Another approach to the general
sentiment that Blackness
is beautiful, with no referent
to their everyday negation
of our essential, human splendor.
An apology on the Senate
floor. For the trade, the plunder
of our names, unremarked
graves, a hand in the hair,
a boot to the throat, guns
in the schools & the guns
are the books, the stares
of the second-grade teacher
calling your son a distraction,
your daughter’s braids illegal,
your building a blight
on the neighborhood,
the good you do & dream
of never quite good
enough to merit
the bull’s-eye’s removal.
A ship to wherever
we point on a map
of the measurable
universe, dare call
harbor, sanctum, ground
where the children can play
& come home whole.
REPARATION
They tell you the tumor, at present,
is roughly four inches wide.
A manageable distance. One that you scale
with your hands, for some reason,
on the long ride back to Boston,
rather counterintuitively, as you were
trying to use them
to write something meaningful
about all this pain
the miniature killer inside
your father carved into you.
The gesture teaches you
absolutely nothing
about the space
between his inconstant body
& the dark man you chase
in all of your thinking.
He is hundreds of miles
away right now, probably,
sitting in a chair, staring
at the wall like a former assailant.
He is sending you text messages
with critical pieces of language
missing.
You grasp at the shards,
stupidly.
Little builder. Little mirror. Little body
-guard, throwing punches
at the flood.
REPARATION
How are you feeling? is always your opening question
& you know me. I invariably take it the wrong way
when you say it like that.
I hear you asking for damage reports, the autobiography
of this pile of brown rubble bumbling on
about his father’s beauty, this chasm splitting
the voice in his unkempt head & the one
which enters the realm of the living.
You are good to me, & this kindness, I think, is not reducible
to our plainly economic relation, the yellow carbon
receipt at the end of each session a reminder
that we aren’t just girls
in the park catching up, estimating the cost
of our high school errors.
I never call you my analyst, because
that makes me sound like a body
of work, some extended meditation
approaching theory, if only asymptotically.
Anyways. I’m all right today. I remembered
to eat breakfast, & went for a run uptown.
I gave myself credit for trying to change.
Something in me awakened, today,
ready for liftoff. It sang.
REPARATION
So much has been said
about black men
& their mothers,
almost none of which
works for you & me
because I am less
your acolyte, or boyfriend,
than I am your twin brother
of a sort, counterfeit currency
moving through the world
on your behalf, making things
move. We duel
because you created me,
& sometimes cannot
bear the trace of yourself
I belt out
by being here.
Laughing with all
my teeth. Debating
minutiae. Stealing your high
-heeled purple pumps, the ones
you once kept next to your dresser
drawer, putting them on,
sauntering across the house
like a soloist. I was four.
You were furious. You
forgave me.
Forgive me. I fear
sometimes I am four men
at once, each one
bludgeoning the other
based on some long-held
misunderstanding.
You urge me
to take better care
of this wilting
frame. Drink
water. Pop a pair
of echinacea capsules
each day. Devote
my thought life (your phrase)
to higher planes.
But what modern-day
black son wasn’t born
knowing how to pray?
Doesn’t meditate
on the gun, the badge,
a lover’s hand
against the face or neck
to jog his memory,
recall his preordained
place? Encaged, prostrate,
enraged, enamored, no space
to make the world
you saw in visions
& scriptures, no,
this isn’t the future
you dreamt of, Ma,
but it is the war
for which
you gave me vestments,
the day I stepped
onto your front porch,
bloodstained & half-asleep.
You bade me return
to the street. Face the boys’
onslaught head-on, remind them
whose I was, the name I carry,
the true & living god giving it form.
I was born
with a job.
I will die
with one. We live
in a country
with no language
for what you are,
& I persist
for the sake
of your glory.
III
TOKEN COMES CLEAN
What I desired most was approachlessness,
enough fear to mark a sharp & ardent
wall between me & the broader social
sphere, think: semi-invisible
force field, think: aura light
umber like Bruce Leroy.
A beauty one might use to keep
a state-sanctioned grave
at bay, the distance
this darker body ought
to buy but doesn’t.
If evolution were kind,
we would all be fireproof
by now. A shame, to be sure: this
brutal truth boomeranging back
& forth across America’s oeuvre,
History stammering with blood
in its throat, blood on the books, blood
on the leaves, & what can you right
-fully call living now that the dead
have learned to dance so well?
Knife wounds in the global sky,
White god on my childhood mind
& you want to talk about repair
FREDERICK DOUGLASS IS DEAD
& might very well remain that way,
despite the best attempts
of our present overlord to resurrect
him without a single living
black mother’s permission.
If he should come, & be recognized
as anything other than the muted whisper
of a body interred, I wish his return
as some strange & ungovernable terror,
a ghost story turned live & direct ectoplasm
without warning: Frederick in the White
House kitchens, Frederick in the faucets,
Frederick posted up at every corner
of the Oval Office, shredding documents
invisibly, a blade in each of his eighteen
laser hands. Go off, his more radical undead
colleagues will exclaim. You better tell that man
to keep your name out his mouth. But Frederick
Douglass doesn’t say a thing. Not yet.
He’s waiting for you & me, my grandmother
says. Frederick Douglass is irrevocably dead,
& refuses to ride until we are ready. Until
our prayers are knives or sheets of flame:
Hear us, O Beloved, Fugitive Saint: Defer
the rain. Grant us the strength of a rage
we can barely fathom. Make us
brave as the flock in the fist
of a storm. Unmoor every melody
they built from our screams. Steady
our dreams. Keep us warm.
OWED TO LONG JOHNS
I remember thinking these are like skin for my skin
& a truer thing to call black to boot
as my first pair were blacker even
than my nascent curls, which turned
brown whenever they would wrestle
the light. My father called you thermals,
which always brought to mind
radioactive weapons of one kind
or another, two nuclear physicists
using casual shorthand over coffee.
For ten years, under thrift store denim
& corduroys rubbed raw
by Ms. Blint’s blue carpet,
I rock your soft scales
with minimal fuss, only twice or so
grumbling to Pop about how
you make me appear,
if not heavier per se then just,
well, stuck in all of my clothes, that this
is on the whole untenable
for a boy my age, no small
tragedy given these were formative
years, you see, critical even
as it pertained to the glowing,
affirmative sense of my body
I would need for success
in the general public
situation. Pop’s concern
remained with the cold,
& I remained a boy
cocooned, fed up, hungry
for better methods of breaking
winter’s callous rule. Anything
other than having to leave
the oven door open, setting
my mother’s best four black pots
to boil at once, our entire family
gathered as if shrapnel in the living
room, so close our bodies grew almost
indeterminate there, huddled like stars
under blankets to thaw
OWED TO YOUR FATHER’S GOLD CHAIN
Since we are already on the topic,
I casually mention that I think we should
name the baby Ajax & you laugh
so hard that both your shoulders shake
as you mouth an adamant no,
your arms waving wild in front
of your face like some novice
air traffic controller. You later explain
that this is not only quote unquote
a terrible name but also that it makes
you think of innumerable Thursdays
spent cleaning bathrooms at your grandma’s
house. And yes, I know, there must be a joke
about class stratification in there somewhere,
since the name Ajax also makes me think
of that magical white dust in the cardboard
blue box long before it does any ancient
Greek demigod, but I tend to assume
my first thought is not my best thought,
as you now know well. I often attribute
this fact to my sound colonial education,
but am not yet sure what you would call
or think of it. One might say that this,
in fact, is a working definition for love
in a time of general disenchantment. The meticulous
consideration of all that slipped through
the mind’s wet meshwork before, minor
miracles, like the number of bones in a human
hand. How yours unfastens like a memory
when I request an impromptu waltz
across the bar’s threshold & we circle
one another, as if swordsmen, in the low light.
How the next week, you clasp your father’s gold
chain at the back of my neck, call me beautiful
in your inside voice, barely breaking a whisper,
as if you can’t hear the dawn roaring
its way through the bedroom window
just to catch a glimpse of us here,
barely mortal, shimmering at the cusp
of this strange & untamable world.
SUMMER JOB
For all we knew, there was no such thing as wealth
management internships sponsored by a father’s
Harvard roommate, or else some Fifth Avenue gig
running iced coffee for fashionistas an hour’s ride away
from where we stood, the darkest thing for miles,
trash collection claws extending from our sleeves
like some late eighties cyborg fantasy. We were bored
out of our brains, unlettered, sharp enough still
to know our place in the grander proletarian scheme:
a pair of scholarship kids paid to maintain campus
while our peers tried their hands at college physics,
American industry, psychedelics and road trips
to the Midwest with friends, all while Devin and I
stood in our standard-issue jumpsuits, adding another
coat of white paint to cafeteria walls without irony.
There were no small iron gods in our pockets then;
no machines to thread us into the invisible world, and so
we passed entire mornings listening to the ceremonies
of birds we couldn’t name as we traversed the sides
of the highway, each step perfecting our soon-to-be
-flawless technique, dodging carrion, dividing paper waste
from condoms and bottles of Coors, just the way Jay taught
us our first day on call. I spent most breaks in the rift
between observation and dreams, pulling music from the filthy
tales each older man on the maintenance crew cast like a cure
into the mind of the other. Folklore filling the desolate
lecture halls where
we took lunch, laughing as we traded
one tradition for another. No future worth claiming apart
from that broken boiler in the next building, blackbirds
trapped in the gutter-way, getting pipes fixed before fall.
ELEGY FOR THE MODERN SCHOOL
This much I can prove:
we were black & unfinished
in the Harlem of old,
a mass of naps
& Vaselined knees
before the promise
of faster Wi-Fi & craft
beer was code for
what it is code for.
& my mother would
drop us off in her ’89
Toyota Camry, its cool
steel flesh the color of a
half-dead rhododendron.
& my big sister would hold on
to my left hand—which fit
in hers like a quarter’s worth
of Peanut Chews back then
—until the bell bid us scatter.
I was a good boy, & thus
defined by a certain lust
for solitude, the countless
ways I learned to scream
don’t touch. This was all I knew
of the world I had yet to name,
its utter indifference, its
physical laws, my sister
a kind of atmosphere,
more god or feeling
than another small,
finite body like mine
that could be known
well, or else unmade.
Miss Cherry owned a ruler
long as my daddy’s
entire forearm,
called it Redeemer, kept
the instrument at the front
of our classroom
so as to enrich
our already budding
sense of the apocalyptic,
would rap our knuckles
& backsides with it
like a blacksmith in love
with his labor any time
we dared behave as if
we were, in her words,
outside our natural
minds. Our parents
thought this little more
than rational extension
of the age-old wisdom
when it comes to rearing
the hunted: I cannot keep you
alive, but will see you die
at my hands long before
the day I let the law erase
your name from the ledger
of the living. & so it was,
that in songs & parables
Owed Page 4
