trampling each other in their need

to consume the lives on which they feed

hungering for something more perverse than greed

some supremacist certainty?

Mad crowds surge forward slicing off tongues, fingers, ears

from those burnt who can no longer scream or hear

Sacred pain adheres

to this word wearing warped customs of devaluation

from when dismemberment fueled rabid celebrations

Fire-lit faces demonic in their glee

violence instructed in this horrific history:

see little white children watching there?

like they’re at a county fair,

see their parents laughing here?

Watch them hoot holler, jeer

Bright day invites a picnic to see

Terror propagated among black citizenry

This claim staked and steeped

in blood drenched earth

pickled black penis in general stores’ jars

while other parts fill lidded masons across the south

adorning mantles in homes and bars

Postcards of those brutal jamborees

held to reap strange, specific fruit

hanging from defiled southern trees

distended limbs, bloated and scorched

have severed hands,

heads flop on broken necks, askew

with full lipped mouths and eyes removed

The appropriator in chief

ignores this history, derides this grief

can’t smell the stench of thrice charred skin,

or conceive of lost skulls from fallen heads

irremovable stains of the dishonored dead

whose every bone was taken, only

mournful memories left in their stead

All this and more imbues the word misused

This ain’t what

ain’t what

happened to you