For Ahmaud Arbery
You leave the house and head to the gym. You ride the metro.
You listen to some music. You read a novel
———-try to act cool Like
you belong here you’re so
———-French
You travel in the underground going from side to side of the city
The darkness helps the white noise in a crowd
———-The crowd must be thick
or you will see your body
———-raising suspicions by walking
——————–you do not want that
But then you get to another part of the city
and re-emerge, and you’re hit with images again
of yourself in the space, and yourself
———-is two beautiful dark-skinned children
just innocently sitting on a bench waiting, not bothering anybody, just waiting &
you want to weep because they are so beautiful
———-and nobody should be wrong to be
so beautiful in this world & that beauty lies there knowing that one day it will lift
itself from their bodies like a question
You mourn the future loss of this being,
——————————————————–so full in space, so occupying, so sitting before ———————————————–you on the bench.
*
They’re from Mauritania they say,
brother and sister,
—They sit there on a park bench
along the busy way &
look at me
with doe eyes
a look of discovery
A hunger awaits
in the fine grain of skin
the perfect lines of teeth
the stillness, as if
no language
had yet been made
as if the first day on earth
you are fully with them
your eyes water
so does your skin
angry because of this thing dormant
not yet knowing itself
—in their eyes
eyes actually
looking into this world
deciding whether to enter
nobody should be wrong to be
so beautiful in this world
*
And he’s running right now…
There he goes right now!
So you try not to act too muscular not to look too big
———-muscular looks very threatening on your skin
you want to walk hard jog hard
be hard
but today you think about your mother
you owe it to her to protect her from this
—-what you can do what can be done to you
you’ve just come out of the gym you feel fit
you feel strong you feel large and full of blood
but you small up yourself and keep going
you read endless messages about your body
you’re eating your body
—-all the images fill you
∞
∞
Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican-born, UK-based poet. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 2015 with a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages and joined the University of Leeds in 2016 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and now serves as the Director of the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. His debut poetry collection, Thinking with Trees, was published in June 2021 by Carcanet Press and named by The Irish Times as one of the Best Poetry Books of 2021.