It’s Important I Remember That Darkness and Blackness Aren’t Perfect Synonyms—
2 Minutes Read Time
but the Venn diagram is a perfect circle.
I poke my neck through the hole of comparison like a hula-hoop
hoping, under no circumstance, that it ever cuts as close
as the collar of the dress shirt hanging in my closet
feeding moths a feast in lean times.
It is the dead center of summer.
We are centering the dead.
The dead are everywhere,
surround me.
There is the virus and the viral video
and they are not the same,
yet the Venn diagram is a perfect circle.
A question is what a ventilator would’ve done for Mr. Floyd.
An answer is what it means to have mercy to be able to give.
A question is why the Lord put his knee on my cousin’s neck.
An answer is what happens when mercy is not received.
A stethoscope and a handcuff
both have a radius;
they are circles that overlap perfectly
around darkness.
Nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds
is not enough time
to say hundreds of thousands of names
scratched out in less than a year.
The great hoax is the thing that kills us:
the pathogen is just an accomplice,
the officer is just an accomplice.
Blackness encircles
my circle.
Systemic, systematic, symptom: the syllables slush in my mouth,
spike my sugar skyward.
They say the sitting president is not the disease but of the disease;
they say the disease is not of the president but is the president’s:
the Venn diagram is a perfect circle.
My body overlaps hers in bed, both in common need
of touch to turn away from ethereal existence.
Our aims and anxieties are always
in between us, a commonality like our bed.
There isn’t a crisis I know of that isn’t existential
and therefore something beyond what exhausting can describe.
The person that feels everything
and the person that feels nothing:
the Venn Diagram is a perfect circle.
What they look like isn’t what they are,
but they are indeed what they look like.
Read more from Issue 18.2.
