for my wife it means I am finally ok
if we don’t try for another child.
PLEDGE TO RAISING A BLACK GIRL
You would’ve thought we set that girl on fire
how she got so cocky, smart as a broken window.
We kept telling people how hard it is to raise a child
who keeps figuring out how to make more trouble
and they just laughed like, wonder where she got
that from? Wasn’t much of a question as much
as politely calling us a problem with a solution
barely worth the effort. Do you know how many
classrooms I either dulled my sharp or dulled
my black until I got tired of being the only
kingdom without its own campaign?
How do you know what you have a taste for
if you’ve been told never to show your teeth?
This time I swaddled her in old blues and new
blues and several choruses I don’t plan on
being present for. The elders want us to raise
girls with a song in their heart, but we only respect
the classics if they respected us, which is why
if you ask me how I’m doing, I say still breathing.
If you ask me how I’ve been, I say less.
Plotting takes a man away from the simple things
like smiling on cue, so I tossed it into a pile
of things she doesn’t need. Can’t be mad at the talk
back because we did teach her to talk shit
even if she ain’t allowed to say that yet.
She still wears all the pink she can claim.
When I say she’s in training, I don’t mean
to take over the world or just this one world
or that the proper lighting is something
you have to pull from the sky itself.
I mean if there’s anything I’m perfect
at, it’s still being alive and maybe that’s worth
passing on, maybe she doesn’t mind reminding
people every day how impossible that is.
INHERITANCE
A car changes lanes so quickly
I forget it is raining, the fatality
this intersection notched last week.
I forget the girl in the back seat,
I forget to signal myself to avoid
a small death or the larger ones.
I forget the Lord long enough
to call them something fit for wreckage.
I can’t remember when my uncles came back
from war because I wasn’t yet alive. I can’t
remember when my uncles came back
from war because they never did. I can’t remember
the last time my father cursed without provocation.
I can’t remember the last time
my father wasn’t provoked.
My yell is a short burst that leaves my throat
a wreckage. The car responds to my whip—
it too forgets the rain to obey me, to save us.
Idiot! I stare out the window, my eyes
hoping to kill a thing it cannot reach. And now
she finally asks, What’s wrong, Daddy?
But I am fury and I don’t want to leave.
I forget the girl in the back seat.
PASSING FOR DAY
This time I’m awake as she,
nimble as mist,
climbs into the bed splitting
the space
between my wife and I separated
by the long
night. It takes
almost no time at all—
the covers retreat
from my shoulder, then are pulled back
up, not quite to where it started,
another rustle of limbs a knee
grazes my back,
tiny fists settle between the valley
of my shoulders and then it is done.
Why would I move now? I dare not
turn to face her, question
the shelter she has chosen. A new silence
is here and I stare out into the morning
as the nest behind me hardens
into old sleep. When the soft snore begins
like a hum,
a subtle prayer laid against my neck, then I know
it is safe to rise. I am late
now, sliding one-quarter of myself into
the dark at a time until I am
indistinguishable among the shapes. Besides,
building a heaven doesn’t mean
you get to stay.
TRESPASS
TURN DOWN FOR NAUGHT
I still fuck with the living,
commuting my soul
from one commitment to the next
burial. I’m not old in the way
that I get bored (I don’t sleep
enough. Some days I’m a hostage,
some days I left myself a key). I’m old
in the way I remember when days
were laid flat: my brain was a web
of need. I hunger and acclimate.
Develop a taste for more. I still hunger
in quiet, I still treat the glowing sky
as an excuse for my wild. My body has widened
into more body. My throat will never recover
from the years of fire I called a smile.
My hands are the same size they were
when I was a teenager, but I can’t gather
as much to my chest. Barrel and full
and the spot where loves laid their tangles,
where everything was going to be ok,
everything was going to be
ok. Have you ever descended into
a bathtub or an ocean, trying to disprove
a baptism? Have you ever been dying of thirst
to discover that you are the drought?
AFTER THE STORM, IT WAS BUSINESS AS USUAL
The summer of my seventeenth year they shot a boy
in the back in Cincinnati. A week later, they
shot another boy everywhere else. The Panthers
showed up. Carried the casket down the church
steps. My friend’s teammate’s mother told us,
If a cop tries to pull you over, just drive
all the way home, he ain’t bold enough
to shoot you in your front yard.
Henry Louis Gates. Ving Rhames.
I’m not famous enough to almost die at the door
I pay for, though I get mistaken for famous black
men all the time. I get mistaken for still here.
I get mistaken for intent. All endangered look alike.
We had a tree in our front yard. After the lightning,
we had half a tree. The backside of its bloom
sanded down by time. We thought we’d have to
uproot it. What is dead continues to die
until everything else is. It is still there
though, leaves falling from one side of its face.
I am thankful for that half of fall. It is still enough for us
to rake, and bury, and collect during the dry season.
I lied about the lightning, or
at least I don’t know
if that’s what fell the tree. I wasn’t there, but I left
out the part about everyone’s garbage cans scattered
far from their homes. I’m not a betting man—
the only thing I can ever put up is myself,
but I would wager the wind brought our tree low.
Invisible and sudden. Like the time a cop appeared
and asked me if I lived at the home I was punching
my garage code into. He could make me
famous with trespass.
HOW TO ASSIMILATE
> Before I could make more
white friends the one
I did have came over
after school to watch
Yo! MTV Raps and I went
into the basement only
to emerge later with my
father’s shotgun
and of course he went
even more white
because this was supposed
to be a joke, the type of shit
thickheaded boys laugh
at until their sides contract
into spasms.
I mean, I laughed
even though I knew it wasn’t
that funny, even when I had
checked the gun for its emptiness
three times over,
I knew he probably
wouldn’t laugh but I was
committed to being the good
son who remembered
my mother collapsing
into a stove after work
and then a couch and then
work again and again
my father retreating below
the house
and sometimes wouldn’t
come up for anything,
even if it was something
he could tear apart
with his teeth. The men at
his job would whittle him
down into a cross until
he believed in it, stringing it
around his own neck,
and when I say
men, I mean white men
because what other kind
is there? And yes, I know watching
my friend spread himself
in fear is a lot to ask of him, hard
to claim mercy for supplying him
with a parachute
if I’m the one pushing
him out of a plane.
I don’t say
that to say he was a jerk
to me or that he deserved
it—it means his parents
got him a Starter jacket
for every team he liked
and I never felt right about
not refusing the one
he handed me down,
the one my father said cost
too much and maybe
he wasn’t talking about
the jacket anyway.
My friend’s parents
accidentally
bought him two of the same,
but the gun, he said that wasn’t
cool and he was right
and I could never really
figure out why I aimed a hollow
threat at my friend except
to say that I probably gave him
something I know so well.
It rubs my back
during slumber,
but his parents
never could afford.
I NEVER GOT OVER TRE GETTING OUT OF DOUGHBOY’S CAR
because Boyz n the Hood was a passage.
The camera aims and everybody wants to say
they’ve seen a dead body until they witness Mrs.
Robinson forget to exclude a name in roll call.
Lord knows we put enough potential into
the ground to make a college of prayers. Please
believe the howls when they’ve replaced a boy’s
greetings. Dear reader, I have worn black and driven
into a night’s percussion looking for something
to empty. I have been at the wheel
of my ending where all the wisdom I will hear
last escaped the throats of dead things.
But I have also been a stained
boy forever rubbing
the blood out of my palms until only someone
else’s remained on them. I have become soft prey
and given to flight where I have replaced my friends
with silence and asked to be left to wander
into the open claws of a moonless lover. And yes,
my father spent godless nights waiting to yell at his
still-alive boy. He had seen sons get in cars
and transports and cruisers and bar-windowed buses
and never return or at least never call home
but mostly, reader, I guess I am almost
always the car itself carrying the bodies
toward the end of things or being left when my toll
is too high. I can only let death ring
out from me for so long until I
start to look like death myself.
I can only suffer the seal
of my doors closing
so many times, so many last rites
before I refuse to open them again.
MY LYFT DRIVER SAYS YOU SHOULDN’T CALL YOUR CHILDREN SMART
& I guess I understand what it means to be named
many things but most often after the worst thing
you survived & I guess humility got a lot of
guys laid in college for being mysterious & I
guess there’s something to be said for being loved for
the downswing and not just the seduction
of your beveled edge & I guess the only difference
between flowers being thrown at your feet or being
thrown on your grave is what you
are expected to do next.
Here is what I know about my unmaking:
My ACT score was higher than the age
of the smartest kid I grew up with ever made it
to. I once spent a night breaking windows
and the moonlight rinsed through them
because what would I do in college anyway?
I was once a beautiful bouquet of new stalks,
but nobody told us what it takes to bloom.
So many of us were pulled up, root and all.
You don’t wait for something to flower if you were
only taught what the ground will take.
INHERITANCE
I am my most imposing during the winter
when the coats are longer and I
levitate over folks who already think
me taller than I actually am
I trained a stride and cadence into myself
the arms move like oars through deep
river the river that demands a toll to cross it
I open doors the minimum necessary
flatten my body through the fissure
illusionist among the yokels watch the large
man captivate then disappear, watch
the shoulders never dip below sea level
my father used to walk this way
in the ways that my father was once my age
at Thanksgiving or Labor Day
he lumbers into the living room to watch
the game a body slowed from a lifetime
at the forge pounding iron into his missing parts
there’s a different molding in the suburbs
where erosion happens away from watchers
I have been told my entirety that I look
like my father and I spent those early years
hiding my hands acting smarter than I
actually was talking my way into fists
when I hear I look like him now I know
it means that the parts I am replacing
have become more obvious
my cheeks a soft and full metal
my crown smooth as a new finish
before the hearing or memory for my tribe
the walk is the first thing to go
the first sign the land has begun to collect
on what was borrowed the feet
then the knees up to the thigh moving
through earth until we have dug
deep enough to cease and lie down
LOOKING OVER MY SHOULDER, SHE DISCOVERS A LYNCHING
In truth it’s not the hanging
that’s hard to explain to a seven-
year
-old who knows what necessitates
a breaking or a blush
to any place the pain called it
she knows what a hanging does
because she’s seen the marks
on my arms older than
her, she’s fallen off a bike
and emerged with a new story
running still wet on her legs
she loves superheroes and the way
they punch someone so hard
their eyes close and remain that
way, it’s not the hanging
love, we all descend
hoping the plunge ends quickly
it’s the easy smiles beneath the falling
of sky, the ornament of an always Christmas,
a picnic made of triumph below a swinging
North Star, yes daughter, you are
right that people celebrating a death
can be a funeral, no I don’t think
they are people in the picture,
yes, your friends
from school, from gymnastics,
Girl Scouts, Build-A-Bear, your
teachers and new teachers
look like the not-people too
no, I don’t think they will
be there at the drop, at the sudden
dismissal of flight, and I won’t
be either, if I pray for anything
it’s to know my length of rope
before you, girl, please know
it’s hard to tell between
one who will anoint the space
between you and the not-people
that pulled your dad from the car
I would wish you luck
but there are more stories about love
than there are those willing
to die for it, there are fish who
will always have a hole in their cheek
because they were almost
worthy of slaughter, tiny thing,
please remember this picture
and the way eyes can track
their next meal and the smiles
are already decaying, already
an archive of failed endings
before they knew that one
day you could see them
ALMOST HILARIOUS
I remember when we moved
to the white neighborhoods
we must have practiced fire
drills in school so much that we
could navigate the hypothetical smoldering
of halls with calm and docile precision.
We would wind our way through
the turns, obey the teachers to safety
with our eyes closed, but not necessarily
We Inherit What the Fires Left Page 3