Fiddlehead Fern fronds and branch curled — CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=147131

Difference

a refutation of whiteness

What if this was a moment of evolution
A breaking point of our elastic reality
What if difference won,
   chests pressed, stretching?
Whiteness,
   the denier, the segregator,
   the eraser, the assimilator.
Whiteness won’t resign,
   into the riff raff,
   into the rabble.
Whiteness hypes light,
   spectral purity,
   each of us contained,
   amalgamated,
   unseparated,
   named white.
Whiteness sanitizes.
Whiteness sterilizes.
What if difference won?
What if we are impure, profane
   fertile?
None of us necessary.
Each of us redundant,
   perfectly, usefully, redundant.
Not melted into an exceptional whole,
   a thing owned.
Instead a leaf in a fiddlehead fern,
   curled inside a branch,
   curled inside a plant,
   waiting inside a seed,
   germinating in just one particular forest floor,
   carpeted with not quite infinite fiddlehead ferns.
Who are we when we are not special
   but still essential?
Not exceptional
   but still integral?
How do I know myself without adulation?
How do I know my worth without domination?
I am rejecting whiteness,
   rejecting purity.
To be one of many.
Existing, not dissolving.
Contributing, not assimilating.
Different, impure, profane.
Fertile,
   like chicken shit in the garden.