Poetry Month, Jason Reynolds

 Match
~Jason Reynolds

on the days the dark is vanta vicious

enough to swallow whole every holy

thing like my mother and the stigmata

she bleeds from a totem of raising black

on the days the cold is cold as all get out but

there’s no place to get in when even breath is

blade and hurts to think of thinking of breathing

let alone laughing

on the days I feel frayed and ‘fraid ripped

and torn from the lot plucked from family

and ‘nem and even myself sometimes my

name is the name of a stranger

my face still the face in the hole of a

hoodie just snatched out my own world

never mine and dragged and scraped

across the rough textured parts of this

being alive thing

i’m reminded of what it feels

like to have my head alight to

have it catch fire and blaze-lick

high above me and all this

i’m reminded to return to the truth that oh

yeah me my little self a match my little

self a cardboard cutout might could burn

this whole so-called kingdom down

Copyright © 2020 by Jason Reynolds. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 28, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.