"Bricks" by Kelsey L. Smoot

VOICEMAIL POEMS

I hope all my books are banned books, like, so contraband they start trappin’ them out the bando— people fiendin’ for my words with such fervor clawing at the door for just one more taste someone keeps the lookout to make sure twelve don’t see the weight: tiny baggies filled with poem scraps pushed out from every corner I hope my books become so obscure that someone’s biggest flex is telling you they’ve read me and then you search for my Wikipedia page and all it says is -Black -queer -longtime resident of the south -93 ‘til infinity I hope white people hate my shit try to say it means nothing in the daylight feel so raw and dirty sneaking peaks on the dark web face a hot mess of flush; I hope they slam their laptops shut when they hear footsteps approaching hang their heads with shame and spend the rest of their lives wondering how much they missed out on I hope they outlaw my books And then drag queens read them to toddlers on the front steps of the capital I hope there are no front steps of the capital Because I hope the empire falls I hope a trans woman throws the first brick And I hope a page ripped from one of my books is attached to it I hope, one day, I meet a genocide survivor all grown up, despite all odds And they tell me they know all about my books And I’ll gasp and ask them how my poems made it to Palestine Through the whisper network, they’ll say We mixed them with Arabic and by the time they reached us they already had French Haitian Creole and Swahili in them too I hope my books are too heady for the Pulitzer I hope my books get down on the down-low I hope their registration expires I hope my books live in infamy I hope my books turn into history books buried somewhere long forgotten only to be dug up in two hundred years by whoever is still left on this rock And they read them and they cry and they wonder what made me write these words and what type of world we were living in where people banned books and then they take my books toss them into a pit pour one out for an ancestor and then they burn them for warmth ————————————– Kelsey L. Smoot called us from Atlanta, GA. voicemailpoems.org/submit/ facebook.com/voicemailpoems twitter.com/voicemailpoems instagram.com/voicemailpoems