II
TOKEN PLAYS THE DOZENS
Okay so boom I’m not that fast or strong but when it comes time to go in and/or cut ass as Chris & Omar call it I’m godlike. Slick. Every witticism swift as hearsay in pursuit though I’m barely even fresh-adjacent, e.g., my off-gold corduroys stay hermetically sealed to each flank, front teeth fanned in at least three directions, but that’s the only joke anybody pretty got on me for real, that & my big head, which I can explain away anyhow, claim but I don’t even care ’cause my mama says that’s where the imagination lives, which goes over about as well as you might expect, though depending on the context I might pop back on some Ya mama’s so fat her belt line is the prime meridian Ya mama’s so black she gets salt on her fingers and it looks like the universe Ya mama’s so ugly when she walks into the corner store they turn the surveillance cameras off & yes there are times this goes on for the entire lunch period, just me & my nonchalant cruelty up against a host of boys more beautiful than I & better dressed too, better loved both here & in the thick of the city once the D train releases us into the block’s gray embrace & I am forced to pay for what I misread as the basic order of things, our mutual exchange of violences passed down clean as color or temperament, the blades between each molar honed at home watching my mother use her most luxurious words to pummel the man she loved into powder.
METAL POEM
is how Baraka described John Tchicai’s deploying the horn
like a kind of war machine before either man’s lungs were left empty
as a shipwreck, bodies still, stoic as stone & buried deep. Mainstream pop
had not yet given John his proper shine,
& so I sometimes like to think of the phrase as a chamber
with no flash or flame to kill the dim, so black it’s blank, the lead
-off to some broader claim about what touch compels, or unmakes. Any leader
-less man will cut holes in the world if you let him breathe, I think. Every horn
holds a history of violence. Animals slain for the sake of sound. Chamber
music born of plundered bone. My entire block is metal poem. Endless empty
school desks mourned by shoes hung from telephone wire, so high they catch the shine
of dawn before anything living. & the beat goes on. Staccato pop
of steel a call to pray. Bloodstained denouement. Pop
hears the family car backfire & dreams of Vietnam, lead
spray autographing his left side from boot to hip. Sundays, he loved to shine
our shoes & skin until both glowed like opal. Sharp as a horn
-bill’s kiss, my daddy was, before the weight of an empty
ledger winnowed him, left his chest hollow as the chamber
of a gun in the hands of a man six bodies deep into his rage, every chamber
of his tome-thick heart falling slack. The day it all went dark, Pop
barely spoke for more than a few clicks of the clock’s one good hand. Empty
quiet, where once was laughter so full, we felt when it fell to the floor. Who will lead
or love us now? the people thought, when Moses melted that metal god from horn
to hoof, made them drink. For weeks, their insides shine
with the light of the fallen. Little novae. Little faiths aflame. O, how I wished to shine
the way Pop did when it came time for penance; my mother’s stare, a chamber
of horrors, pulling names from him till they lie like fresh kill on our kitchen table, hornets
filling corpses with chatter. Every morning, the same perverse pop
quiz: where have you been? He responds as any weapon might. Leaden
expression to quell her pursuit. Either hand empty
apart from the car keys he will use to open the air between us again, empty
out our unearned dreams. His love for the idea of us never fails to shine
through. But for how long can you ask a man to lead
a life he never yearned for? Silence each chamber
clicking inside of him, coaxing both feet forward, demanding he pop
his son in the mouth for calling him phantom when he means to say my heart is a horn
in a hole in the earth is an empty cell cleansed of sunshine is a dead man’s chamber
nothing worth dying for inside of it is a lead balloon is a prop
gun in a time of war is a single splintered thorn
STILL LIFE WITH TOY GUN
for Tamir Rice and John Crawford III
After the after-party empties both of its fists
the seven of us gather like a murder
of crows to loose bread around the last
table the dining hall has left. It’s late,
& vegetarian pizza is the best thing
the joint has going, but we stay, mostly
to partake in what we would never call
gossip in front of our uncles but most
certainly is: who left with how many
numbers, top ten worst life choices
made that weekend, how Lauryn’s cobalt
dress lassoed every human breath in the room.
Night unspools. Our attention plants
its feet in late Clinton-era Everywhere
& we sing of what we yearned for back then,
back home, what mocked our small,
stupefied hands like a white stove
or the promise of beauty.
Consensus lands on Super Soakers.
BB guns. All manner of false weaponry
we were barred from as boys
because of a mother’s fear, her suspicion
that the rules of a given game might shift
& gunfire would be our only warning,
the policeman’s voice an aftershock, his first mouth
having already made its claim. Even now, no one
among us calls this a kind of theft, which is to say,
the term never launches like a hex from our tongues,
but even if it did, somehow, rise & alight the air, if everything
we missed during the years we grew tired trying not to die
found its own body right then, right there in the center
of campus, what difference could it make now
that we have already mastered the rule book, the protocol
we learned before we learned to slow
dance, or smooth talk, or scream
the lyrics of a favorite song in a group
of two or more & not feel ashamed
of all the noise a black body can make
while it is still living
WHEN THY KING WAS A BOY
with thanks to Ed Roberson
The most recent headline on the Dead
-spin front page reads LeBron James
is omnipotent & the first thing
I think is that even back in 2006,
his advent means a certain kind of undeniable,
post-soul apocalypse. The man
was low-key Copernicus
in this sense, at least for all those boys
at the baseline of my memory’s best
eye, coming of age in M.J.’s wake,
wandering wild with no martyr
to call archetype, no popular afterlife
through which to measure the value
of a solitary human breath. We were sixteen
on the bench, starving for exits
our bodies might build from hours spent
in tepid gyms & backs of buses
scanning Faulkner, hedging our bets
with the books in case Cornell never call
ed
on the ball front, & we were forced to let go
of dreams already long-destroyed
by genes & childhood vice. All that untapped
fleshly potential, sacrificed
in the name of first-person shooters,
chess lessons, friends who fled
when beatdowns swelled beyond
their means. But Bron would never
do us like that. This we knew from his high
-definition entry into the land
of the generally despised & perpetually syndicated,
only a year or so older than us but boundless
in his vision & grace, vicious with the first step,
every outlet pass launching across
the length of the court as if cannoned,
or indwelt by a god of pitch,
summer waging its two-front war
on our hair & skin & no one
cares to breathe. The boy king
rises like an aria. We sing.
He, who will one day
carry entire economies
in his stead, but for now
is little more than a hunter
-green headband, honey
-colored 23 emblazoned
across his chest like the chosen
few of us back then
with the game or gall
to claim that we too
had inherited the air.
MIKE BROWN IS A TYPE OF CHRIST
By which I mean, mostly, that we gaze upon the boy
& all of our fallen return to us, their wounds unhealed
& howling. I want to say something about indeterminacy
here. Decomposition as a kind of writing.
How the body never vanishes, really,
merely sketches the landscape anew
underground, foxgloves & marigolds jutting
like scimitars from the field’s flesh,
precious weapons of those thought to be rot
already, soil’s song, long gone past the grave.
For who says the dead don’t think, don’t shake
the weight of marrow & slip, quiet as fire, back
into whatever partition binds this life
to its grand black Epilogue? Last night,
I imagined every officer’s gun
gathered & stuffed in a bombproof box
by the side of the highway; wondered
what they might choose to craft
with their hands, their eyes, both given
for so long to the work of chasing
what can’t be contained. I dreamt unkillable
multitudes assembled in the wake
of a slain friend, the name
his mother once cast
like a cloak over him
the small & common blade
beneath their tongues
YOU ARE SO ARTICULATE WITH YOUR HANDS
she says & it’s the first time
the word doesn’t hurt. I respond
by citing something age-inappropriate
from Aristotle, drawing mostly
from his idea that hands are what make us
human, every gesture the embodiment
of our desire for invention or care, & I’m not
sure about that last part but it seemed
like a polite response at the time
& I’m not accustomed to not needing
to fight. If my hands speak with conviction
then blame my stupid mouth for its lack
of weaponry or sweetness. I clap when I’m angry
because it’s the best way to get the heat out.
Pop says that my words are bigger
than my mouth, but these hands
can block a punch, build a bookcase,
feed a child & when’s the last time
you saw a song do that?
OWED TO THE 99 CENT STORE
You are a kind of utopia,
you know. God’s garage.
Counter-hegemonic
magic, how you tug
on a dollar bill
until it becomes an open
field, how you mock semiotics,
offering products which often
belie your professed mission,
your wondrous intentions,
all these too-expensive toasters,
fragile dishes, ironing boards
that make Mom appeal to American
Express as backup, her escape
route from unplanned shame.
You ain’t have to do us like that.
But I peeped game. I know you
just like everyone else, hoping
to hustle your way off
this ziggurat block, all these
poor folks stacked on top
of one another like tropes.
Your true currency
is the cheer of children,
the love of learners
under duress, black & white
notebooks I still call upon
in hopes that these,
my most harried dreams,
might have rest, shelter
when smartphones give in,
fading to moonless wan
like everything else
around here. You persist.
You tenacious meditation
on excess. You candy bars
& batteries when pilot
lights kissed us no more
& Swedish Fish
were the best high we knew
or could afford.
You smorgasbord.
You sweet ecology.
You philosophy of boys
that have not yet learned
the wiring of value.
You neon name.
You anti-nihilism.
You clarion call
to the righteous
singing come fill
& be filled.
OWED TO THE PLASTIC ON YOUR GRANDMOTHER’S COUCH
Which could almost be said
to glisten, or glow,
like the weaponry
in heaven.
Frictionless.
As if slickened
with some Pentecost
-al auntie’s last bottle
of anointing oil, an ark
of no covenant
one might easily name,
apart from the promise
to preserve all small
& distinctly mortal forms
of loveliness
that any elder
African American
woman makes
the day they see sixty.
Consider the garden
of collards & heirloom
tomatoes only,
her long, single braid
streaked with gray
like a gathering
of weather,
the child popped
in church for not
sitting still, how even that,
they say, can become an omen
if you aren’t careful,
if you don’t act like you know
all Newton’s laws
don’t apply to us
the same exactly.
Ain’t no equal
& opposite reaction
to the everyday brawl
blackness in America is,
no body so beloved
it cannot be destroyed.
we cannot hold.
Adorn it
in Vaseline, or gold,
or polyurethane wrapping.
Call it ours
& don’t
mean owned.
Call it just
like new,
mean alive.
REPARATION
Forty acres & a jewel-encrusted orchid crown
for each & every living baby girl
growing up the way
we did. The way
we do. Unbridled. Unburied
though we stay pursued
by the U.S. school-to-prison
state’s laserlike vision.
Biweekly standing ovations.
Bras-Coupé resuscitated
with a sledgehammer slung over
his left shoulder, eyes ablaze
& dead set on the private
sector, the price
of four-year tuition, four-year
fascist presidents, any & all forms
of predatory opulence. Scholarships.
Scholars that love us
enough to break this language
lengthwise, filled as it is
with the bones of our fallen. Monuments
to the fallen. A grave site
for the illustrious Negro dead,
like Zora Neale Hurston said,
illustrious meaning you were black
& full of adoration, or vexed,
which is just another way
of saying you wanted to survive,
the world said die,
& you refused its refusal.
Owed Page 3