"Who can push out fresh air in this country anymore?"
Listen to "I Can't Breathe," poet jessica Care moore's powerful poem, written after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner...
Listen to "I Can't Breathe," poet jessica Care moore's powerful poem, written after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner...
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00:00I'm in Detroit and I can't breathe. The air is being sucked out of my city. The
00:06poor don't have water and everything new means no us. I can't breathe. There is a
00:12smoking gun down my throat with promises of a post-racial America. I can't swallow
00:17the chamber. It is stuck in 1967 and it keeps reloading after it pierces the
00:21bodies of our unarmed babies. I can't breathe because I'm being rushed on a
00:26sidewalk in the middle of a peaceful protest by a militarized police force in
00:30Missouri. They are yelling, I got one, I got one. I am half running distraught
00:35searching for Talib's hand. Rosa is a few steps ahead. The air is thick and ugly
00:40and dense and I can't breathe. I'm being forced to lie face down on the cement in
00:44Ferguson with AR-15s pointed at my back. A long brown teenage boy is shaking at
00:49Rosa's lap. A young thick girl stands up anyway. I pull her back down and ask her
00:53to please wait. In Atlanta, a beautiful young activist tells me she is arrested
00:59at 6 p.m. and driven around by officers till 2 a.m. before finally being booked
01:03with no explanation. We know who you are, they say. Hoping to replace her breath
01:09with fear and now she doesn't know how to tell her story of being kidnapped. She
01:13can't breathe. Who can push out fresh air in this country anymore? The rich, the
01:18corporation. We should all be choking to death from Fox News, processed food, and
01:22white supremacy. My 19-year-old calls me after hearing I'm in Ferguson to ask me
01:26to please go home and he hasn't lived with me in years so I'm trying to figure
01:30out this geographic location of this place, home. The place we should feel the
01:35safest and I wonder how all this rage has been because when you can have this
01:39race, you're called the racist. Mississippi, goddamn Missouri, feel hot as
01:43you. On Canfield, this young man smiles his grill at me. Beautiful and bright and
01:49revital gold. You from Detroit, you a poet. I saw you on the news. This is a
01:54place where Mike Brown's blood turned to roses. The stem legs are boys, long and
01:58erasing, always swimming toward the sun, easily tripped up, life interrupted. The
02:03ones who don't love you are armed. As much as we claim this is our land, the
02:08world minority is running our country. Our sweat, our women, our mothers. We built
02:14this nation, built it on free labor and death with no reparation raised in sight.
02:18In sight. I need more insight on what this has to do with genocide, everything.
02:23We are born with our choice here. Many of us fatherless, some of us warm-blooded,
02:28West African, Dakota, Cree, Cherokee. We a place with no place. We are natives,
02:33beautiful somewhere people, newsflag poles and crosses and so many more
02:37little girls, plus those four. We will never forget. We are Moors, portrayed as
02:42criminals. We the children of royalty. We red clay goddesses. We down south
02:47forces. We the trees of rings of stories. I can't breathe. I'm home from a
02:51terrifying place. An Octavia Butler, past, future, past lives, scars resurface. I
02:56can't breathe. My son is four years from 12. In the park, it's his planet where he
03:02plays freely. He knows the seed leaves the flowers if you plant it. He loves Bob
03:06Marley, Faith Ringgold, and Frida Kahlo. Walks with his head up and doesn't
03:11follow. Recites Baraka, sings the blues. He thinks wearing a belt is cool. He
03:16is simply a black boy with an imagination, built on a nation of poems
03:20and a mom that says, don't f**k me. Cable is a winter luxury, so we don't get our
03:25information from the idiot box. I've already had to teach my son how to act
03:29when we're pulled over by the cops. He's seen them waving like my poems. He's seen
03:33them black and flirting, has to call me on the phone. He's seen them white in
03:37Dearborn Heights, accusing me of running a light. I did not run, mommy, but the
03:41policeman is lying. That's the reality too, son. When I can't breathe, I cry in a
03:48parking lot, dropping you off at hockey camp, praying the white coaches and kids
03:52won't try to suck the beauty out of your lungs. Pray you black ice skate fast past
03:56the chokeholds, the dangerous walks from the store to buy candy. I can't breathe,
04:00so I rush to get you from school daily. I collect a mother's intuition, always
04:05feels death moving around this winter in America clock. In these spaces where air
04:09is thin, humanity is forgotten, an ancestral spirit is blowing hard, and
04:13fear has pushed you into a place you don't recognize. A forced language is
04:18pushed into your mouth, whipped across your back, along the Ivy Coast, on a ship
04:21called Jesus, in the Congo, through the door, no return, in an Alabama cotton field,
04:25in Chicago, in Cleveland, in Staten Island, in Detroit, in Missouri. When you look the
04:31world in its face after attempts to hijack your spirit, take your breath
04:35loosely for a Lucy. I will inhale God and blow my last wind into your body,
04:41your exhale be the Holy Ghost for this land. I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I
04:46can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe,
04:51I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe,
04:58I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe,
05:18I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe,
05:19I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe,
05:20You know, it's also for Eric Gardner, who I watched be murdered in Staten Island over
05:25a cigarette.
05:26But these are not new words.
05:28And so I think that's what people need to understand, that I can't breathe became something
05:34that people were saying nationally after George Floyd was asking to live with that police
05:42officer's knee in his neck.
05:45So it's just a metaphor for what's been happening to our people.
05:50I think in a global way, it's a problem everywhere.
05:54But here it's intense in a different kind of way and in a disparaging way.
06:01And I am a mother of sons, so you worry.
06:05And that's the poem is also about motherhood, about my son Omari calling me.
06:09He was 19 then, he's 25 now, and him saying, you know, go home, why are you there?
06:16And then me questioning myself, like, what am I doing here?
06:19But I went because of them.
06:21It's a poem that's a part of a larger collection called We Want Our Bodies Back for Sandra
06:26Bland.
06:26And so that's an underlying theme in the piece.
06:31And we just pray that art turns into action and that we're able to make the world better.