A Fortune for Your Disaster

by Hanif Abdurraqib

  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