tentacles of blood surround the fresh damage. the only surviving instrument.
IT’S NOT LIKE NIKOLA TESLA KNEW ALL OF THOSE PEOPLE WERE GOING TO DIE
Everyone wants to write about god
but no one wants to imagine their god
as the finger trembling inside a grenade
pin’s ring or the red vine of blood coughed into a child’s palm
while they cradle the head of a dying parent.
Few things are more dangerous than a man
who is capable of dividing himself into several men,
each of them with a unique river of desire
on their tongue. It is also magic to pray for a daughter
and find yourself with an endless march of boys
who all have the smile of a motherfucker who wronged you
and never apologized. No one wants to imagine their god
as the knuckles cracking on a father watching his son
picking a good switch from the tree and certainly
no one wants to imagine their god as the tree.
Enough with the foolishness of hope and how it bruises
the walls of a home where two people sit, stubbornly in love
with the idea of staying. If one must pray, I imagine
it is most worthwhile to pray toward endings.
The only difference between sunsets and funerals
is whether or not a town mistakes the howls
of a crying woman for madness.
YOU ABOUT TO TELL HER YOU LOVE HER, WE OFF THAT
I text you & instead say distance is a mirror inside
of which the only echo is your face but then I delete
it & I type something to make you think I laughed
at the joke / the one about a dog / the one about
a boy / the one about making your own ending &
walking through it & I thought of you during the movie
in the dark of the theater when the man had a gun pointed
at his head & he closed his eyes & prayed as if god has any
sway over the evil unlocked in a stranger’s hands & I thought
of you on the way home when the car was being pushed
through the gap of snow by 5 people & still moving only
inches & I think of you now when the blades of a helicopter sever
the single cloud & it becomes two drifting corpses, one for each
coast & the thing about texting a joke is that no one cares whether
it’s actually funny & when we are not in the same room
I imagine a lie to be better than silence & the word hollow
in any language sounds like something the body wants no part
of & I text you again: I have made my own ending & the door is yawning
& on the other side of it I am praying & I am pushing & I am drifting away
& the funny thing about the boy who cries wolf is that he eventually becomes one
ONE SIDE OF AN INTERVIEW WITH THE GHOST OF MARVIN GAYE
after Eve L. Ewing
A: yes. he was a preacher.
A: you let a man see god once and he’ll learn to make a country out of anything.
A: I think what I’m saying is that I prayed to any sound I could tempt out of a body.
A: the bullet is like any other thing born an orphan.
A: I mean it’s just looking for another new place to call home.
A: hunger is whatever shape the moonlight pulls your shadow into.
A: yes. I served as many masters as it took.
A: it wasn’t only sex, but people hear what they want when the world is on fire.
A: smoke said once you make people believe that you got something they need, you can make them believe anything.
A: yes, I grew tired of waiting on my grave, so I seduced one out of thin air.
A: commandments? at least 8.
A: the joke was that to be sanctified, you gotta set a distance between yourself and what you love.
A: no. I never got to ask for her forgiveness.
A: no. She never came back.
A: that’s the thing about being empty I guess.
A: everyone who thinks of death as a peaceful place is still alive
WITH BOXES PILED AT THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS, I GO TO SEE LOGAN
I will not spoil
the ending, though
what is there to spoil
but to say there was
a casket in the place
you would imagine
a casket to be.
depending on how
you define burial,
the ending is unspectacular.
my pal died not when the pill bottle
rolled empty from his unfurling
palm. it was sometime after
that, when I told his old girlfriend
I have maybe been in love
with you the whole time.
HOW CAN BLACK PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT FLOWERS AT A TIME LIKE THIS
Kehinde painted
that man Barack
with roses at his feet
the saying goes
get your roses
while you’re still alive
to smell them
show me a way to govern
without violence
and I will show you
a way to not feel
shame inside
of the moment
when you recognizes
their face
in the face of their captor
and falls in love
with the familiarity
I too have licked
the blood from a mirror
in an attempt
to see more clearly
the lips thick
with a familiar slang
flooding the tongue
get me to the curve
of a lover’s neck
while I am still alive enough
for my nose
to resist disappearing
my blessings into ash
depending on what is in bloom
I might summon
the blade
I might undo
the forest winding
its way along
the sides of my face
so that I can
more closely resemble
a man worthy
of waking to roses
at his feet
in a kill or be killed
nation
give to my open palms
something that
might die before I do
until all that remain
are the thorns
pushing their lips
together and begging
for touch.
IT IS MAYBE TIME TO ADMIT THAT MICHAEL JORDAN DEFINITELY PUSHED OFF
that one time in the ’98 NBA finals & in praise of one man’s hand on the waist of another & in praise of the ways we guide our ships to the shore of some brief & gilded mercy I touch my fingers to the hips of this vast & immovable grief & push once more & who is to say really how much weight was behind Jordan’s palm on that night in Utah & on that same night one year earlier the paramedics pulled my drowning mother from the sheets where she slept & they said it must have felt like a whole hand was pushing down on her lungs & I spent the whole summer holding my breath in bed until the small black spots danced on the ceiling & I am sorry that there is no way to describe this that is not about agony or that is not about someone being torn from the perch of their comfort & on the same night a year before my mother died Jordan wept on the floor of the United Center locker room after winning another title because it was father’s day & his father went to sleep on the side of a road in ’93 & woke up a ghost & there is no moment worth falling to our knees & galloping toward like the one that sings our dead into the architecture & so yes for a moment in 1998 Michael Jordan made what space he could on the path between him & his father’s small & breathing grace
&n
bsp; & so yes,
there is an ocean between us the length of my arm & I have built nothing for you that can survive it
& from here I am close enough to be seen but not close enough to be cherished
& from here, I can see every possible ending before we even touch.
GLAMOUR ON THE WEST STREETS / SILVER OVER EVERYTHING
from the humid brick building below my humid brick building, a woman
bellows at the pizza man. who, it seems, threw no cheese atop the crust
& its red river of sauce because—as he shouts above the sirens of State
Street & the growing crowd lined outside his shop—it is Friday night
& he is woefully short on mozzarella & there are far better pizza options
on every corner of this city, overpriced & tonight bursting at the seams
with lonely people who will seek the warmth spilling from the edges
of a cardboard box & onto their laps & into their fingers on the walk
back to a newly empty apartment. I love the heat for how it separates
the desire for touch from the practicality of it. If it gets too hot to fuck,
as it did for mookie & tina, then we’re all on our own sinking islands
anyway. there is no cheese in this town anymore & what could be worse
than the fraction of a dream behind every door you crawl to. it is friday & surely
some of my people are praising the fresh coin in their bank accounts & what
a tragedy to spend it on a half-finished freedom & the argument below has poured
out into the streets & the waiting masses & I imagine this is no longer over
cheese but over every mode of unfulfilled promise. the cluster of sins still stuck to a body
fresh from the waters of baptism. the parent who must dig a grave for their youngest
child. from below, a man yells there are only three ingredients. you can’t even get that right.
isn’t it funny, to vow that you will love someone until you are dead.
THE GHOST OF MARVIN GAYE STANDS OVER HIS FATHER’S GRAVE AND FORGETS TO ASK FOR AN APOLOGY
They ain’t make a religion yet that lets you trade in mercy for more sins. Can you believe the boys these days? They open their mouth & a machine holds their voice. In a balled fist. They ain’t even dancing no more, pop. There ain’t nothing out there for someone lonely to look at & dream about in a corner of a cold bed. I told ’em you left all those bruises so that you could always have a map to me, father. I told ’em the belt buckle’s echo along a brick wall was how I learned the charity of silence. Look at me now. All I got to call my own is quiet. Ain’t no forgiveness for men like us. Ain’t no god in any architecture where we goin’. Only thing that separates purgatory and hell is whether or not you can see the face of someone you’ve loved in the fire, baby, and I’m good with what I ain’t got. Wouldn’t know what to do if I could look myself in the eye. Thank you for opening the door to this eternity. I wasn’t gonna be out here digging a hole for any child I brought into this world. I wasn’t ever trynna bury nothin’ but my own self. I sang that shit that could get somebody free. The women all threw roses at my feet in California until the roses looked like chains.
AND JUST LIKE THAT, I PART WAYS WITH THE ONLY THING I WON IN THE DIVORCE
one night with some dive’s secondhand smoke playing a love song
above our heads & our fingers slicked with grease from someone’s fried
chicken, amy said afrofuturism is simply the idea that black people will exist
in the future & i watched the fullness of the malt liquor bottle jump
its way to empty at the tilt of an old head’s lips & i said i am not so sure
& like any self-fashioned god, i cherry-pick the aesthetics of my own resurrection.
the salesman wants to talk to me about leather & how it is ethically made
because the hide of the dead animal would be destroyed anyway & so you see,
even something discarded deserves a second life & in praise of this, i dig
my fingers into the seat of the new car with one hand & find a tune
with the other & i spent 3 seasons cutting off the parts of myself destined
for destruction & yet no one has fashioned them into anything useful &
i mean to look the old heads in the eye & say i wish you wouldn’t smoke
that shit ’round me but instead i say take into yourself that which might get you closer
to heaven and blow some over my head. who wants the burden of being an ancestor
anyway, i tell the salesman who has two children & another on the way.
a crown made of assassin’s tools is still a crown. i have enough money
in my pocket to buy my way out of the relics of grief & i don’t say this
lightly. pay me what you owe me for the way my heart breaking has made yours
feel less like an anchor & in exchange, i will tell you that true wealth
is the ability to embrace forgetting. to my children, i will leave only the ways
i didn’t let them down, written on small pieces of paper & hidden amid
a graveyard of animal hides. for now, i say i will take the one with the sun-
roof. i want this particular wind all to myself. i want it to blow through
the absence of hair & know there would have been a passenger there once.
i want to hear it, through clenched teeth, hissing i’ve had enough of you now.
HOW CAN BLACK PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT FLOWERS AT A TIME LIKE THIS
with my eyes closed long enough,
i can at least remember the popping
of gum thrashing between Jasmine’s
teeth. i would like for memory alone
to declare me forgiven but i would be lying
if i said i recall the color of the dress
or the way her hair spread its many arms
along the blacktop. i nurse whatever visions
i must for the sake of enduring. of course,
i tell myself it was the popping of gum.
of course, i say that she was pulled to the ground
by revelry, and nothing else. of course, i
do not ask you to relive with me the funeral,
though by now you surely know there was one.
THE OLD HEAD GIVES BAD ADVICE WHILE A MAN SITS WITH A GUN
on his lap in a white suv dragging down the santa ana freeway encased by a parade of blue & whites with their sirens on mute & still flashing & running their claws along the exterior of the whip & nbc cut the nba finals off for this & in ohio my pops would let the brooklyn leap out his voice whenever the knicks were winning & ewing had hakeem grasping at ghosts that night like my man angelo who hadn’t slept in a month since the echo of a night’s pistol replaced his sister in the gospel choir & mario said that if we wanted to watch a black man run from the cops we could just go down to livingston ave on the 1st or 15th & so we grabbed the rock & ran toward the orange halo cutting through the starless black & painted the sky with our sweat & shouting & the rim’s vibration from our misses & we backed off josh at the 3-point line cuz he missed everything & rule is you crowd the shooter whether or not you think they might actually shoot & some would say that as everyone is capable of dying everyone is capable of killing or everyone is capable of the fear that sends a hand reaching for a killing instrument & that night the heat lapped at our hand-me-down shirts as we ran home & the heat sat on the lap of a man running home to his mother & enough love cannot bleach the blood from your hands but that won’t stop the men from trying & past the porch on barnett the old man sat with his radio & his beer & the glow of a tv & the white suv still making its crawl home towards absolution & the man looked us up and down & thumbed the picture of his wife from the day they were married & through the window his bed was made up & hadn’t been slept in for at least a month & he stared at the suv splitting the los angeles sunlight & said don’t you boys ever fa
ll in love
THE TURN
Drowning people
Sometimes die
Fighting their rescuers
—OCTAVIA BUTLER
I WOULD ASK YOU TO RECONSIDER THE IDEA THAT THINGS ARE AS BAD AS THEY’VE EVER BEEN
In the year that felt like one
hundred years, Kendrick let
a small flame dance along the tight
braids pulled in rows along his head
by someone with thin & aching
fingers & when two trains sped
A Fortune for Your Disaster Page 2