Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Unruly
 ~Jari Bradley

Hushed whispers in an undisclosed room
            Take it out of the girl
a child, boyish in nature                     their smallness magnified.

Outcasted—the soft bodied animal you are
determined unruly animalia,
                                                    what survives inflation & inertia?

The body is a set of complex feedback systems
nothing is as it appears
                                                   the coexistence of a beard & breasts
                                                   evidence of the body’s willfully defiant
                                                       nature

The body’s resilience amid the promise of perish:
                                              somehow the child survives their own hand
                                              the day’s weary edge inverted toward grace

A child, boyish in their nature           & barrel shaped
            survives sedimented against the residue
            of dunes, soil, leaf litter,         & the bodies of a lesser

What couldn’t be excised
            your boyish nature
            your untamed phylum,         your small heart pulsing loud
                                                               notes against the night.

Copyright © 2020 by Jari Bradley. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 8, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.