"Race Inauguration Day."
How many people went to the Obama inauguration?
I went.
I grew up in Washington DC and I live in New York City.
And it was a cold day, let me tell you.
But I got up at 2 o'clock in the morning and I went.
And I just wanted to write about it
and I wanted to photograph it.
But I had one of those really good tickets like really
up front.
And I got there with my ticket excited, freezing,
and a water main or something had broke,
so they just stopped letting people in like right up front.
So I had to go away in the back by the Lincoln Memorial,
by the National Mall and there's the Capitol and the monument,
and Lincoln.
So I walked way in the back and blah blah blah.
So this is something on the way back to way
in the back I got all these different conversations going
on about the historic moment.
So I tried to write this poem because not everybody was
happy.
And inside of the complexity of the historic moment,
there were people who were really thinking about things
and talking about things.
And some of the stuff I heard I tried to shape into this thing
and I called it "Race Inauguration Day."
It's a short fiction.
It was going to be a science fiction,
but it didn't work out.
Parades.
But not- a- one in the meter of a march.
There were parties.
No, apology.
Then there were more parties.
Still many of our former owners spat at progress,
at celebration, at transparency, our fought-for
step up from nothingness.
Masked, we forgave them.
Civil wrongs overcome.
Statehood?
No one wants to make the hood a state.
So we skinned ourselves, zipper down the body middle, right
there on the National Mall.
The moment the poet, cold as her tone,
enjambed America with "Love."
Without complexion, though, we looked exactly
like what we had become--
a clear people, equal to blur.
Sores.
Thank you.