Under the Porchlight

I used to be a painter
when ‘being’ wasn’t yet obligatory,
clay sculptures in a kiln,
and the words my mother pressed into my forehead
before she turned out the lights each night.

I used to paint things
before colors were
bins of silk ribbons and plastic trophies
collecting dust in my closet.
Those shimmering colors were unbreakable,
yet I’d snap crayola by the box, put faces to rocks,
and no one asked me to give them names.

I used to be a painter
of stick figures and movie endings told
from droughted bristles I forgot to wash.
And I could have bought more;
I could have been a painter;
I could have just gone to the store,
but I would’ve had to walk
across the sidewalk chalk
I can’t talk to anymore.

Listen, I used to be a painter,
but I think everyone can say that,
before our paintings were the curbside
and we had somewhere to be.
I was a lot of things
when I wasn’t told to be someone.
I used to be origami and smiling at anyone “just because.”
I was riding round trips in paper planes,
writing condensation love stories ‘til they melted down the window panes.

Listen, or perhaps don’t listen at all because I never did.
But I used to be a painter
before that had to mean a lot of things.
I’d paint questions and leave the rest to the canvas,
like how to make oats with mom
or the reasons Dorothy left Kansas,
and Painter, I still remember
when you’d texturize the moon,
fill it in with rug burns and static on birthday balloons.

Painting was always stopping long enough
to forget about time
until Grandpa’s western rocking chair
started sounding like a pendulum to you.
He’d fill it up with boot scoot tunes
as you oiled your name into the wood,
sprawling in the deck splinters,
listening to his weathering winters
you still see in his face.
You haven’t touched that floor in years.
I don’t recall when you became so afraid to bleed.

racist

When i think of racist,
i see a capital R
that isn’t there
and a mass of article words,
a Racist
the Blacks
a Lesbian
a Retard
a Christian
the Muslims,
adjectives contorted into nouns,
traits becoming names,

i think of end white silence but stopping to listen,
silence is violence but assimilation slicing
at the tongue, the black albums my father bought
still wrapped in plastic to this day on display,
i think of touching black hair without asking
because the pain...
b..because the pain is...
the pain is...
b..because the pain is...

i think of hard R’s and soft A’s,
lips thick and thin,
words weaponized and reclaimed,
the inability to accept our skin’s connotations,

i cannot forget about racist
each time i find
that black and african american
are a decision this country
hasn’t made, i think about the 60s
and unseeing race when our skin and our content are simply
inseparable, my childhood days were full of I had a dream’s,
though frankly, i’d be damned if we even fall
asleep and wasn’t mlk more tired than
hungry and how is it that malcolm x never made
my grade school textbooks, was he such a thoughtcrime,
and somehow, we all know exactly what michelle obama means by
Becoming
because the pain...
b..because the pain is...

i think of calling broken things ghetto
and Joe Biden’s interview response

“poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids,”
i see the black boy who shared my pencils with me in second grade
being taught that he’d work for me
someday, that if he wasn’t on a cereal box, he’d struggle to buy one
and he sat there as he heard
that the white students misbehaving were “acting black,”
he’d go home to televisions with white basketball team owners
and their black mvps,
my intellectual dreams were seldom apparent
to the black boy next to me
b..because the pain
the pain...
the pain is...
b..because the pain...
the pain...
the Pain...

and through the eyes of a presidential candidate,
poor and white are direct antonyms,
we are constantly dividing one nation indivisible
into sub sufficient factions,
have i forgotten to mention races other than black and white,
and i swore i saw Mr. President counting his teeth the day
Bruce Springsteen called him un-American,
clarence clemons’s saxophone shrilling
through the border walls, i watched them tumble under the weight of his breath,
a torch waving atop Lady Liberty, Born to Run,

when i think of racist,
i see July smoke
dusting over the month prior —a stagnant blue

so i shut my eyes
and banish millions
to the darkness I fail to lift—

Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, with what is known as the 9th street divide (a street with skyscrapers on one side and very impoverished housing on the other), Baker has witnessed severe income inequality, cultural appropriation, and some of the most negative impacts of consumerism. Baker focuses on fiction, poetry, and the lyrical essay, all of which have a tendency to follow themes of sociopolitical dissonance.