Virtue Signaling, Wisconsin by Tiana Clark

You couldn’t know this loneliness…
–Natalie Eilbert

My first night in Madison      the air was different—
cool, less sticky. The street    was quiet, weirdly         stagnant.

Our house, a pale yellow.   I straddled the                   isthmus,
felt ice chip                           between both lakes           like frozen lace.

I’m hyper      visible now,       so seen, so         everywhere, then suddenly
nowhere—so much so, I became           Muzak            to my own face.

Now      I’m being   followed    inside a grocery store. Down each aisle,
then back again. Now I’m being           stalked              inside a restaurant.

I switch seats.               But it does not matter.    I feel it all:     the eyeballs
of this town scorch      the back of my neck,      skin already darker there.

I want to pluck                      all the signs              I see stapled across
these manicured lawns        that read:                 Black Lives Matter.

I don’t believe you.               There is a sign you buy because
you want so badly to believe                            in what it has to say,

and then there is a sign you buy        because
                                           you want others to believe you are brave.

A sign can’t save                                   my life?     You will not spare me.
I watch                     as you watch me                     I watch

as my white students watch me   I watch me     watch me, smaller now
than when I first moved here.                               Lost a quarter of an inch

my doctor said.                          Most days            I wait
for the bitter winter to end.    Most days            I wait    for another black

person to pass me.                    Most days                        they never come.
Most days I wait               for another black person       to save me

and we hold the gaze.     We do not smile or lie.            A simple nod
simply                                                                 saves my life.

Tiana Clark is the author of Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016). Her first full-length collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming 2018), won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.