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.