#BOYCOTTFLORIDA

So I learned Florida
is a trigger word for me.
Learned that people going to Miami
for vacation and races
and sunshine and smiles
is actually my death sentence.

This is a country where if I lived in
Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky,
Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri,
Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee,
Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Georgia or Florida,

I,
Would probably,
Be dead.

Once, I
collapsed at school for care
that is life saving but also
now called abortion,
my body expelling what
what was not meant to be
inside - nobody said the word -
miscarriage -
I didn’t understand anything in
my body but that
I was lucky to
                  survive.

I die now,
In front of all of you who need
Miami’s and Clearwater’s commercialism and substandard beaches,
a fake tanned world of banned books
and banned bodies.

We die -

Women die
              Every Day
because you say you are
allies but
sunbathe in Florida
vacation in Texas.

Like you’re not killing Black lives
and women’s lives and my life
and our future and our history and
our history and our history…

Did you know the first and longest settlement in North America was St Augustine, Florida?
It was Spanish in 1565, not English that has long been spoken here.

Did you know that thousands of Mexicans, including women were lynched all across the South West?

Did you know that Abraham Lincoln didn’t give a shit about Black people, he just wanted soldiers to win a war?

Did you know that most of the Civil Rights gains people sacrificed so much for in the 1960s were lost by the 90s?

America is the greatest country of all - in forgetting.

Covering toes in warm sand, flinging beads in Mardi Gras, eating BBQ in Texas as if a few hours away there aren’t children risking everything for a dream they haven’t yet learned they can no longer apply for.

Arturo Schomburg once wrote: "The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.”

Our history our history our history
Is killing us all.