Year 2020

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Courtnie Beckford

 

 

It’s the year 2008.

I’m seven years old but my parents make everything make sense.

I learn I will have to work twice as hard to get half as much.

 

It’s the year 2010.

We’re learning about slavery and the civil rights movement for black history month.

For the first time, I wonder what happened before that.

 

It’s the year 2012,

I wear a hoodie to class in solidarity, but am told to take it off.

Your livelihood is up for question if you’re half past a shade too dark.

 

It’s the year 2014,

I hear the words “I can’t breathe” in my dreams, a man crying out for his mother.

The same institution that tore open the backs of my great-grandparents bleeds into

and sears my psyche.

 

It’s the year 2016,

Boys point out my melanated lips and wide hips and greedily rip my esteem apart.

For the first time, I wonder how life would be if I weren’t black.

 

It’s the year 2018,

Ebonics and black vernacular are considered feisty and fashionable,

but ghetto or ratchet for me.

I learn that there’s a monopoly even on the words that pour from my mouth.

 

It’s the year 2019,

I’m angry, yet anxious.

A gun shot sounds the same as a whip and I’m afraid of the eternity they hold.

 

It’s the year 2020,

It becomes hard not to see yourself under someone’s knee, gasping for a last breath.

I fret over the simple things in life, so as not to

become another statistic, which isn’t very different than it was for my ancestors

in 1965.

Or 1492.

 

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Courtnie Beckford is a junior majoring in Biology, looking to go onto graduate school and become a midwife. She writes, “I once had an Instagram page that became popular where I would post short stories and poems about little thoughts that would occur to me walking to and from school in Englewood, NJ.”