How do you explain a sneeze to someone who’s never had one? Well, it’s like when your nose smells some shit, and it doesn’t know how to handle it, so it retaliates. Or, you ever had an itch in a weird place you couldn’t reach? And the more you try to ignore it the more it itches, so you start to convulse and shake in weird ways until it’s satisfied? Dictionary says a sneeze is when you make an involuntary explosion of air from the nose and mouth due to irritation of one’s nostrils. But if you’ve never sneezed before, that doesn’t quite capture the unique feeling of the almost painful need to get this shit out of your face. I once sneezed on a stranger, and the look of horror she gave me still haunts me to this day. And like, it wasn’t even my fault. I turned to the side and sneezed like à decent human being, and she just happened to speed walk into it. I think we don’t have a great way to explain a sneeze because everyone has already experienced it by the time we know the word for it. 

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       How do you explain racism to someone who hasn’t experienced it? Well, it’s like when someone looks at you, and presumes to know your story without ever once saying a word to you, or listening to you, or looking at you. It’s like when someone gets an itch, in the back of their mind, that the skin you’re wearing is so 2014, or 1968, or 1861, is worth a retweet but not equality, is  still upset about that whole slavery thing, and the only way to alleviate the itch is to call you boy, or thug, or target. Or to pretend your struggle to survive doesn’t exist. And so to help those who haven’t experienced it, understand just how common this still is. For the duration of this poem, I will replace the word racism with the word sneeze.

       I was 15 when I experienced sneezing for the first time. I was meeting my girlfriend’s parents and her father looked me in my eyes and said, “I don’t want you dating my daughter.” He tried to blame it on other people’s sneezing, that he was looking out for our safety. But that's the thing about sneezing. Once you see it, you can always tell when someone’s trying hard to hold it in. I used to believe that sneezing was just a thing we read about in textbooks- could never happen nowadays. So it was just a little jarring when someone sneezed in my face. No blessing or apology, just a shrug that said I shouldn’t be so charred cedar. So pitch black pollen. So dark-brown dust. Since that day, I’ve watched people sneeze openly and behind closed lips. And I can assure you, no one looks appealing when they’re sneezing, looks honorable with both eyes closed. And we seemed to have made it respectable to sneeze behind the same hands that shake our own, assuring us there’s no sneezing problem. Like for people of color, it isn’t allergy season all year round, like this country can just Benadryl its way to equality- as if we weren’t the one’s struggling to keep breathing, drowsy after being prescribed Twitter apologies. And isn’t it funny, how every sneeze can sound unique but we all still know when it’s happening, like we’ve been speaking sneeze our whole lives, reading it in nationalist napkins or far right shirt sleeves claiming sneezing is just a part of our history, chuckling at all the funny ways people try to stop it from happening, telling us their civil war monuments aren’t about sneezing. That would be silly. No, the monuments embody a cure, getting rid of all the irritants would be the best way to stop all this sneezing, wouldn’t it? And in response, we close our eyes and open our Facebook feeds, choosing an emoticon that shows just how angry we are about all this sneezing- and the world keeps turning, like this was all just ordinary. Like it was as natural as…[sneezing sound]