by Sherese Francis
Screening: Black Men Frolicking
What does it mean for a Black man to love flowers?
The fear of his bright and loud blossoming,
Attempts are made to erase and smudge him out of an existence:
A clown once painted a butterfly on a little boy’s face.
The mother told the clown to instead paint a skull.
The clown tried to whisper to him: it’s okay to want the butterfly,
It’s okay to want something beautiful
And not attach to the ways the world can destroy you.
The mother turned to bring the father to police the situation.
The father who has learned not to love beautiful things, too.
What does it mean for a Black man to love flowers?
For each Black man
To not have to smear
To melt
To let slip
To hide
To kill
The beauty in him.
To make instead an altar to the all the ways
He is beautiful, too.
To be carried away as a butterfly, as a pollen
seed In his own glory.
Sherese Francis (she/they) describes themselves as an AlkyMist of the I-Magination, finding expression through poetry, interdisciplinary arts (collage, book and paper arts, sound and performance art, text art), workshop facilitation, editing, and literary curation. Sherese has published work in various journals and anthologies, and published four chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls, Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling, Recycling a Why That Rules Over My Sacred Sight, and Lady Liberty Smashing Stones, and edited a poetry anthology/guided journal, Baby Suggs and a Purple Butterfly.
