by JoliAmour DuBose-Morris
My skin is a contract of mirrors made by the generations before me cut by glass. These shards of loans and section eight housing make up a black body one would easily frame on their wall. a beautiful take on the african diaspora because art is not only it’s breathtaking image but it’s pain. My skin is the remembering and dismembering of broken bones and unkept promises. A bunch of “make it’s,” and “no interest payments,” the suffering of first generation parents questioning what their take is on---- their boy liking cosmetics and their daughter not wanting to become a medic. The worries of a woman, blaq, not wanting to birth ten children who will have sex with poverty.
They say we are powerful but disorganized. Easily distracted by campaigns that are supposed to salute those with mirrored skin to which we forget to question why we can’t make the commercials. My skin is a contract of commercializing black pain instead of it’s intellectual paint. Taught at a young age to put pants on because there are grown men around but not how to wear the pants themselves. We learn to cut and sew the denim but never know how the fabric feels like on us. The grandmother of all my grandmothers, the unheard of vigilante who washed the denim in charcoal buckets between the sun and it’s opposite Earth as her charcoal skin turned blue -- that is the example I use.
My skin is a contract of mirrors made by generations before me cut by glass. To which when the mirrors break, it is easily swept up with, “I’m sorry’s,” but not the discussion of the mistake. it is like walking outside with no shoes on, glint, skin, bleed, and now my foot aches. It is like walking outside and hoping to not come off blaq, to not sound blaq and so the interactions I’ll have with others who oppose it, do not leave me as the splinter. glint, skin, bleed. A set of laws to follow so you may never have to hear a verdict but the sturdy truth that one hopes never shows up in their gifts on Christmas morning is that you are the verdict. My skin is a contract made up of plea deals so angled on top of a redlined building that boys with coarse hair who don’t take top notch courses cannot find the slope to grasp it., men with umber skin, thundering skin, who find their release in the rain they feel when their thoughts have met the clouds. A blunt to ooze the sorrows pushed deep between the wishes of bedtime stories but.. You had to be a man first. Those same blunts make antonymously therapeutic ways to live the next forty years stuck in a four by four.
My skin is a contract of dolls that never looked like the girls I knew. To be little, to be blaq, to be girls, the pronunciation of the ‘ck’, falls on your tongue like the letter q and that q is the summary of what it feels to be a black woman. Knowing that there is always a question for you.
An expectation that the organ so round and covered in knitted crimson right there in that giantly small circle placed by the chest are quilted blankets for everyone else to fall at ease, as the rest stutter in the cold and bitter plaque of unprotection. Unprotecshun , to be shunned upon for choosing themselves, for not enjoying their need to be constantly enthusiastic for closed doors and unkind glares. For being blamed for ounces of ass and a mouth that wants to be listened to. For not liking the way we are touched. We are the american girl dolls that were never produced but the hated painters that inspired a collection of dolls who resculpted their body in our image. An oval mirror stands in the middle of a carpeted floor and a white woman glances at her reflection. She does not see herself. She sees what's left of the gifts that a woman who shaded in her monochrome has given to her. Or simply, the graces of only looking like what’s in the mirror.
My mirrors have refurbished cracks and my rainbows are stolen before I ever see them. I knew a girl inside me who blew bubbles for the chance to. I know many girls who did. The girls that I
don’t know, girls that were disowned from their redlined buildings, girls that were taken advantage of behind them as well; I know they wish to see theirs. A collective symphony of shatter.
My skin is a contract. And so on.
About the Author
JoliAmour DuBose-Morris is an 18-year-old screenwriter from Queens, New York who writes experimental versions of the black experience because we deserve the chance to ask: "what if?"
