We Inherit What the Fires Left

by William Evans

  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