Blackbird or stone
Nailah Mathews
In conversation with Hughie Lee-Smith’s ‘Rooftop’ 1957

A black man in a white shirt on the rooftop of a pale blue day
alone
with red brick and white water tower and silver grey spires.
His compositional properties are:
Oil on Masonite
His isolation
His blackness
The wind
That breath you take before starting
a conversation.
Where does loneliness sit in you? Mine is high in my throat, a fluttering, anxious thing. It can
hear your breezes, buffeting the brick off the wall.
Tell me.
Is he going to
jump?
Nailah Mathews is a nonbinary Black poet to whom books and black lives matter, who aspires to be as kind to every stranger as they would be to a lost child. Their piece “Hanlon’s Razor” will appear in Tilde~A Literary Journal’s Issue V. They can be reached at nailah.mathews@case.edu for inquiries.
Interested in having your work published in the Awake? Complete your submission here.