A Martyr's Will, by Simone Reid

My time and energy is elsewhere, once more. In the meantime/in-between time, please enjoy this brilliant, beautiful, painstaking poem from my friend Simone Reid.

When I die
Don’t you let them spoon me out

Don't you let them fill me with flies
make me a walking skeleton
a socket of eyes
my corpse cracked out
   perforated
      and defiled

Do not have me stirring conversation
in my butcher's kitchen

Do not have me stuffed into moments of silence
the idea of me collecting
in mouths 
   ready to spit

Do not make me polite aversion



Do not cautionary tale me!


I am not
your burning car
rubber neck subject

Don’t you name any toothless laws after me

Do not have me striking fear
in the hearts of would-be revolutionaries
New bludgeon
of the pragmatic mob

Don’t even let them speak my name
without also offering
this curse:

Let me flow in the wind

tracing dust back into their eyes

Let me burn their corneas

Let my enemies recoil

knowing for certain that they cannot twist truth out of my body

tweeze integrity out of my nails

Let future days stink with rejection

of that fist pressing southward

that idea that we dead softly

dead in scores

dead easy

Let there be no debate

When they touch us

We will return

We will wait in the plums

holding flesh to the cheek

And may the next child who bites into this plum

get a bite back

with the spite

and fervor of revolution

We can be rocks

Rocks far flung to a tank
bursts of light riding 
twin tail back trails
of the moon

---

Simone Reid (she/they) is a cultural worker. It’s her aim to hijack the written word for our anti-imperialist struggle. Their poems appear or are forthcoming in Obsidian, Protean Magazine, Gordon Square Review, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU, supported by the Lillian Vernon Fellowship.