CW: none.
The first line began as the heart of a much larger story about a group of Queer, Black vampires. But the more I ruminated on this question, the more paths I followed that revealed so many different ways death, undeath, and resurrection have been central to being Queer and Black in America. This poem became my way of mapping those paths.
What does a Queer Black immortality look like?
Is it a soul song carried from the Ivory Coast to the shores of South Carolina
Ferried by pullman porters up to Motown?
Is it D’Arcy’s vampire, stoking revolution,
Desiring whiteness and murdering it
But always falling short of both?
Is it a zombi, perpetuating dominion and
Enslavement?
Or is it Eartha’s Angelitos Negros?
Is it a sun-shriveled raisin become a plump grape again?
Is it a Parks photograph? A Lewis sculpture?
Is it Crystal LaBeija’s reads on a queen’s looping lip-sync?
Is it a mutating strain of HIV impersonating a HeLa cell?
Does it drink your blood?
Does it want your life
At night?
Is it hungry and will you invite it to the cookout?
Does it fear what it dreams?
Does it dream though it fears?
Does it sleep? Is it always sleeping?
Does it rest in a casket with Charon on the horns,
Hades on the tambourine, and
Hermes with his feathered umbrellas,
Carried by the whole procession just north of the Mason-Dixon
Where it wakes again in Madame Duterte’s mortuary?
Or is it cruising in a park filled with mist,
Smelling of tea tree and stale banana powder,
Humming “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)?”
Or is it steaming chicken soup,
Vicks rubbed in the chest,
And an old quilt
To calm the fever
That the doctors say
Is in the blood?
