Jenny Pep

Jenny Pep Poems

The Best Poem Of Jenny Pep

The Whitest Thing

owning your own white guilt isn't cool yet
so you stuff the soft parts of other
kids cultures into your pockets until
you believe that it is not there at all
you are a matching sweat suit jukebox
stocked with everything from Ice Cube to
2 Chainz entire albums memorized and
coiled in the damp of your throat they
are gunfire into the air above the high
school parking lot and that is as black
as you think possible and pulling blunts
the size of magic markers into your
small lungs before school is black and
your dance routines are black they call
you Justin Timberlake your crossover is
the blackest though you are the only
white boy on the court anyway they call
you Steve Kerr you used to stare at a
freckle on your left hand and imagine
your entire body how much easier it
might be to be you if that were the case
and until someone tells you otherwise
well that is black 2 and it isn't that
you don't know you're white right I mean
less white is all you'd really like to
be you are sure there are good parts
about having white skin too even if you
cannot see them yet no one asks you
where you came from which is good
because you could not answer anyhow you
just appear with an insatiable hunger to
touch things that do not belong to you
and a culture that fits like a bedsheet
no one calls you carpetbagger tells you
that you can't place your favorite
things about black people into a single
bucket and just try them on and parade
around for years on the front lawn to
feel better about what you cannot say
until it is time to come inside for
dinner and so you do precisely that you
dip your toe in
and then out and you run when you must
but you stay when you choose and that
well that is the whitest thing of all all

by adam falkner

Jenny Pep Comments