I’m most American when I reach for more ketchup
as Shaunae Miller dives across the finish.
I’m blackest when Allyson Felix collapses on the track,
knees up, concealing her last name
and the letters U.S.A. blistering her chest.
I’m saddest whenever black women are competing,
because I never know who to root for,
and I’m arrogant enough to believe my split loyalty
fails them (which makes me more American again).
This is how it feels to be a problem:
hoping that, when a country’s cameras are
trained on my back, and I offer the fruited plain
of my body, it’s somehow enough to quench
the parched land where all the brothers keep dying,
each ghost a breath-song trilling in my blood,
and, perhaps, one day, grand mal convulsions:
petechiae like pomegranate seeds jeweling my
face. Every race is a transubstantiation of flesh—
not to gold, nor bronze, nor mythical filigree,
but to the fleeting, nameless moment when a foot
finds a chalk line drawn by someone else.
Maybe #magic, or a single, unfortunate tremor
that means nothing until I’m dead. Who knows what metals
the gods use to forge victory, which is neither sympathy [End Page 208]
nor love, nor more sacred than the foot-fall,
its indiscernible blip magnified for millions
of eyes that never blink when we’re winning;
which you too probably missed, although later,
in the dashcam footage, you’ll swear to me you saw it.
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