Ninel Nekay
Analogy For Black Women
The Ice cream dealer asks the colorless child
with eyes like robin eggs “which flavor?”
she say “all of them.”
He say “nah blondie, choose.”
she say “sherbert, that way I can taste them all
and it’ll cost me the price of a single scoop.”
forty-levem licks later
the arctic cream is uprooted
from its sugar cone country
kidnapped by the wind’s hunger
unearthed by the breeze
the hot breath deriving from a white girl’s paper mache mouth
knocked from it’s cow pus pedestal and onto the littered sidewalk
isn’t this the perfect analogy for black bodies:
Sherbert flattening slowly along the ground
Pale pedestrians stepping over the spillage
pretending not to see the rainbows
crying out in our skin
Isn’t it sick normal
I cannot recognize a black person
as a black person
if they are not already melting
into memory as I dap them in passing
Former Atlanta’s Youth Poet Laureate, Chief of operations at HomeGrown Poetry, and author of “B Is For Balcony”, Ninel Nekay (born September 12, 1997) is a second generation Jamaican-American writer whose work has appeared on widely recognized stages such as The Fox Theater, The Alliance Theater, The Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts, The Center For Civil And Human Rights, Georgia Public Broadcast Center, The War Memorial Opera House, and so forth. Nekay is known for her creative writing, mesmerizing acting abilities, unorthodox teaching methods, and womanist views, particularly regarding her existence as a Jamaican-American southerner who embodies the definition of intersectionality.