God’s Land PT II (Maiya’s Interlude)

Lyrics

[Spoken: Maiya Pittman] And I laid down in the street last night Counting how many men's deaths I mourned Before I got to my own The skin feels like deliberate martyrdom The way it wars with itself Both black and woman, knowing it can't have both My hands hold generations of compliance All dishwashing in the kitchen, and bent over scripture Reminds me of my grandma And women who were too quiet storm And not enough floodgate refusing to break I spit on death's face Ask him, "Why you so patriarchal? Why do you engrave black boy's names into my chest But forget black women, trans women, sex workers Death has become another male privilege?" Death wants foot soldiers for their movement But asks me to sit on the back of the bus on the way to basic training Death tells me to wear my resilience like a [?] Be seen, and not heard So I won't wait for death to come I want my departure to be like a hurricane with a ghetto name So people know to get the fuck out of town I want it to have a fat ass and a bad attitude Tearing up the town like it was a dance floor I want the storm to roll Like an angry black woman's neck Leaving a sea of picket signs that say "Black women's lives matter" I want black men to take to the streets Without they mama telling them Or because I was someone's sister Or because I was someone's daughter But because I am someone I want a flood of guilt A river of crumpled stigma A whimpering lamppost laid down in the streets And let me ask, why, do all the beauty salons look like graveyards? Why, did the cities become so raspy? How, will the earth remember to turn without using a black woman's neck as it's axis? I'll say it because you made me do this Winds pushing through your misogynoir While contorting a landscape that never left a place for me I'll make a night so black you'll forget the sun existed Snatch the landscape just to lay my edges Shake this earth, try to knock some sense into it And when the last wave crashes over your hatred of black women 'Cause you didn't hear me the first time I will leave you with what I owe you Nothing *Gunshots*