It is not enough
to not be
racist. Heresy
to remove
your mask
and cough.
White men
move
their mask
and cough
into a crowd.
We are still
supposed to be
distant. Now
I can’t clean myself
enough off. Blood
on my hands
after hundreds
of years. Yet
we chant the system
has gone on
too long. We look
into a chaos
of fog & tear
gas smoke.
I am lucky
to live
this long.
We must peel
all the saturated
paint off America’s
crumbling walls
and build a new
house.

(originally published in Breathe, May 2021)