Owed
Page 2
expect, you ethicist, defending
hairlines at all cost, your vigilance
keeping online & otherwise
slander at bay. Philosopher king.
Thesaurus in the drawer,
dominoes & scotch & Barbasol
adorning your countertop,
right above the chorus
line of clippers swaying
to the clamor of checkmates
& offhand insults now filling
the shop, each moving
as if the unfettered
locks of some great
metal monster, some faraway
watcher, & you, guardian
of it all. Clean as a pope.
OWED TO THE DURAG
Which I spell that way because that’s the way it was spelled
on all the clear plastic packets I grew up buying for no more
than two dollars, two fifty max, unless I was at Duane Reade
or some likewise corporatized venue but who buys
the majority of their durags at Duane Reade anyway,
who would actually wage war on the durag’s good name
by spelling it d-e-w hyphen r-a-g, as I recently read
some sad lost souls do in an article in The Guardian?
This isn’t botany. This isn’t a device one might use
to attend to the suburban garden & its unremarkable
flora, drying freshly damp wisteria with black silk
or the much more common nylon-rayon-cotton blend.
I could see d-o hyphen r-a-g. That works for me.
One could argue this version makes more sense
even than the spelling I am accustomed to,
reflective as it is of nothing other than itself.
I have never heard the term do used in a sentence
by anyone other than a long-lost colleague
at Princeton who once reached wide-eyed
for my high-top fade before a swift rebuke,
marked by my striking his wrist as if some large
though distinctly nonlethal mosquito, surely a top six
proudest moment of anticolonial choreography
I have dared call mine in this odd, improbable
life I hold to my chest like a weapon. I know.
I know. This wasn’t supposed to be about them.
You make me inordinately beautiful. Let’s talk
about that. Or how I’m twelve years old & the cape
of a white durag billows from beneath my Marlins cap
like a sham poltergeist, flight & failure contained
within a single body, worthy core of any early
2000s-era New York rapper’s coat of arms.
I was lying before. Once, while we sat, quiet
as mourners on the front porch, my father spat
that’s a nice do you have there, eyeing the soft mess
of corkscrewed darkness atop his second-youngest
son’s aging face, no sign of the good hair he praised
for years to family & coworkers alike. Alas, old friend,
you somehow make me even more opaque, make
me mystery, criminal, dope boy by the corner
of Broadway & 127th compelling respectable
women to reach for smartphones, call for backup.
My smooth, adjustable shadow. Like policy
or fire, you blacken everything you touch.
OWED TO THE HIGH-TOP FADE
You stand like a black-box theater in a one-pony town where no one likes theater. Except for the one pony. Who loves August Wilson. Especially the way August Wilson describes juba & inheritance & regret. I do not regret your genesis. I was simply unprepared for the side effects. How you announce my entrance for everyone on the subway car, how they fictionalize my vertical leap, my Spades telepathy, my court vision in overtime, you get what I’m getting at here. You’re rocking the boat, my man! You grow out of this body in small black fists, like a poplar you could scale to heaven, like a shadow arguing for a body. You make this body unfamiliar. Mom & Dad loved you at first, but now you are three weeks past acceptable, an inch too long for adolescent phase, or interview, or the gravity of hard bristle & cocoa butter you refuse to obey. You refuse to obey. & I do not know how to care for anything or anyone that dares to break into this vault I built from scholarship money & easy praise, this armory skin. Teach me. Teach me to praise the flesh they flayed. My silhouette’s gorgeous speed. The many contradictions of this name. You redeem.
OWED TO ANKLE WEIGHTS
Far as we could tell, Mark dreamt
of weightlessness & little else,
an entire career built upon
leapfrogging elephants
& lesser men. Though he
never deployed this exact
imagery in a public speech
or more casual tête-à-tête
over hot fries & Powerade,
the dream was well known
throughout the jailhouse
beige middle school hallways
we bolted through.
Mark wears ankle weights
every day because that
is what ballers do
when they are serious,
& Mark is very serious
when it comes to
the business of giving
out buckets as a kind
of spiritual practice, ascension
under control, an outlet
pass flying language-like
across the length
of the court, Mark
catching the so-worn
-it’s-almost-gold
sphere in his dominant
palm, switching
to the left without what most
would call thought, soaring
like an invocation
to the cylinder & the crowd
leaps right along with him.
Hands aloft in awe
of the boy who must have
some falcon in his blood
-line somewhere, the sheer
eloquence of his movement
enough to make them forget
whatever heaviness like a second
skeleton held them flush to the ground
that day, whatever slight or malice
born in silence by necessity
simply melts, falls like a man
made of flowers to the floor.
When we closed our eyes
that year we all saw the same
fecund emptiness staring
back, imagined all we could
hammer our bodies into by way
of pure repetition: sprinting
to the bodega for Peanut Chews
before the cheese bus could leave
us behind, toting little
brothers all the way up
past the third flight
with no break for breath,
jumping rope with the girls by
the hydrant by the hardware
store at least once a week,
two-pound silver bricks
strapped to each leg,
tucked as if contraband
or some secret knowledge
into the lips of our lucky
socks, all that kept us
from drowning.
OWED TO THE CHEESE BUS
O, how we gave chase
on legs that bent like Air
-heads under front teeth
or early summer’s graceless
gaze. The back seats that
loved us
back. Our bodies flush
against their sticky green
leather glory once heat
was high enough for hydrants
to bloom: block boys molted
swagger, gathered laughing
to see red & yellow metal
croon cool. It was you
who taught uncute kids
the breaks, their hearts to flex
with pluck & pomp, re-spawn
when Valentine’s Day cards
went unopened, when jewelry
stolen from Mom
& given to Melissa was worn
to homecoming with Jordan
who was an inch taller
than he should have been
& a mediocre chess player.
Who else could defang the shame
but you, great muse of Morlock
youth, patron saint
of the thirteen-yet-still-juice-box
-bearing multitudes?
Mom’s Volvo? Quotidian
by comparison. They call you
yellow. I call you off-gold
chariot. Haven for homework
forgotten at home or forgone
altogether. Truth is, we all together
like this nowhere but here.
You wrought us. You drop us
off but never drop us. Even
when drivers threaten
to call the law,
or actually carry through
with such a pitiful joke
& we drop down for fear
of turning to smoke, you stay.
Your floors may be filthy, but they
are solid as a full life & we are young.
& quicksilver tongued. & learning
words like inertia for the first time.
PLURAL
You know I ain’t scared to lose you.
—Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn aka Future
In the name of solidarity, I have given
myself over to the particular
fixations of my age: ducking
sleep, day-drinking
with my internet
friends, three or four
Instagram self-portraits
on the downtown A,
left arm angled high
enough to catch collarbone.
I’m learning how to participate
in the world. Why
just last week, I said hello
to a woman wearing a dress made of smoke
spilling Stella over both her hands
in a charming sort of way
as Trina offered a theory
of radical black self
-determination in the background
each line giving fresh velocity
to the room & yes I do
of course mean that Trina
whose unfettered praise
of the shaking of the booty
has always been
to my mind
a kind of talisman,
laic prayer lending valor
to the bashful & now
the woman in white
is talking to me
about the history of Liberia
& her favorite podcasts,
how good it feels
to see this many people dancing
in a city best known
for its casual indifference,
the impossible farness
between a mass of bodies
flush as paper sheaves
on the bus ride home,
six to an apartment built
for one, poverty & proximity
like two bladed halves
of the same long equation.
She types her number
into my right palm
& the boys go wild,
stain the floor
with handfuls of hyacinth
petals they cast
as if aspiration
into the soft
black air.
I’m pretty good
at not loving
anything enough
to fear its ruin.
The cruel speed
of our guaranteed
obsolescence suits
me. This way
I get to be at least one
of my favorite
versions of myself
every other week:
brooding philosopher,
race man, public apology
connoisseur, without
the pressure
of your seeing
where I keep
the parts I know
you would one day
wish I tucked away
or else killed
somewhere private
so you didn’t
have to smell
the fire & all
I can think of
these days as I stare
across the table
past the drinks
with beautiful names
is how my friend Ibrahim
used to say I’m not single,
I’m plural & we all laughed
like we understood
PALIMPSESTINA
I spend my days studying the eloquent beast
juxtaposed against a given black
body living into its singular joy, i.e., forsythia
& lemonade in the middle of July, steel
pan playing loud enough to feel it. Hands
aloft in praise taken for surrender, left
then right, slowly. Nothing left
to an officer’s imagination lest he manumit the beasts
which call his corners quarters, think his hands
tempest sent to scar the endless black
expanse. George Jackson bends steel
with every letter, & I can think only of the forsythia
growing in his lover’s eyes, how forsythia
sounds like the name of a girl I knew before I left
town for hallways bereft of steel
-faced boys who named sorrow the beast
they slew daily, how they sustained a kind of black
humor about this business of being bound to one’s hands
as conflict’s only punctuation. Survival: how I lend my hands
to lyric’s labor, as if forsythia
or chrysanthemum could bloom from black
ideas dancing across a screen. What is there left
to say about the dead space betwixt soul & beast,
the law as an eternal mouth, anxious for blood & steel?
Before I learned to steel
nerves in the face of a stranger’s hands
swinging swift as a beast’s
heart in chase or heat, my arms were forsythia
freshly grown, thinnest green, bad for business. Which left
only a world of fugitive black
letters to serve as my loophole of retreat, a black
wholeness to ease the wounds, flesh of gem & steel
to reflect the light of those who left
only faintest trace behind. May these hands
forever tend the soil of those songs, the forsythia
lives straining for air against the beast
-ly fear which seeks to calm the black steel beast
that sleeps within, the voice left praying forsythia,
forsythia, make a world of these h
ands.
THE OPEN
To be sure, there is a certain promiscuous relation
between what Rilke calls, in his eighth & greatest
elegy, the open, & what I meant in twelfth grade
when I dialed Tiana’s digits into my aquamarine
Sprint flip phone, said you free this Wednesday,
I got the open, which was shorthand, of course,
for open crib, or open house, without the academic
associations that attend the latter phrase.
In Rilke’s mouth, the term connotes a way
of seeing, the world as a blurring of body
& shape, no discernible split between
the water & its trout like broadswords
soft to the touch, lending their silver speed
to the landscape. I have spent years yearning
to be so close to the body of another
my mind might pass like mist from me,
an albatross I could shed without penance
or pain. Tiana leaves for the 64 bus
eventually, & I am only a boy
alone in his childhood bed, watching
the hours improve. At school the next
day, my friends adorn me
in their singular brutality, claim
Tiana has me open, outlined
in marigolds, my body luminous, my body
barely discernible, as if I had gazed
upon the edge of the known world
with all my eyes & yet lived
AMERICAN ABECEDARIAN
A is for atom bomb. B is for blacks belting blues before burial, the blood they let to give the flag its glimmer. C is for cocoon & its cognates. Cocaine, Coca-Cola, the cacophonous wail of drones filling air with wartime. D is for demagogue. E is for elephants & their semblances, every political animal laboring under some less-than-human name. F is for foxhole. Firefight. Fears we cathect onto men holding best intentions close to the chest as one might guilt or guns & of course G is for guns, G-men, guillotines draped in flame we dream any hellscape holds if it’s up to snuff. H is for Horsepower. I is for I. I is for individual drive trumps all concern when it comes to this business of living joyously at the edge of wit, watching half a world drown with your hands tied. J is for jeans. K is for Krispy Kreme. L is for loss. L is for loveliness. L is for lean in the cups of boys in white shirts billowing free in Mississippi towns so small, they are visible only when passing through them, like death. M is for metafiction. N is for next: next wife, next car, next life I would spend the bones in this flesh one by one to touch. O is for opulence. Opportunity. Occasional anguish but nothing compared to what I will reach when I peak & P is for Preakness. Poverty & bodies that flee it. Oh body, like a storm of horses. Oh questions we dare not ask for fear of breaking rank or losing funding. Q is for quarantine. R is for repair, Revolution, other conflicts that lack limit in any definitional sense. S is for stars we adore & reflect. T is for tragedy. U is for upper-middle working class when the survey asks. V is for the viola my mother plays in the 1970s as her hometown collapses without fanfare. W is for Windows 98 in the public school computer lab & every fourth grader playing Oregon Trail there. X is for xanthan gum, every everyday ingredient you couldn’t identify by sight if you tried. Y is for Yellowstone. Y is for the yachts in the docks in our eyes. Z is for zealotry: national pride like an infinite zip line, hyperdrive, the fastest way down.