Determined Invisibility

I sat at our Thanksgiving Day table listening
to my daughter talk about the university and
the horrors of determined invisibility. Over
the years I have recorded her dreams of
death at their hands, sometimes glorious,
sometimes cheap. She tells me of the
teachers who refuse to understand simple
questions, who look at her as if she were a
benign – meaning powerless – but unsightly
tumor. She weeps. I hold her. I tell her to
remember the university doesn’t own her,
that she has a home. But I have to let her go
into that jungle of ghosts, having taught her
only how to be fleet of foot, how to whistle,
how to love, and how not to run. Unless she
has to. It is never enough.

*a poem after Audre Lorde and her “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,”
to be read silently