WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST AND THE CHILDREN FIRST AND THE CHILDREN
are still dying somewhere not here the man on television wears a tie the color of a fresh sky unburdened by the machines of war and I think it is warm this year I think I loved you best when warmth was something to be hoarded between limbs (ice age coming / ice age coming /let me hear / both sides) ok: I have made room for joy though
the oceans may not allow my children’s children to see room for joy & isn’t that the way? I toss my dice against the immovable future & only bad numbers come back & yet (take the money / and run / take the money / and run / take the money) here, I’m alive & standing
in summer’s unbearable yawn & for the purpose of romantics in the face of extinction I say sweat now & mean disintegration I say sweat & mean I am melting like everything else but this is a parting gift the way I become water another vessel for you to find your reflection in & may I go first before everyone I love & I am once again demanding to
be missing & not missed but in Ohio the stars sink their fangs into the neck of the night sky& I am not afraid of how you look leaning into the dark red mercy is good lighting & a hand steady enough to hold the camera still & I will take whatever is coming & everything after &
I (laugh / until / my head / comes /
Off.)
HOW CAN BLACK PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT FLOWERS AT A TIME LIKE THIS
Forgive me, for I have been nurturing
my well-worn grudges against beauty.
I am hoping my neighbors will show some mercy
on me for backing my car
into the garden
& crushing what I will say were the peonies.
a flower with a short
season. born dying.
some might say it’s a blessing to know your entrances
& exits. forgive me, for I have once again been recklessly
made responsible for the curation of softness
& have instead returned with another torrent
of viciousness. in the brief moment of their
flourish, at the opening of spring, I drove across
state lines
to gather peonies for a woman
who loved me once.
as a way of surrender,
I pull the already dying thing from the earth
in a mess of tangled knots & I insist
that you must keep it alive
for a year, even after it so desperately wants to be
done with the foolishness of its living.
The last thing I ask
of this relationship is to burden you with another
relationship. it is so delicious to define
the misery you are putting
a body out of. & just like that, we are talking about power.
how awful this must be for you I whispered as I closed my eyes
& put the car into reverse.
THE GHOST OF MARVIN GAYE LEANS INTO A WALL OUTSIDE THE 7-ELEVEN AND TELLS YOU THE STORY OF HOW HE BROKE YOUR MAMA’S HEART REAL GOOD
I done showed up in enough dreams. I know how to make myself into anything. smokey said it ain’t about the words. only about how you sing ’em. like you already got one foot in the grave. enough sex will make anyone give up on all that church shit. you thought I was good then. I’m somethin’ else now. I can wear the moonlight as flesh. swear to god I’m bulletproof. lovers know I ain’t good for a damn thing. but leaving a room loud and then empty. tell the women I still hear the ocean in my ears. in a body that holds nothing, I still cannot stop the water from filling my lungs. every time the sun sets.
IT IS AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT THING TO WALK INTO THE RIVER WITH STONES
stretching the fabric of pockets stitched onto a black overcoat. It may seem like now is not the time but shout out to the stones, whom the old lovers would drop a needle on the first morning they woke to find out their beloved had run into the arms of another. Shout out to the snaps that firework & flourish from a record’s ridges in the silence before a song starts. An animal running its claws against the bars of a prison long enough grows to love the sound more than it loves freedom. Mick Jagger got a pregnant Merry Clayton out of bed at midnight because he needed someone to sing the word murder like they were trying to squeeze it through a barbed wire fence without opening a wound on their own fingers & Merry Clayton got home from the studio & miscarried & when her voice tears at the air on the second syllable of murder Jagger whispers wow & the song must hold up despite death & it must still be able to sell a car or a sandwich or a war no matter how many grains of sand it kicked down the tunnel of the hourglass & it must be able to play in a market where two people trace entire futures out of each other with a cascade of stolen glances. What backstory, what suffering are you willing to make your soundtrack while pulling a zipper south or hiding a condom inside of a hotel bible. Shout out never to my sins themselves, but always to the child they made me when I was consumed by them. Shout out to the names of boys I wish were never born & how I’ve held each name in my pocket & walked to the water’s edge.
HOW CAN BLACK PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT FLOWERS AT A TIME LIKE THIS
i maybe should have mentioned before this cruel unfurling began:
i only believe in god so that i might have someone else to task
with the blistered fingers & the trench of guilt they are responsible for
placing in the direct center of any room where you desire
a shrinking of the distance between us. but it has been said
that the first carnation bloomed from a tear of the virgin
mary, which fell while jesus carried the cross with blood
streaming into his eyes. this is the part about a mother’s
love. how i wore a carnation at the tip of a suit jacket on a night
a mother fought back tears & begged me not to do her daughter
wrong. & so here, let’s make a deal. bring to me your palms
overflowing with the production of your most intemperate
anguish & i promise there is no target i will not stand in front of
for you. there is no wood that could fashion a cross to hold me.
LOVE YOUR NIGGAS
I am again considering how I sit inside of the space between two gs
as I did when the officer thumbed the handle of his weapon & asked
what you boys doing out so late one night on Livingston while the skin
of me & two of my niggas hushed the brightness of the streetlights
& we were old enough boys to know when someone wasn’t actually
calling us boys & look at how these fools put dancing shoes on all that language
like my niggas ain’t write the book & then have the book stolen & then
take back whatever pages they could before slipping out a window & what you have
to realize is that fire knows no master beyond whatever hands summoned it &
in virginia the torches sprayed a mist of sparks across the sky & in ohio me &
my niggas threw our hands over a fire & let the flame turn meat brown & cracked
jokes until somebody’s mama got to rolling over in her grave & some niggas might say
to force movement out of the dead is another way to keep the ancestors close & so
I sin & I sin & I sin & I know & I hope when I die there are some niggas
still kicking it & willing to yell something heavy & improper about my living so that I too
may know what it is to roll over & to roll up on a nigga is another type of intimacy
& once, we rolled up on some niggas over a card game or over some weed or over
loneliness & I guess loneliness is another type of debt & there is no cure for the ache
of living like running with some niggas who might actually get your ass killed & speaking
of absence I am considering how the space between the two gs is where we might congregate
those who love us & those who want to see us dead. oh, how we’v
e both found ourselves
wedded to the way the g sits in the back of the throat for a swift moment before tumbling
down the tongue & out of a car window in a town where you might be far away from your niggas &
I am wondering if this is the common ground I have been hearing so much about. It seems I love
my gs as you do, executioner. & what a tool this is for both of us. the way one can wrap their fingers
around the letter’s open mouth & use its bottom to dig a grave. during the q&a, the old black
woman
who could be my kin in the way that anyone who has outlived my kin could be my kin asks me
what I think about putting the word nigga in my poems & in another voice, she is asking if I know
who had to die for me to be here with this ungrateful tongue & who am I to curate the small space between love & violence & I think of this when I say I love you nigga & slap a hand so hard that the blood vibrates underneath my palm for hours. I want the ghost of every type of love I have for my niggas to echo for days like these, where it is raining in a city & I make mirrors out of every surface so that I am both me & all my niggas. & I am considering the g again. all my gs done dirt & some have become it. my gs wish to be made into ash upon their leaving but we bury my gs anyway. my niggas ain’t ones to miss a chance to get fly & a funeral will do if nothing else will. god grant me a good grave in your gracious ground. let someone else be kept awake at night by the sound
of my body moving the earth in the name of my niggas & all of their breathing & iridescent sins.
A POEM IN WHICH I NAME THE BIRD
that circled above our heads in the leveled wheat field off route 39
where you wore white pants & upon the threshed wheat laid, as the border
between us, a quilt that once sprung from the fingers of your mother’s mother
& that which will one day cover our bodies & to mask the sun,
there were two wings & I know the work of the poet is to say bird
or to say wings & not speak of their lineage but if I tell you that as a boy
on my grandmother’s lap, we pointed to the sky at dusk & yelled the names of what cut
through the fat clouds on the way to somewhere south of the season we reckoned
with & if I tell you that once, the albatross stretched itself over the project rooftop
& the land was black but for the snow that fell for six whole months & there were no funerals
& everyone stayed inside with someone who kept them warm
& if I tell you all of this, lover I am reaching across the aching landscape to pull
close, then you must believe that in the wheat field, when we were together,
I knew well what could eclipse the burning
or I knew well what would give the blessing of shade,
a darkness over anything trying to take us from each other
HOW CAN BLACK PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT FLOWERS AT A TIME LIKE THIS
I knew not by the way I watched the cardinal kiss
the sticky neck of the ash tree from my window,
which had yet to become our window on a morning I
did not wake you due to how the time bends
forward around the parts of a country that keeps us
apart & I suppose I should have known by this but did not.
how, between us, I have always been the one able to see the future
& have still loved you in every version of it & I should have known
by you in the car & singing with the windows up & the highway’s growl
sharp enough to drown out the lift of your voice. how you’d get a lyric wrong
& in my head, I rewrote the song to whatever you had newly determined
it to be & I did not know by how you rolled over right as the cardinal—covered
in the ruins of its labor—drifted away, the tree newly naked & stripped to
its barest layer. I only knew when thinking of Gram Parsons
& how a suit was sewn for him when he was 21 & on the suit there were bursts of red
poppy flowers & how the resin from the pod of the poppy makes morphine possible
& how Gram Parsons sat underneath a dark sky at Joshua Tree
when he was 26 & how he had been clean for months but wanted to see the stars
puff out their round cheeks over the sand that, in the darkness, must have looked like pearls
& I do not need to tell you that he did not survive the night, or the morphine
injected into him & to adorn yourself in the tools of your eventual undoing is not by itself
romance & to wear your demise across your own shoulders is not romance.
but, like the poppy, I have become something more dangerous than I was once
& this is how I have learned my heart’s worst fears.
each small misery could be something that takes us away from each other.
I knew this way, too. I have dreams about planes crashing & houses on fire
& in the dream I am both the watcher & the sufferer. it can be said that this is love. to
imagine all of the worst separations. forgive me. I am being too literal again,
which all my most attractive friends say is not romantic. let me try something
else. love is not the drug itself but is the fluorescent palm that splits the earth
in the name of its blooming. not the drug, but the object so beautiful it demands
to be stitched into something that the body can consume.
or, here. what I meant to say when I could not bring myself to wake you.
I imagine the cardinal tears away the layers of that which holds it up to ensure everything
underneath is real. you leave and atop my sink a makeup remover holds a memory of
you & the toothbrush dripping the small pond into a contour of porcelain
holds a memory of you & the mug on the table with the stain of lipstick shaped
like the crescent of a blood moon holds a memory of you & I am sorry I couldn’t do this
without talking about the dead & the songs they wrote. Gram Parsons had his body
set on fire at Joshua Tree & today people say the ashes still blow into their hair
& their eyes & god, what a miracle. all I have been trying to say is this:
may even the residue of our love find a curve of wind to dance an echo into.
THE GHOST OF MARVIN GAYE SITS INSIDE THE SHELL OF NIKOLA TESLA’S MACHINE AND BUILDS HIMSELF A PROPER COFFIN
shit where I’m from all you had
to do to make a man
disappear
was give him the love of a good woman
and a little temptation from a bad one
and that ain’t a trick
of nothing except two
stars snapping their fingers
together at the right rhythm
and before you know it,
everybody gonna find themselves
behind a new curtain.
The first funeral is when you sweat
through a suit on stage and the women don’t even bother
screaming. Everything that comes after is just waiting.
I seen the future too once and wasn’t nothin’ there
except a trail of broken hearts calling me daddy.
I seen progress and all I got is these empty rooms. Don’t let
all that begging fool you, baby. I didn’t never want forgiveness
or any type of heaven that didn’t wash off with a sunrise.
I imagine in a field somewhere all the parts of myself I left behind
writhing themselves back together. And that’s the trick.
You make yourself a god to someone new
every night and then before you know it, you can write
your own bible. I was building a grave this whole time and you all
were too drunk on the howling of naked
A Fortune for Your Disaster Page 5