The Ballad of Recy Taylor *

Abbeville, Alabama?

act just like you do with your husband or I'll cut your damn throat
-Herbert Lovett?

to be an american is to love

roads that tried to kill
me, dust, the desperate

beat of fannie’s
stout white fists against that green

chevy, a murder
of white men packed inside, their
pale hands a lesson on patriotism and

allegiance. to be an american
is to love god, to love how
we can call out his name
maybe a thousand times in one

endless bloody breaking night, to glory

in the silence of an answer
that never comes.
?

I am an american
because i call a thing
a thing: love
is my child, home
is wherever my daddy
goes: frantic searching
for my body
and what those seven
white men did
in all those godless hours was rape me
laugh train steel at my heart
?

my god, if I waited
for you, maybe I’d be dead
in that lonesome forest, my bare

breasts holding a grove
of pecan trees, the taste
of my blood lingering
in its fruit, a shamed
footnote in another black man’s

sorrow. you let me keep

my tongue, I’ll use it to set

this road afire
?

* ?Recy Taylor was a Black woman kidnapped and gang raped by seven white men on September 3, 1944. She pressed charges, aided by Rosa Parks, and eventually brought her assailants to trial.