sisters like Chapman would arrive. I shook my chin wool
then, and placed my hand over the guitar string’s window
till it stilled. “When the moon’s black,” I said. “Be faithful.”
A PLATE OF BONES
My silk slick black muscular back-talking
uncle driving me and a school
of fish corpses to church. The sick-eyed
gap-mouthed bass, the kingfish without
kingdom, the sliver-thin silver fish—each
dead and separate in a cool bucket. Gilded
and shapely as a necktied Sunday morning,
the fish. Sit upright, he said, and I sat right up,
riding shotgun looking hard at the road.
He muttered, Crackers, as if it was something
swinging from a thin clear wire,
the clump of tiny maggots in a trout’s brain,
the flies lazing like the devil’s jewelry at our backs.
Last night when the white boy’s arm
lassoed his daughter’s neck, my uncle
said nothing until they left. I let him feed me
the anger I knew was a birthright,
a plate of bones thin enough to puncture
a lung. But the words did things in my mouth
I’d heard they killed people for. They went
to a movie and sat quietly and touched
or did not touch in the darkness. My uncle watched
the news with the sound turned down
until she came in, my silk slick black back-talking
cousin, his daughter. He went to work
beating a prayer out of her skin.
THE SHEPHERD
“I am here, in my father’s house.”
—“The Sheep-Child,” by James Dickey
If you and every person in the county mailed
me an envelope of five to ten dollars, I think
I could rehabilitate the sheep. You should know,
however, that they are mentioned over three hundred times
in the Bible. Remember when John the Baptist
sees Jesus coming toward him and says,
“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin
of the world”? Lambs, which is to say sheep,
are mentioned twenty-eight times in the Book of Revelation
alone. I like the wily black sheep of the shepherd boy
who lacked training as well as the brooding sheep
at the insomniac’s fence. Sheep strike
the same pose each season: sheared and suspended
from hooks like strange fruit or fidgeting in open fields
like boys in oversize baseball uniforms.
What if your momma tried to make you join a pony
league of ten- to twelve-year-olds who were coached
by a man they knew as “Coach” and you knew
as a wolf sweating your mother’s body?
Whenever my parents fought, my father would drive me
to the dollar movies to watch and forget the movies.
The rain left stripes on our faces. The news
of another sheep’s death was often on my mind.
The story of how sheep fall in love with moonlight;
how sheep go astray and are bruised.
My father sometimes burned upon the sofa
like a campfire, and a dry whimper
broke from him. Sometimes in mid conversation,
sheep begin drifting off to sleep. You say, “Sunshine,”
and their eyes roll over the horizon. I love the sheep
of the lost lake and the sheep of patron saints.
Once my mother bought a sheepskin brush
for my father’s sheepskin jacket. He held her then,
as if she were a shepherd’s guitar. My love is sentimental.
It is the good news that holds us. I am still in the house
with the music that makes my brown face soft
and gives the sheep a reason to believe. How, Mr. Dickey,
would you have told your father about your pet
imaginary sheep the day you kneeled in the backyard
with a choked hose and thirsty bucket, him saying,
“How ’bout playing football or basketball if not baseball?”
and you yielding to nothing, you shaking your wooly head
above the emptiness, half hearing the wind mutter, “Punk,”
or your father mutter it, and when the water came finally,
you crying, your father walking out of the fence?
HIDE
The tire was like the wet hide of a seal
dropped from the bridge
to waters as black as a seal
glistening that way in the wake
of sparkling nighttime dead
if a thing can be that dead
in the same breath the limp tire
damned and dropped from the rail
the night we ran away rolled
from the three-wheeled scampering Ford
like a gawking with no face
like a hole to the place you wanted to live
I was the wet hide too in a seal
of shadows on broad river bridge
sleepy as the drowned and black
listening that way to the wakefulness
dead if wakefulness can be that dead
and lit the nighttime littered with breaking
and tired of running away of being rolled
from a damp dream by fists and scampering
to my gawking shoes as you led me
from our house with a flat line across your face
the heart weary of its grief desires forgetfulness
but I never wanted it to be that way
FOR BROTHERS OF THE DRAGON
a pecha kucha
[PREMONITION]
I dreamed my brother said I’d live with the feeling
a child feels the first time he sees his brother disappear.
I went down on my knees and sure enough, I was the size
of a boy again. With my shins like two skinny tracks in the dirt,
I could almost hear a train carrying its racket up my spine.
[OPENING SCENE]
The day Malcolm X was buried, his brothers were in a motel
watching the funeral on a black-and-white TV. If I were in their story,
I would have run down the assassins and removed their eyes.
It does not matter if this is true, only that it can be conceived.
[HOW FICTION FUNCTIONS]
However else fiction functions, it fills you with the sound
of crows chirping, alive alive alive. But that’s temporary too.
Tell my story, begs the past, as if it was a prayer
for an imagined life or a life that’s better than the life you live.
[SCENE AT THE GRAVE]
I am considering writing a story about the lives the brothers lead
afterward. They will change their names a third time and abandon
their families. They will visit their brother’s grave at Ferncliff.
They will be poor and empty. One will bag the dead man’s bones
while the one holding the shovel begs him to hurry.
[FORESHADOWING]
I keep thinking I’ll have a dream about the smoke clouding
the bar my brother and I used to haunt. We spent hours saying
nothing. He pretended he didn’t know the man raising us was
his father but not mine. Instead I dream about the mouth
of a dragon, the smoke of a train vanishing into a mountainside.
[DRAMATIC ARC]
One brother will want, at first, redemption; one brother will want,
at first, revenge. Their story will be part family saga and elegy,
part mystery. What changes them before the story begins will be,
at first, more important than what changes them when it ends.
[IMAGERY]
I have no problem with the flaws of memory. The bird carcass
stiff as the shoe of a hit-and-run victim on the side of the road
might just be a veil the wind pulled from the face of a new bride.
Why was the imagination invented, if not to remake?
[OPENING DIALOGUE]
The motel’s twin beds will be narrow and dingy. On each pillow
will be a sweating peppermint candy left by a desk clerk
who will sigh the way my mother sighs. “Y’all look like the ghosts
of Malcolm X,” I’ll have her think, carelessly. “Y’all smell
like men who slept all night in a boxcar or on a roadside.”
[SYMBOLISM]
However else fiction functions, it fills you with the sound
of running away. The dirt, the smudged mirror, even the silences
between speech have something to say. In novels
there is no such thing as a useless past or typical day.
[FLASHBACK]
I’m thinking of black boys in the countryside with a white boy
who’d seen, only a summer before, a black man strung up
at the edge of town. They’ll be singing when they drag the white boy
to the river and throw him in. They’ll be singing when they
dive in and drag him back to shore before he drowns.
[STATIC CHARACTERS]
In my novel all the minor characters will look like various friends
and family: Blind Vince Twang, BlackerThanMost, Deadeye Sue,
Lil Clementine. They will be more human than my protagonists
because they will be left with lives that do not change.
[POINT OF VIEW]
The chin of Malcolm’s widow will quiver below her veil.
Where is home now? she’ll think. It will be the wind
or her trembling that moves the veil. I am not going to describe
her face because I want you to think of her as a bride.
[SETTING THAT ILLUMINATES CHARACTER]
When I try remembering dirt, I remember my mother’s pale carpet
stained by mud and my brother on his knees with a hairbrush
and bar of soap, scrubbing before school. I do not remember
the names of the birds who lived outside our house,
but I know their music was swallowed by the passing trains.
[ALLEGORY]
One brother will tell the other a story: Once, in the shadow of a tree
lit with song, when a black woman unbuttoned her blouse,
all the birds came to dine. It will mean there are people who root
and people who roam; people bound to a place
and people bound to an idea, whatever the idea may be.
[CONNOTATION]
I wish I was not the kind of man who abandons
those who love him repeatedly. My brother must be
one hundred pounds heavier now than he was
all those years ago. Because growing old is like slipping
into a new coat without taking the old coat off,
I think of him bearing the weight of our family.
[DELETED CHAPTER]
You’ll find salt in the eyes of anyone who kneels too long
with his head in the dirt. I should say what happened
to my brother when he was sixteen. My mother found him
naked and weeping to himself in the closet. Because
I wasn’t there, there is no suitable place in the story for this scene.
[FALLING ACTION]
Later both X brothers show up at the widow X’s door and miss
the softer woman she was before. Here, I am not going to say
she forgives them. When she turns them away, I imagine
the sunlight bleeding its heaviness upon their backs.
[METAPHOR]
Because I am a brother of the dragon, call me Dragonfly.
When I dream of the train riding our parallel spines, carrying
our history, the weight that turns my brother into fire, makes me
scattered light. In my story the X brothers will live
without their brother, but that doesn’t mean they’ll survive.
[ALLUSION TO THEME]
It’s all true: the pair of tracks through the darkness,
men who look like me, disguised. The bewilderment
that cannot be described. What I feel is Why. In fiction
everything happens with ease, and the easefulness kills me.
[RESOLUTION]
I am full of dirt sometimes. I am trying to tell you a story
without talking. I promise nothing I write about you
tomorrow will be a lie. Instead of fiction, brother,
I will offer you an apology. And if that fails,
I will drag myself to your arms crying, Speak to me.
THREE MEASURES OF TIME
I. How My Brother Tells Time
By noon and the hours jumping toward dinner bells.
By the goodness in the body smelling sweet
as the air around our mother’s good-night sentence,
the one long since gone flat as money,
the belly shrouded in hunger.
The past is nutritious; the past is there on the table
with the hair you know is Ma’s color.
It’s curling and somewhere she is marveling
her light-headed, near comic hairdo.
Absence in each Hello, her teeth are yellow,
her belly stretch-marked, her glasses
were supposed to be scratch-proof and unbreakable.
She is in the kitchen cooking something
and singing, each pink note ringing through the rooms,
but it’s not the kind of shoo-bee-doo-bees the radio loves
to spit at you. If she wrote the words down,
they’d be illegible, darkening, prideful. You might ask her
later if she’d finished dinner, but she’d already be asleep.
Let’s wait in the hall outside her door with our plates.
No such thing as thanklessness. Let’s sing until she’s sound
awake, half brother. I am or I am almost the same as you.
The hour is hushed and clicking to rust
and cleaving and cleaving to her: the meat that made us.
II. How My Father Tells Time
By knowing how the year jumps forward.
God in the meat of a chicken. The smell
of barbecue in a sentence, the scent
long gone flat as money. Animal hunger
in the mouth like the hollow side of a bell.
And remorsefulness bland as the grease
on the carcass. The past has its nutrients,
but it is too thin for color, and it is shapeless.
Like wind troubling my mother’s hairdo
when she looks at you sideways,
a gathering storm in each Hello.
The day is yellow, but it is not scratch-proof
or unbreakable. By the time the coals die down
you’re asleep before a whispering TV.
No such thing as darkening.
Let’s sing the old songs until the hour is new.
Step-Daddy, half of me belongs to you.
III. How My Mother Tells Time
By none of the hours jumping at the window.
By the joblessness of God and the body
beneath a floral bedsheet. A sentence
with no sense of anything but money.
A mouth of bad teeth and a past bland
as grease in hair too thin for color.
Sleep is a form of absence.
Nothing sings without food.
You are in the kitchen with a spatula
above something inedible or inevitable
and darkening. Or you are asleep
in a locked room. O Blood,
the hours cling to y
ou.
[GOD IS AN AMERICAN]
THE AVOCADO
“In 1971, drunk on the sweet, sweet juice of revolution,
a crew of us marched into the president’s office with a list
of demands,” the black man tells us at the February luncheon,
and I’m pretending I haven’t heard this one before as I eye
black tortillas on a red plate beside a big green bowl
of guacamole made from the whipped, battered remains
of several harmless former avocados. If abolitionists had a flag
it would no doubt feature the avocado, also known as the alligator
pear, for obvious reasons. “Number one: reparations!
Enough gold to fill each of our women’s wombs, gold
to nurse our warriors waiting to enter this world with bright fists,
that’s what we told them,” the man says, and I’m thinking
of the money-colored flesh of the avocado, high in monosaturates;
its oil content is second only to olives. I am looking
at Yoyo’s caterpillar locks dangle over her ear. I dare you
to find a lovelier black woman from Cincinnati, where the North
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