Black Heroism is Unskilled Labor
By Xandria Phillips
Angela makes sure the right people die at the funeral.
A grandchild of the Tulsa Massacre, her skin
is artifice, a call to dream so nothing occurs.
When her yt colleague detonates a suicide bomber
she blocks the blast with a casket. It is common knowledge
that womanism does feminism’s housekeeping.
Much as one might travel, one guilt-trips.
In this case, to Re-Reconstruction Era fantasy.
Did I mention that everyone is a cop, and still
someone is trying to tell a story about justice.
Quiet as it’s kept, take something from the blackbox
and a little black ekes out further into the ethos,
but these stories don’t need to matter; they’re made from it.
I find no proxy here in iconography, genomes ache.
“Okonkwo hangs himself in the end” says Angela,
spoiling the final pages of Things Fall Apart.
“Angela won’t die at the end,” I say, to spoil another thing.
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This poem "is written about Watchmen's Angela Abar," Phillips told Poets.org. "As much as I love the show, I am drawn to critique its shortcomings, particularly Black characters standing in as an artifice for change in a world of cops."
I had a pretty quiet Friday -- chores, email, figuring out how to add watermarks to my Barbie Tarot images so that over the coming (predicted to be rainy) weekend I can upload them and change the URLs on the web pages to stop people from stealing and selling them again. I'm so glad our Star Trek Tarot images are much smaller and the other online "decks" I've made have horizontal images, not practical for actual Tarot readings (I don't believe in divination, so practical reading use has never matted so much to me). Here are the Cabin John crocuses from the past two days:
Saw my parents briefly -- they brought Whole Foods sesame tofu -- and took a walk, and though the drizzle started while we were out, I saw my first open daffodil of the spring! And we watched WandaVision, which is fantastic this week though painful to watch: lots of things we knew had happened to Wanda from previous screen moments seen in a new light, and Hayward should die at the hands of all the monsters he's contributed to creating. Then we watched the season finale of Dickinson, which did not make up to Emily and Sue for all the disappointing obsession with men this season.
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