Are We Not Obsidian?*

for Bekezela Mguni and Saretta Morgan
*title after Ellen Gallagher’s exhibit Are We Obsidian?

This is not the death
I dreamed of, so it must
be life. Red moon bullseye
playing peek-a-boo
with the idea of a cloud. A black-
bird vessel sprouting porcelain
feathers. It’s spouting steam—
can’t hiss so it chuckles: Coo Coo
Coo Coo, some relentless heckler.

I never wear black but it’s wearing me
down, so many weights and shades
playing peek-a-boo with the idea
of a shroud. Black velvet charcoal
cigarette ash newsprint rubber black sponge
black lace black paint flaking recalcitrant
black ink overcrowding the looseleaf.
Out of the black I carve portholes
with a view of more black. Out of the view
I scoop lakes lined with black tar and burlap.

Red moon bullseye plays peek-a-boo
with the idea of a cloud. I never wear black
but it’s wearing me down. The politicians
in blackface croon Coo Coo, Coo Coo, rehearsing
a round for the six o’clock news.

This is not the death I swaddled
so it must be life. A blackbird vessel
sprouting porcelain feathers cackles a jingle
into the night. I want to dance with a hematite
ghost, flat-hatted shadow sneezing
smoke. She’s burning a fleet of funereal
boats. She dips and billows, she spurs
my pulse, sings How can
BLACK LIVES MATTER
and not your own?

Note: The question at the end of the poem was inspired by the Ferguson Voices: Hands-On Community Writing Workshop facilitated by Bekezela Mguni and Saretta Morgan at the University of Pittsburgh in February, 2018.

This poem first appeared in Sampsonia Way as part of the series All Pittsburghers Are Poets.
Image Credits: Randolph Black

Lauren Russell

Lauren Russell is the author of Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020) and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). A 2017 NEA Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry, she has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and residencies from the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and City of Asylum/Passa Porta. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Brooklyn Rail, Cream City Review, and the anthologies Bettering American Poetry 2015 and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, among others. She has been assistant director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh for the last four years. Beginning in the fall of 2020, she will join the faculty of Michigan State University as an assistant professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and director of the Center for Poetry there.