Poetry On Odyssey: Black Girl Minus Magic

Black girl, you are so fly.

How fly is she?

She radiates a glow.

One that shines from within.

Effortlessly.

Limitlessly.

Soul so pure, you touch lives of those you only meet once.

Your divine energy transcends what the mind is capable of understanding.

You are so fly they don't even know what to call you.

No really, I know it sounds silly, but hear me out.

To them, you are that of the unnatural.

You are supernatural.

Something so spectacular and raw

It is almost frightening.

So still they must limit you.

Place you in a box.

Label box.

Dress it up.

Make it sound cute.

Sweet.

Innocent.

So they open their mouth and lift their tongue to call you magic instead.

Terrified that you may penetrate their ideology of you being unreal.

Inanimate.

Make them forget why they have their lip injections.

Wanting the very features they mock

laugh at

then go to the doctor to get.

Say things like, "Yeah she's pretty, for a black girl" and then run to the nearest place to spray their body in chemicals to look like said black girl.

Lusting over all the features they claim to hate then they choose to procreate

make life with black men

Smile when people compliment the babies features and say, "they can thank their dad for that."

Except compliments of the hair.

Call it textured.

Call it different.

Call them curls.

What they wanted to call it?

Nappy.

Raise hands to touch another black woman's hair.

While simultaneously asking questions like

"Can I touch it?"

"Is that your real hair?"

"How does it stay in?"

Intrigued as if weave was any different than their clip-in extensions.

Call Kylie Jenner the queen of wigs.

We laugh.

Have you seen my grandma's church wig?

NEW TREND ALERT!

Kim Kardashian wears Fulani braids.

Kim Kardashian wears cornrows.

First, they call it ghetto only to repackage it and sell it as fashion.

Try to jar our essence and sell it back to us.

Forgetting the strength of their existence is built on our "magic"

So when you achieve black girl

don't let them call you magic

you are no figment of imagination

no optical illusion

they cannot make your shine disappear.

Stand tall

head high

call yourself queen

call yourself healer

call them everything they were scared to speak into you.

Too afraid to call you power.

Too afraid it'll give you power.

Awakening the already burning fire we are born with in the pits of our bellies.

I will not be your personified ideology of a concept not even you can understand.

I am not magical.

I am real.

Standing here.

Do not try to equate me to falsified ideas to fit me in categories that suit your comfortability.

I am not "magic" on days I fit your criteria of what I should be.

I am tangible.

Address me and my melanin as such.

I am beauty in the truest form.

Call me Midas, because everything I touch turns to gold.