SCENT OF THE DAY: Nose Rest Day
*Let's workshop this poem about the jarring mismatch between the reality of modern black cultural power and the exhausted but highly profitable institutional propaganda of perpetual black oppression.
*Reworked pieces of each stanza
Leslie Marmon Silko and Ceremony Rot
You love black culture. But do you love me? You love how I sound: my voice, these beats, this flow—not me though, right? You love how I look: my hair, this skin—but me, nah. We don’t get to exist. We’re forced to survive. We still fight. We still play while the world burns on fields that ain’t even level. ‘All men are created equal,’ huh—that’s my favorite part. You hate us so deeply, but you’re still so impressed. Why can’t you see there’s history in our skin? You built this country on our backs. I’m him. He’s me. She-us-we are all Black: power!—An Apple commercial, 2026
Solemn sips of ten-dollar-a-cup apple cider (“Black owned,” loud like opportunistic storefront signage) under pain paintings (Jim Crow fire hoses blasting through twenty-twenties boardrooms and billy clubs, Dixie sticks of brass-button boys in blue, battering Say-their-Name faces; a few grade-school entries too of black wrists busting free of bloody chains and cop knees crushing Afro skulls, brains on cement with gore that would have white artists fired; placards, spaces safe, for “vulnerable artists, kings and queens,” to answer what attendees here most want to learn: “How does your work speak to surviving each day, each day the same, as a Black body in Amerikkka?"),
funereal nods and sometimes even tears (selfied for proof of being down or one of the good ones) under pain theater (a robed black person on a mic, like a Buckingham guard, in each corner groaning and ASMRing watchwords like “I can’t breathe” and “systemic”; cotton-field spirituals bellowed into Kubrick iPhones raised, as if on commission to transmit coercion over “the ’Gram,” to justify victim psyches, equity bureaucracies, too bloated not to lie; tall tales of transatlantic coffee shops, slam sass accentuated by djembe salvos: “No Miss Karen, bad-built bozo Becky-ass bitch, I don’t want my cream whipped! Mattah fact, a sista want her coffee Black!”),
the every-damn-box-ticked nature of the exhibit (“Survival Mode”), just too on-the-nose, all by itself (bracketing off even how every self-seeking person, so long as they are non-neurospicy and up-to-date, wishes they were, or thanks God they are, the skin color of Disney’s good side, HR’s good side) shows the truth: that, hard as it is to face given how long solidarity and purpose has been suckled from such bodacious trauma, the time-flattened hyperstition, the hobbling ceremony, of suffering in subjugation has run its course beyond exhaustion, into a fraud where whiteness excuses every black failure, a fraud the tell-tale heart of black America finds shameful.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
