Durability of color

Wearing washed white gloves, my black
hands open a metal box. Inside, I find pictures
of the “wholesome celebration.” Black ghost
feet emulsified, freeze-dried, alongside
brimmed hats and white grins, kept, soiled words
and pictures of Southern days of "yore." A black face winces, and dies slowly under your knee.
I see all y'all now. I cry alone at the new hanging tree.
Holding steady the opened box with my black hands.
This time, I see and know everything. My eyes
are wide in a sun, tendering red-hot heat.
A scream escapes my mouth. A neoteric
world outcry shapes around the boxed sacred pieces
of ancestral flesh and bone, mere souvenirs,
caught in the intermittent silence of your history
held captive between a habitual alarm
and a world mirror. Here, I pick up a rock.