waiting on you to die so i can be myself by Danez Smith
waiting on you to die so i can be myself
Danez Smitha thousand years of daughters, then me.
what else could i have learned to be?girl after girl after giving herself to herself
one long ring-shout name, monarchy of copper& coal shoulders. the body too is a garment.
i learn this best from the snake angulatingout of her pork-rind dress. i crawl out of myself
into myself, take refuge where i flee.once, i snatched my heart out like a track
& found not a heart, but two girls foreverplaying slide on a porch in my chest.
who knows how they keep countthey could be a single girl doubled
& joined at the hands. i’m stalling.i want to say something without saying it
but there’s no time. i’m waiting for a few folksi love dearly to die so i can be myself.
please don’t make me say who.bitch, the garments i’d buy if my baby
wasn’t alive. if they woke up at their wakethey might not recognize that woman
in the front making all that noise.
KEEP READING
SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, No. 15, Summer 2017.
ABOUT DANEZ SMITH
Danez Smith is the author of four poetry collections: [insert] boy, Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez was won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award,… (more)
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