Black History Month Special Issue Poetry Runner Up: Salt-Blood

By Christie Valentin-Bati

I woke today with the same attitude I always have
one fist cured and another open.
I call this the Black girl stance.

Later on, I drive to Divinely Auditorium
because I am giving a speech there on inequality
because I am Black and understand inequality.

At the podium, I open and close my fists.

I had a dream, I begin,
and all the white people in the audience
stand and clap.

I speak slow, soft
like positioning marbles
beneath my tongue

I trapeze
gripping between two lives—

white and black.
Will they call me articulate or loud?
Am I passionate or angry?

Two shifting veils, two faces: double consciousness,
Du Bois called it.

I push on with my speech.

I had a dream
and in my dream,
I see my mother.

She, a Black woman,
is honeycomb sweet,
misunderstood,
so tangled in broken lineage.

Our family is purpled-ivied, she says. Our family carries pain.
My body is your body is all bodies derived from me.

In this dream, we are at a grocery store, looking at fruit.
She is holding a banana—small and ripening,
pew, she points it at me and laughs.

If you know this story already
change it for me
before it’s too late
before she becomes a threat
before the inevitable happens.

I shake her. I say mom, grab a peach
an orange, a pear,
anything less gun-like
than a speckling banana.
Better to grab nothing at all,
walk with your hands up instead

I curse             I slap the fruit away               I scream

She is killed anyway.

In this speech, I only wanted to explain

how Black dreams can come in terrors unbidden
how my face, like everyone else, is just one-half of my mother’s,
my temperament the same
and see, how I am not so different?

The audience does a polite clap.
Some nod like saying yes or maybe saying no.

When I finally leave the auditorium
the humid air warms across my face
I sweat the same
salt liquid like any other

it draws in all the mosquitos
hungry for my blood.

About the author:

Christie Valentin-Bati is a poet based in Miami Beach. In 2018, she co-authored Existential Quandary: between a chicken and God, a book of haikus written from the perspective of a chicken – and now, for a living, she writes about wellness and beauty. She has been featured in Phyllis Straus Gallery, Asterism Magazine, and more of her work can be found on Instagram at _christieos_