in our sleep because once or several times
an officer placed his finger an inch into my heart
and told me to get my black ass off the field
a block from our new home. I didn’t dream
of much else. If his hands were on fire
or if he bellowed my not-name in swirling smoke,
maybe I would’ve felt at home pooling at his feet.
Which is funny since a lot of black boys
disappeared over the years, some came back
with scars, some never came back
at all, but so few were lost to fire.
BATTLE OF VERSAILLES
The park opened and it was good
and the white folks came and it was
still good and the white folks brought
their dogs and the kids could no longer
run free through the fields and the kids
could no longer play soccer for fear
of stepping in dog shit and we thought
well this is easy they must go the dogs
I mean but the city said yes they should go
so they called a meeting to tell them no longer
will your dogs shit in the park and we thought
well this is easy until it was announced that
a dog park would be built too and we thought
well that’s unexpected but we too have
wanted to be given a field and nothing but
options we too have begged for a sanctuary
where the leather is unclamped from our necks
so we thought cool a new dog park would be cool
until we saw that we were the new dog park
except they still called it a park and no one ever
cleans up the dog shit and no one ever forgets
the first time a dog broke free of a leash or an
owner’s attention and saw you as a new opportunity
BEFORE: GOOD NEIGHBORS
Dear Neighbors, as I rise before your sun, running
past your homes on my morning penance, knowing
every break in the sidewalk, knowing where you
have hidden dawn for another hour, know
that I no longer come in peace as much as I have
been here for some age, when frost was writing her
name on our cars and mailboxes and before that,
when you left your leaves for the animals to nest
under, I know what it means to fall, not as a single
piece, but a collective scatter, where my remains are
given to wind and crunched underfoot, if you ever
wondered, we always end in the street, before
giving up on being whole, yes, you’ve seen my
labored breath on the second mile, perhaps your
lights are motion-sensored or you were waiting for
me, your cat no longer flinches from my path, and I
think what it must mean to see something that can
absolutely ruin you and not be compelled to move
from its steps, maybe I am a harmless creature
now, maybe you will never need to call the police
on me again for morning jogs, where I must have
been running from something and I was,
every day is a half-flung benediction, but I jogged
with my daughter, and you remarked she must be two years
older than she actually is, and I knew the sun was
still setting, I knew the night had other designs on
our bodies, you should see the claws I grow before
a hunt, you should see the fur and the teeth and the
way a doe gives me its last breath, this is why I rise
so early to run now, when the crickets are awake
and verbose with song, I hear them because I am
them like any good myth, heard in my most known
form, a renewable fable and never truly seen.
AFTER: GOOD NEIGHBORS
The last white family
moved from our street
the quiet family who never
had company who never
threw parties or occupied
the whole block with other
white people’s cars they
were here before us but not
before the new us sometimes
you could catch him shirtless
Jesus with no spear cutting
the front lawn or her still
thin as inheritance trimming
the growth that would black
out the whole house if she
ever let it every new moon
I’d see her finishing a jog
especially after the baby
came about two years
ahead of our own
and once for the first time
they came to our door
and asked if we would buy
some Girl Scout cookies
but I froze and didn’t say
sure come in and didn’t
say my daughter is also
selling cookies this year
and didn’t say I noticed
you never have any yard
signs during the election
years and didn’t ask what
their names were or what
was the neighborhood
like before we tumbled
from a more pitiful heaven
but I instead said no thank you
and good luck because
I have been forged to deal
with the arrow of starvation
the billy club I have been
trained to pry the talons
squeezing a bellow from
my throat but I am still
new at being invisible
and then suddenly not
I am still learning my hands to be
as still as an old pond
I am still learning
to let myself be dug up
again by someone
anyone for the first time
for the first time there are
no white people on the street
every silo filled with someone
who doesn’t know if they
belong here or not I suppose
there’s something legend
in all of that I suppose once
there were neighborhoods
that had white people in each
home and then they didn’t
what became of them where
did they move to and what does it
mean if they just moved again from
our street in the dead of night
without so much as a no
thank you or good luck
SOCIAL EXPERIMENT IN WHICH I AM THE [BEAR]
At the dinner party
I didn’t want to attend
because these people
are from work, meaning
[overtime] without pay,
and one woman, newish
person in old money, ring
on her hand that could
lift a family out of the mud, says [boy]
I didn’t know you were
this funny, I didn’t know
you were a troubadour, a silk rousting
my ears and of course I am
paraphrasing because she can’t
really talk like me, a [writer] and all
except when she flexes and says
And I heard you write
poetry too, my [worship] you aren’t
intimidating
at all, are you?
you’re as ursine as they come
and if you think
she didn’t really say “ursine,”
then you’ve never
seen a hunter try to aim
straight with one hand
while they offered
the forest’s gifts with the other,
and if you think I didn’t know
&nb
sp; she thought I was once
a great beast neutered down
to [civility] then
you haven’t attended enough
dinner parties, and I wish
I had relevant facts about [bears],
how we are one of the
few mammals that can see
in color, how we can be
vegetarians or carnivorous,
how even a shaved polar
bear is still black, but this time
I just laugh low
and hollow like a stolen growl,
I am already
on my hind legs after all, already
talk with my paws wide
as a preservation, my voice
shakes the leaves even
when I don’t plan on it, our lineage
traces back generations, but once
you’ve assimilated, who’s to tell
when you were [captured]?
Who’s to argue where the bear ends
and the circus begins?
There’s a world between
learning the song of one’s claws
against a new throat
and performing tricks
for anyone who bought
a ticket, but I did wash the mud
from my fingernails before
I arrived—I’m still
laughing, by the way, still
hoarding my teeth deeper
within me, I am a [library]
full of the times I yanked
something apart and the times
I went hungry
and the times I let my hair grow
and grow and grow
until I was a snarl of a thing
and I ate everything
the party could offer me,
like I could never
become full
CORIOLIS EFFECT
The email went out to the whole
building, apologizing that they were
replacing the new splash guards
on the urinals. They were doing the opposite
of their intended purpose. My coworker asks
why I am laughing and I stumble through
explaining how splash guards never seemed
necessary, at least not the way I was taught
to hold my body. I hear myself say “taught,”
but I don’t know if that is true. Maybe memory
has frozen me. Sometimes, I am
as pristine as a monument. Eventually, I am
explaining the purest techniques and how
I have tamed the curve of the urinal to my
submission, surely sounding like a sniper explaining
the Coriolis effect—my coworker, a cylinder
of amusement, his pale face now autumn and apt
to burst, as he swerves his hips in the most
unflattering reenactment, coughs his contribution:
If my grandfather were alive, he’d be amazed how
soft we’ve become. I want to join his choir. I know
the song even if my pitch needs work. We are kin
now, in this fabling, but my grandfather, bladder
full of colored water, was arrested for relieving
himself in the company of the wrong gods. I don’t say
this, because I am still laughing harder now
for the sake of the pageant. And I should feel
bad, imagining what my grandfather would
say if he could see me, cackling with the jackals
but he got tired and died when I was a boy anyway.
TRESPASS
I catch the lines / of his trunk / he places both hands
upon the fence / the pull / sinew arms / shoulders
rotate propel him / lands soft / the morning wet
grass / I was mowing today / will remember his
footprints / he is a sapling / arms swing low willows
I have no / trees in the backyard / except when he
or another sprout / uproot themselves / when I was
a young trespass / fences were too / much trouble
once we heard / about a kid / west side electrocuted
so fuck (metal) / borders / we listened for dogs
no motion / sensors in the old hood / my father told
me no more / cutting yards / in the suburbs
thought he was / trying to assimilate / be loved
then a man / shotgun ready to claim me / I get it
now today I / muster Come on fam / to the boy
migrating / the yard I own / he shrugs
barely quickens / his shoulders say / I know man I
know but / what are you really / gonna do about it?
INHERITANCE
Along my temple is the vanishing point.
Sniper shot sweet. I tried to trim my beard
before, misjudging the angles that border my lips.
My barber snickered when he saw.
I don’t know why you
do yourself harm, then pay me to fix you. I would
laugh, but he’s holding my jaw
like something he lost.
The world looks different when you have aged
out of polite disagreement. I carry my grandfather
to every river I have yet to cross. I have pressed
cocoa butter into my hands until they are no longer
my hands. I don’t belong to anything that hasn’t
died at least once, so mark me like the promise
you are conflicted about. I have risen from stronger
lies, Homeric reckoning, storm
who swallowed much.
I sat in his chair because I don’t always know
myself, where I come together, where I can be
cut. He rotates me like a small planet, checking
me for stubbornness, claiming my new moons.
When I meet my father later, he rubs at the years
of his empty chin, staring at his son, smoke
curling from my new face. Sometimes he snickers,
sometimes he just stares. Sometimes I imagine him
thinking, I don’t know why you.
VACANTS
We moved in before
the rebound, when the homes
were still cheap. Had our pick
of the vacants. Ghosts canvassed
the neighborhood until we
gentrified the departed. I would
say our hood carelessly, we didn’t
want for much out loud. It’s so brown
here, my mother would say.
Everyone had kids, and then so
did we. We fought over who
had the greenest lawn, removed our shirts
during July swelters. Our daughter met
the twins up the block. Then the other black
girls who were a year ahead. The neighbors
would walk their dogs, carrying grocery bags,
stopped to let our atomic girl pet them.
When the fall came again, we saw the couple
across the street rake their leaves, so then
we combed our lawn, and the folks next
to us followed. And God said it was
good. The woman two houses down
argued with a new boyfriend,
and someone new must have called the cops.
The lights stained our windows. I had
forgotten the last time I was threatened.
Naïve boy in my house of straw. I had
forgotten the last time I was called
something I no longer was. Was called
something I never was. Another cruiser
entered the night, and then they took
everyone out of the house. In the spring,
the house was still haunted. The city
planted trees in front of most of the homes.
Ours died because we never watered it.
We didn’t know who it really belonged to.
AT FORTY-SIX DEGREES FAHRENHEIT SOMEBODY BREAKS OUT THE GRILL
Gotta move the cars a little farther
down the driveway, grill brush ready
we never put you away dirty, never
know when we might need you again
meat unwrapped, flattened between
a sinner’s palms, sure it’s prayer today
fingers spread out like a plantation
but the patties get unequivocal love
hope Gigi ain’t left for church yet
who else we trust with the macaroni on
short notice, the kids mix a little till
an adult arrives, you have to have failed
something to get credit for the pastas
and the cornbread usually from scratch
but the temperature just went up and we
didn’t have time to prepare, so someone’s
auntie gonna do the best they can, might
be her husband (or roommate of eighteen
years and four children) out there working
the grill, too cold to be out under a one-eyed
sun and not be at the grill, but he making love
out there, safest place in a storm is the eye
and you can watch him not flinch, even when
the hawk catch hold of his shirt, trying to pull
him away like the week before when he was
doing some shit he know he had no business doing
he asks for some plates and the new tongs they got
before the summer laid itself down like the barber
we hit every other Tuesday because he stay closed
on Mondays and we were just wearing coats
zipped up to our necks yesterday, I covered
my head with a hoodie, even when we saw
the cruiser doing the rounds because it was cold
enough to risk a malfunctioning body cam over
the elements kind of cold, stomp my feet when I get
in the house even though there’s no snow to shake
loose kind of cold, but today the temperature
got all the way up to forty-six degrees
and nobody gonna pull themselves from hell
to our world and call it heaven but what we know
is that today it was warmer than the icy stare
of yesterday and black folks ain’t never ask this
country for nothing except the promise that
shit will improve from yesterday, so we feast.
I WILL LOVE YOU MOST WHEN I BARELY REMEMBER ANYTHING
My first two crushes are fifty yards apart
in the same Ohio cemetery. They never knew each other
but now I connect them like a bowstring. I keep
We Inherit What the Fires Left Page 4