Alora Young: "Dark-skinned girls with bad wigs aren't prepared"

Dark-skinned girls with bad wigs aren't prepared

They spoke patois on the patio 
 A Japanese fan from China cooled the air in the city 
They would never know they were baking in a kindred kind of heat
The rooster stood by the door and looked at you 
Like you told it to cocadoodledo 
And he said “Make me” 
 
A Spanish guitar sweats a little melody for a girl when nobody is around to listen 
A brown-skinned woman wears a pink dress 
And god smiles 
Because god loves brown-skinned women in pink dresses 
She( god) says “Ohh she’s too sharp” it's a shame they won't be allowed to wear that type of dress in public for another century in Earth years” 
 
But in about a century, 
A brown girl, tangentially related to this one, finds the dress at a thrift store in Harlem 
And she wears it to the club 
And gets disrespectful with a boy who ain’t no good in the bushes at the park at 3 am 
Her ancestor, 
Now in heaven, 
Watches this happen on DTV (descendants TV, like MTV for Angels) 
And sucks her teeth 

The blue of the storm shades has greened over 
And the rooster was dinner about 94 years prior to this happening 
But the first woman still thinks 
That boy is a bad wig 
​The kind you see in Tyler Perry movies that white people compliment you on 
And he partakes in coonish behavior 
And there is nothing for a brown girl 
In the kind of man who tells you you're pretty for a brown girl 
And then marries a white woman 
 
Who will divorce him for never doing any labor 
Physical or emotional 
Around the house 
 
And he fumbles out of her then fumbles all over her and doesn't apologize 
And that is the moment when the second girl realizes what her ancestor has been telling her 
 
A bad wig is not a Spanish guitar 
It will never sweat you a song
It can only get nappy and tangled 
And if you put it on your head 
All it will ever do 
Is make you look like a fool 

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Alora Young is the 2021 Youth Poet Laureate of the Southern United States. She is a presidential scholar of the arts, a two-time TEDx Speaker, a scholastic gold medalist, an Americans for the Arts Round Table fellow, a Young Arts winner in spoken word, and a recipient of the Princeton Prize in Race Relations, along with the Spring Robinson literary prize, the Lin Arison excellence in writing award, and the International Human Rights Day rising advocate award. She was also nominated for Best of the Net by Rattle magazine.  She is the founder of AboveGround, an organization seeking to create equity in Nashville elementary schools through creative writing and neurodivergent education. She is an inaugural intern at the Center for Race Research and Justice at Vanderbilt University. She has publications in or upcoming in The New York Times, Rattle, Washington Post, Signal Mountain Review, Rigorous Mag, and Ice Colony Jornal. She was a poet in Lyric Fest’s production of Cotton and contributed to the anthology I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like. She won two Best Young Actress awards at the Rome and Madrid International Film Festival.  Alora also has a degree in Spoken Word Pedagogy with a minor in Religion from Swarthmore College. As an actor, as well as a as poet she has performed on CNN, CBS, TIME, and many local channels in Nashville.  Her book Walking Gentry Home was released by Hogarth Books in August of 2022. It received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews and it was nominated for a Goodreads Choice award. It won best debut in Nashville Scene magazine and Ms. magazine. She is planning to pursue a M.F.A in creative writing and a PHD. in neurodivergent creativity. She spends her free time writing and playtesting her two board games Girlboss and Fake Your Own Death. She has written ten books and thousands of poems many of which will be coming out in the following years.