Whitewash - Lia Smith-Redmann

​My body is infected by a curse that is meant to keep on killing
Like a mirror with a monstrous ghost trapped inside.
 
When I scrape at centuries of angry corpses in my arms, blanched like death lives in them,
Trying to extract the bleach that burns not on but under my skin, the nail lines fade red.
 
I am a thoroughbred horse fit for a Tripe Crown photo op,
Bred by those who fix the races then hang that red blanket over the necks of their winners.
 
They turn me into an apron on which to spill blood, to wear the white lie.
I am both one of the cattle and the white glint of the knife used to kill it.
 
I want to lay my confusion down, face in the sand of an unmarked beach
And let the sea dissolve me into its white foam.
 
I am a raw blank canvas primed not by the ivory accordion or albino sheets wrung up to sail,
But by the legacy of the conqueror, the oppressor, and the appropriator.
 
I am a weapon. I am a bullet shot from the barrel of an unfair system.
I live in a sanitized morgue that turns butchering into an art form. It is called the White House,
 
isn’t it?