Queen D aka Danee Black, an Oakland teacher by profession and a poet by design, is known to the world from her time on TV One’s Verses and Flows where she performed her piece, “Things My Family Said About My Ex-Boyfriend After We Broke Up.” For most East Bay residents, it was her performance of “Roadkill” that first drew us in.
A piece inspired by the cycle of violence and its effect on Oakland youth, she opened, “You can call me openly sympathetic but I feel bad when I see roadkill. Mangled squirrels with squashed hopes of making it across the road, bodies of possums and raccoons lying twisted and outstretched, dogs and cats that once belonged to loving homes are now owned by concrete.”
The meaning becomes clear in the middle as she delivered the line, “You see it’s easier to navigate around a dead squirrel in the middle of the road than it is the corpse of a 16 year old boy lying on my classroom floor, we can all see him. Mangled and twisted with his hopes of seeing 18 crushed into tiny fragments — I wish there was a street sweeper or at least a grief counselor to help us clean up this mess made by displaced anger and a stray bullet.”
Asked what she thinks poetry has the power to accomplish, she answered, “Poetry changes lives. Poetry opens doors. Poetry has the ability to kinda take a quiet little church mouse out of their shell, give voice to the voiceless, give a person the opportunity to follow their dreams to reach the masses to tell a story. To just really provide a space to generate love and connection and power through words.”
