My Pronouns are Black

I woke up to my mommas voice

and it wasn’t erasure

sometimes I wake up a boy

switch to nothin by noon

go to sleep a girl

my pronouns are Black

my pronouns code-switch

my gender is a girl who’s momma has not yet told ‘em how to behave

who races

and fights

and leaves their legs o p e n in dresses

my gender is chasing my brother for everything he stole from me

my pronouns seen my momma play every gender role

my gender is ebonics looking me in the eye saying

“you child

woman feminine thing

rammed over

picked at

sliced up on the way

into my salon”

my gender hasn’t started the habit of reminding themself

of their race

reminding that they are a girl

that girls like boys

my gender is unteaching what they learned me

my gender is a black child

watching people who look like them

drown in ward 9

so my pronouns are silent,

are polite with strangers,

my pronouns avoid the police

the Black of me wants to survive

long enough to have an identity politic

how do you go from being a slave to a gendered thing

from a mule to a person

and expect gender to function the same across race

my gender went to my momma’s alma mater,

a white, women centered college in a city that

gentrifies people of color to the margins

they tried to do the same to my gender

no one asked me my pronouns

whiteness asks Blackness

why they could not transition

from sugar plantations

to beauty pageants more gracefully

my pronouns and I lay in bed together

and we don’t know how to fuck

but my gender, so pretty in all those dresses flinches

my pronouns understand the significance

of the mason dixon in a southern summertime

they are the belle, the peach

the yes ma’am they need to be

and it does not render them invisible

the way it's supposed to

I know how to survive myself

my pronouns are my mama and

every other black woman calling me girl

my gender sees themselves

in the calluses of people who call me lovely

my gender loves my body so much

it sticks to me under all these clothes

my gender is my skin and the body underneath it

in between my legs

there's a non binary brown love letter

written to the multitudes of me

my pronouns start every poem

‘bout my momma who don't wanna hear

‘bout the things white people taught me anymore

I tell her “white people didn’t teach me

how to be brown

how to overcome

how to gender mama

my body told me that

our ancestors told me that

you told me that

I watched you”