On Finding a Crisp Apple in Louisville’s West End

If a single grocery store serves twelve neighborhoods

how does the city expect every person to eat?

And if that city plants more parking garages than trees

does it expect apples to dangle from the garage rafters?

If apples, by miracle, grow from ceilings and not from sidewalk trees

or backyard orchards and are not for sale in a local market,

are people supposed to tippytoe or jump and pick them 

or should they bring ladders? 

If they can be picked, should Black Louisvillians march a couple 

miles or more from Shawnee from Russell from Portland 

with trampolines and ladders to garages on West Main 

or 5th or 6th or 3rd or Arena Plaza? 

If the garages aren’t heavy with apples,

and if no one Black should be marching down city streets,

because white eyes are prone to see “riots,” never injustice,

where can a young Black girl find a crisp apple

in Louisville’s West End? If it falls from a parking garage, 

and she doesn’t catch it, does it burst into pulp?

If she does catch it, will it not already 

be bruised or rotten, knocked around by traffic?

If she’s hungry, does she scavenge for bits of crisp apple 

or does she eat her fingernails for dinner instead?

If she eats her fingernails for dinner, do they crunch

like broken pavement beneath her feet? Remind her

of streets broken like promise after promise made

by white mayors and ‘neighbors,’ like me, to make Louisville better? 

Promises to do more, secure food and water

and apply it as a salve to “save” them from violence created 

by white desire to be surrounded by whiteness, to police Blackness. Our desire to be good,

so good we donate groceries instead of investing in a grocery store,

push cops instead of a school into an overpopulated district,

throw anything that way but reparations and support anything but liberation.

Does it hurt her to eat fingernails? Hurt to swallow? Does it remind 

her that there is a city telling her to be compassionate

on an empty stomach? But, if she is compassionate enough,

can she pluck handfuls of dandelion greens from a sidewalk crack big

enough to fall into, and with an applemush-sticky palm boil them and eat 

them for dinner? Or is she old enough to know that dandelion 

greens picked from a cracked Louisville sidewalk are not good

without ham or bacon or fat or olive oil? That dandelion greens

are bitter. Period. Or does she eat them? And If she eats them

and is still hungry, still belly growling

can she walk, is she in walking distance

to the one grocery store in Louisville’s West End? In her part

of town? Can she find a sidewalk safe 

enough to carry her to a grocery store? 

Or, could she even devise a maze

of sidewalks to carry her to the market?

If she makes it alive, if a car doesn’t smash her like an apple

falling from the rafter of a parking garage, if she is not 

a suspicion to white eyes, can she amble down aisles of apples red 

as smiling lips or green as grass or golden delicious as a wrapped 

chocolate coin at Christmas or pink as lips? If she plucks one 

and the pyramid of apples cascades, tumbling all at once

softly and hardly and quietly and loudly

down on her, will a produce stocker pick them up, 

pick her up tell her softly that it is okay, the apples

are okay, she is okay? They are only bruised. 

Will they tell her she is only bruised? Will she pick up a crisp, shiny

apple and take a bite as she walks safely back home?

Battleground State, or In an Interview with Dawn Gee, Mayor Greg Fischer Says His Hands are Tied Regarding the Murder of Breonna Taylor.

Your battle with the state,                     not me.

He says, as if he didn’t just mention metropolitan Louisville,

politan as in polis, the Greek city state. Appealing to white Athens, when really, he 

Is white spartan. Warmongers, warriors.

Cops in phalanx ready to tear 

through protestors and homes and mourning. 

He says as if the city is not 

the state, not the State with 

a capital S. State as in

State your intention or be

removed from this park at the commands of                 the mayor. 

As in state your open record request and be denied      denied            denied.

Denial, a permanent state of the State.

As if this isn’t a battleground           state. Where white people, me 

included, sometimes or all the times or times and times again say, 

This is why you vote. As if a Black woman,

as if Breonna Taylor dying at the hands of the State incarnate is

a partisan issue. 

As if the State doesn’t charge protestors

with felonies to keep them from voting. Or charge

their bodies to the ground or into       an unmarked van. 

Or, as if out-of-state, State money 

controls the state of our state election.

As if the city isn’t the same as the State. Police-like soldiers, soldier-like 

police invade neighborhoods with gentrifying 

bullets, each wrapped in a one-eighth sliver of a single

dollar bill. 

As if the city-state didn’t take a single dollar bill and split    

     it eight ways to 

destabilize a neighborhood, soak it in Black blood 

and buy the corner of Elliott Avenue.

As if the city mayor didn’t say that’s not gentrification, it’s making

neighborhoods nice for every           body so

people all around the city can have that.  

A game of metropolitan            city-state                   monopoly. 

As if a community can belong to those outside it: 

To me, to you, to a stranger looking through the

window peppered by police bullets

can own it. 

As if Louisville’s Black communities need this mayor

this mayor     this city    this city     or this state      this state

to define nice, when he, it, we can’t officially

loudly condemn the state-

sanctioned murder of Breonna Taylor.