Giraffe
three
(TW for racism, homophobia)

We are the stuff that dreams are made of.
Or, at least that’s what the dead man told us, but it was probably his lover doing the writing anyway, because everyone knows that queer love is a giraffe’s neck
By which, I mean
They tell us a horse with a horn is a magical fantasy but that spotted golden cow neck towers towards the sky so which creature is harder to believe in?
That queer love has marked every stage of history, always?
Yet somehow we’re unicorns. Impossible dreams that never existed.

It’s not mythology. It’s erasure.

And Tulsa said his name was Dusk, but we all knew he tasted like sunlight
And little brown boys loving one another is exactly what sunlight tastes like.
It spreads easy across the coming dawn like promise. Like tomorrow.
What I mean to say, is that loving yourselves is an act of defiance.
But you can’t bottle sunshine and sell it to Hollywood, so they beat the queer out of brown hides instead
Tanning skins
Hanging fresh to dry despite the tears of their mothers.

They lied about Emmet, anyway. It wouldn’t have mattered if he were queer. He’d still be just as dead.

But Baby, she sees the sunlight in his swollen face and calls it beautiful
Even in death
Because no noose ever swung open mouthed like a song for tomorrow. They only speak one language. Only sing the low notes of low men in their yellow coats
With their yellow teeth
And their yellow claws piercing the false flesh of their fingertips
They filthy the color because they can’t golden their feathers.
There’s no flight for monsters. The sky is a freedom torn wide for joy.

The roots are birthing blackness but the cotton tops were always white
Say woven families scattered to seed
Say don’t say gay and teach
Say pinch the tail and suck the head
There is only one right way, and it’s what they decide.
Ours is only to abide. They are sunlight, after all.
The sky was made for sunlight.

And if I could touch the braided coils, would they be worn with time? Would I see the age and mark the history as violence or as progress? Would the books still print their yellow bellies loud across the pages of our children’s desks, speaking to the skills on enslavement? I hear the cotton growing. It groans from the earth we traded for money. It poisoned our waters and the rice is thick with arsenic. The bodies are always dying. Always burning.

That’s what happens when you murder a sunlit child.