint but the fractured, the broke clean, the brownest gouges in the blades of our great-great-great-shoulders. Let me leave and come back when my chest opens for you wider than your ditches did to engorge my placeless body. The mosquito-thick breath in your throat coats my skin and it almost feels as if you love me. Let the AC drown out the TV. Let the lotion bottle keep a secret corner til Friday. Let Ike, Wan, D-Block, all my brother’s brothers ride through the weekend. Let the cop car swerve its nose into night and not see none of them. Let us smell rain. Let the breeze through an oak hymn the promise that keeps us waking. Let the cicada unwind while hushpuppy steam slips out the knot of a tourist’s hand, and let him hear in it legends of how hot grease kept the hounds and the lash at bay.