the GENDER issue / POETRY
"For Natasha McKenna"
by Sequoia Maner
Photo: Natasha McKenna
For Natasha McKenna (1978-2015) who died in police custody while naked, shackled, and hooded after being tasered four times by members of a tactical unit charged with transferring her to a psychiatric facility in Fairfax, VA
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If sometimes my mind gets to wandering from this plane to where sound gives way to silence
If sometimes my tongue talks as other tongues malformed, garbled
If sometimes my clenched fist craves the give & crack of firm flesh, soft organ
If sometimes there is no joy
If sometimes the cries of my babygirl cannot move me
If sometimes her eyes look like mine, almonds, but most times I see
him & I think she have this thing that comes up out of me
If sometimes the pitch of black is a coppery conduit to brackish waters
If sometimes there is joy
If sometimes there is no joy
If sometimes the sweet smell of sumac sends me spiraling to dream & I wake up yelling again
If sometimes I don’t remember how my inside thoughts crawled out of me to land as spit
If sometimes I just need a muthafucka to back up
If sometimes I need the walls to reflect the funkiness of the human condition
If sometimes a wasting cannot be quieted
If sometimes I cannot be quieted
If sometimes it is what I always expected it was
You promised you wouldn’t kill me
I didn’t do anything
Sequoia Maner is a Mellon Teaching Fellow of Feminist Studies at Southwestern University. She earned her B.A. in English from Duke University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English from the University of Texas at Austin. She is co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge 2019). Her essays and poetry can be found in Meridians, Obsidian, The Langston Hughes Review, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere.