Benediction

God bless the lightning bolt in my little brother’s hair. God bless our neighborhood barber, the patience it takes to make a man you’ve just met beautiful. God bless every beautiful thing called monstrous since the dawn of a colonizer’s time. God bless the arms of the mother on the cross -town bus, the sterling silver cross at the crux of her collarbone, its shine barely visible beneath her nightshade -navy New York Yankees hoodie. God bless the baby boy kept precious in her embrace. His wail turning my entire row into an opera house. God bless the vulnerable ones. How they call us toward love & its infinite, unthinkable costs. God bless the floss. The flash. The brash & bare-knuckle brawl of the South Bronx girls who raised my mother to grease knuckles, cut eyes, get fly as any fugitive dream on the lam, on the run from the Law as any & all of us are who dare to wake & walk in this skin & you best believe God blessed this skin, the shimmer & slick of it, the wherewithal to bear the rage of brothers, sisters slain & still function each morning, still sit at a desk, send an email, take an order, dream a world, some heaven big enough for black life to flourish, to grow, God bless the , my story is not for sale the , this body belongs to me & the earth alone, the , the thing about souls is they by definition cannot be owned God bless the beloved flesh our refusal calls home God bless the unkillable interior bless the uprising bless the rebellion bless the overflow God bless everything that survives the fire