White Editor
by Yash Seyedbagheri
My African-American and brown brothers and sisters, let me give you
The Help
all stored in a
Green Book
with
Dangerous Minds
that need a little nuancing
I can and will illuminate your narratives
carrying a butter-colored lamp through cottonfields
and reciting Swing Low, Sweet Chariot as a Shakespearean sonnet
while we’re Finding Forrester
I’m not going to rewrite your narratives
or tell you how to write in a Sean Connery accent
although vernacular may be superseded by more accessible parlance
with the end goal of enfranchising you people and your socioeconomic strata
and I mean you people, not you people
I’m here to carry your stories in my costume-store Afro that doesn’t fit
and spread the narrative pieces to the wind
for aren’t we all the same
we all micturate the same
excrete the same
I won’t see you on the Blind Side
my brother
I speak verisimilitude to power dynamics
or truth to power as you so eloquently put it
there are no Hidden Figures here
I just made your narrative a little more digestible
And I tweeted about it over a Venti in a white cup
You’re welcome, my brother
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University's MFA program in fiction. His
story, “Soon,” was nominated for a Pushcart. Yash has also had work nominated for The Best
Small Fictions and Best of the Net. A native of Idaho, Yash’s work is forthcoming or has been published in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Write City Magazine, Café Lit, and Ariel Chart, among others.
