& even the black guy’s profile reads 'sorry, no black guys'

Smith’s poem is written in free verse in one unrhymed stanza with no metering or line breaks. The form allows for a conversational, informal voice to come through, and the voice's stream-of-consciousness reflections adds to the highly personal and candid tone of the poem.

Even though “& even the black guy’s profile” is a prose poem that departs from conventional poetry forms, Smith still includes repetition and anaphora to establish both rhythm and structure throughout the short piece. As a tightly confined single stanza poem, “& even the black guy’s profile” builds on itself with repeated words and phrases: “&” is repeated in the title and five times in the text (Lines 3-5) of the poem, while “you” is repeated six times in the second-to-last and final statements of the poem (Lines 3-5). These repeated words help build an internal tension and rhythm to an otherwise open form poem.

While traditionally anaphora includes the repetition of a word or phrase at the start of multiple lines in the poem, Smith uses this poetic device to build the initial calls to action.