long-given to the tide
of Reagan & concrete
bleeding blackness
all over & wayward
shots meant
for men themselves too young
to know the scent of cells
& aspiration rotted through,
we learned how we arrived
at the underside of modernity,
children only while we were held
& honed within those broad
brick walls, a place for us
to be unburied & yet unashamed,
unassailable, unaware
of an entire order lingering
like lions at the door.
ELEGY FOR THE POLICE STATE
What I imagined first were pruning hooks.
Something biblical, agrarian, a new use
for metal once good for little
more than tearing the air
from a docile body. Then, a gesture
toward the speculative: improbable,
overdue machines, teleportation
pads & twelve-speed hover-bikes,
lightsabers that can’t kill, but make you feel
warm & amorphous upon contact, like good
ramen, or when you find someone
else’s money on the floor.
The exercise grew unwieldy,
so I gave my energies over
to more practical matters.
Who to call when you get robbed
or hit with a bat. Who else to feed the dogs
of entropy & personal choice, the price
we pay to live decent, which
is to say, far from the stench
of the dead & the dying interlocked,
unintelligible with all that gold
in their mouths.
Here’s a story: once, freshly cast
by my old man to the hotel room wall,
throat now full of my own, unoriginal
blood, I knew I needed my father
dead, assumed the quickest route
would be to call the law. Twelve years old
& already this kind of contract killer,
I took my cue from scenes
at school, black wands buzzing
before each child marking us
ready for class or cuffs, no middle
ground to be found, really, what I have
since heard called a pipeline more of a smooth
continuum from hold to hold, everywhere
batons & threats of premature interment, everywhere
taupe walls like the ones in jail & someone’s grandbaby
pummeled raw.
PURPLE CITY BYRD GANG
My lavender tee is tall
as a ballroom gown
but no one dares
to say anything like that
to my face. Durag bisected
by black & Carolina-blue
stitching to contrast,
each of my newly purchased
Air Force Ones
shimmering white
as opportunity.
Against the pull
of crass familiarity,
& my parents’ warnings
about the historical
dangers of the D train,
I am posted up
on the Lower East Side,
dead set on buying
my first album without
supervision or shame.
The front cover reads
From Me to U & it almost
feels like a form
of direct address.
Me & Juelz Santana
are damn near the same
age & although I have yet
to hold a gun or serve
the block my will
is good. I am fifteen
& everything
is possible.
I am private school
by way of two buses,
one regional train,
a first alarm
at 5:25 a.m. shaking
the entire house
by its neck. My parents
know Jesus loves us
all, abhors
our weaknesses. Dip
-set is contraband
by extension.
Hence, I fled
to the basement
for cover, anxious
to hear a certain version
of my own moderate life
recited back to me
in spectacular hues,
Jacuzzis & bulletproof
vests, rhyming couplets
that all end in the exact
same word. Almost
as if some argument
for love beyond
magnetism. Some
postmodern parlor
trick. Some living, future
English, & everyone in it
is immortal.
THE PANTHER IS A VIRTUAL ANIMAL
with a line from Tavia Nyong’o
Anything that wants to be can be a panther. The black lion
or ocelot, the black cheetah or cornrowed uptown girl sprinting
down her neighborhood block just like one, in dogged pursuit
of the future world. In this frame, I imagine Huey and Bobby
as boys in the sense of gender and genre alike, an unbroken
line reading: my life is an armor for the other. Before black berets
or free breakfasts, then, there is friendship. Before gun laws
shifting in the wake of organized strength, leather jackets
shimmering like gypsum in the Northern California twilight—
or else magazine covers running the world over, compelling
everyday ordinary people across the spectrum of context
or color to sing who wants to be a panther ought to be he can be it
—there is love. The panther is a virtual animal. The panther
strikes only when it has been assailed. The panther is a human
vision, interminable refusal, our common call to adore ourselves
as what we are and live and die on terms we fashioned from the earth
like this. Our precious metal metonym. Our style of fire and stone.
ELEGY FOR PRISON
Without fail, at least one
student replies but what will we do
with all the murderers?
& the answer hasn’t changed
since I first felt cuffs, read
Etheridge or Dwayne, heard
iron doors too heavy to dent
with any human
pair of hands thud shut.
We cannot speak
as if the killers are not
already among us, mowing
the lawn, getting promotions,
trying on their fresh winter coats.
As if my older brother were perpetual
-ly dressed for the role
of corner store stickup boy,
eyes preordained for making
out unmarked cop cars
from a distance,
calm as Jimmy Carter
while a handgun rests
below the pitch
-navy Avirex jeans Mama
got him to celebrate
high honor roll,
A’s across the board, even
in Environmental Science,
where he struggled early on.
I get the ar
gument.
Close the jails & there he goes
again, classic Shaun,
up at seven a.m. mapping out
ever more intricate ways
to rob grocery stores. Shaun
with the shotgun, Shaun
with the bullet
-proof skin, Shaun
with the stains on his blood.
No one comes out & says
he was born with them.
No one calls him a thug
or an emptiness, nothing
so gauche as all that, most
of those assembled
in the lecture hall
opt instead for terms
like practical or natural
selection say let’s be realistic
here it’s really a matter
of public order
I mean we have to
keep them all
somewhere right
if someone killed
my mother money
wouldn’t help at all
I would want
to take away
the one thing they
can’t ever take back
& that’s time
THE NEXT BLACK NATIONAL ANTHEM
Will naturally begin
with a blues note.
Some well-adorned
lovelorn lyric
about how
your baby left
& all you got
in the divorce
was remorse.
& a mortgage.
& a somewhat
morbid, though
mostly metaphorical,
obsession with
the underground.
With how it feels
to live in such unrelenting
emptiness, unseen,
altogether un-correctable
by the State’s endless
arms. Just imagine:
Ellison’s Prologue
set to the most elaborate
Metro Boomin instrumental
you can fathom, brass
horns & pulsar cannons
firing in tandem
as Aretha lines a hymn
in the footnotes. Twelve
& a half minutes
of unchecked, bass-laden
braggadocio. An owed
to the unwanted.
The most imitated,
incarcerated human
beings in the history
of the world & every
nanosecond of the band’s
boundless song belongs
to us. It is ours, the way
the word overcome
or The Wiz or Herman
Melville is ours. In every
corner store & court
of law. Any barbershop
argument or hours-long
spat over Spades. The Next
Black National Anthem
will, by the rule, begin
in blood, & span
our centuries-long war
against oblivion, elaborate
the anguish at the core
of our gentleness. How
that generosity is a kind
of weapon.
This music, a blade
-d criticism of a country
obsessed with owning
everything that shimmers,
or moves with a destination
in mind. Even the sky.
Even the darkness
behind our eyes
when we dream.
AMERICA WILL BE
after Langston Hughes
I am now at the age where my father calls me brother
when we say goodbye. Take care of yourself, brother,
he whispers a half beat before we hang up the phone,
& it is as if some great bridge has unfolded over the air
between us. He is sixty-eight years old. He was born in the throat
of Jim Crow Alabama, one of ten children, their bodies side
by side in the kitchen each morning like a pair of hands
exalting. Over breakfast, I ask him to tell me the hardest thing
about going to school back then, expecting some history
I have already memorized. Boycotts & attack dogs, fire
hoses, Bull Connor in his personal tank, candy paint
shining white as a slaver’s ghost. He says: Having to read
The Canterbury Tales. He says: Eating lunch alone. Now, I hear
the word America & think first of my father’s loneliness,
the hands holding the pens that stabbed him as he walked
through the hallway, unclenched palms settling
onto a wooden desk, taking notes, trying to pretend
the shame didn’t feel like an inheritance. You say democracy
& I see the men holding documents that sent him off
to war a year later, Motown blaring from a country
boy’s bunker as napalm scarred the sky into jigsaw
patterns, his eyes open wide as the blooming blue
heart of the light bulb in a Crown Heights basement where he
& my mother will dance for the first time, their bodies
swaying like rockets in the impossible dark & yes I know
that this is more than likely not what you mean
when you sing liberty but it is the only kind
I know or can readily claim, the times where those hunted
by history are underground & somehow daring to love
what they cannot hold or fully fathom when the stranger
is not a threat but the promise of a different ending
I woke up this morning & there were men on television
lauding a wall big enough to box out an entire world,
families torn with the stroke of a pen, the right to live
little more than a garment that can be stolen or reduced
to cinder at a tyrant’s whim my father knows this grew up
knowing this witnessed firsthand the firebombs
the Klan multiple messiahs love-soaked & shot through
somehow still believes in this grand bloodstained
experiment still votes still prays that his children might
make a life unlike any he has ever seen. He looks
at me like the promise of another cosmos & I never
know what to tell him. All of the books in my head
have made me cynical & distant, but there’s a choir
in him that calls me forward my disbelief built as it is
from the bricks of his belief not in any America
you might see on network news or hear heralded
before a football game but in the quiet
power of Sam Cooke singing that he was born
by a river that remains unnamed that he runs
alongside to this day, some vast & future country
some nation within a nation, black as candor,
loud as the sound of my father’s
unfettered laughter over cheese eggs & coffee
his eyes shut tight as armories his fists
unclenched as if he were invincible
PHOTO BY NICHOLAS NICHOLS
Poet, performer, and scholar Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School. He received his PhD in English from Princeton University, and is currently Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. His writing has b
een published in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. His book Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf. He lives in Boston.
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