We Inherit What the Fires Left
Page 5
memories like a modeled city, the tallest buildings
erecting themselves between my shoulders. I have
good neighborhoods and blocks that marked me.
I have fires that threaten to burn everything. There
is a phenomenon called “chunking” where
we individualize memories when we’re younger
& group them together as we get older.
Time doesn’t fly when you are having fun, time
flies when you begin to remember less of it.
I drop my daughter off at school. An officer pulls
me out of my car as the sun goes down. Something
died in between. When aging, the only thing
that becomes agile is time. I now know why
the Babylonians invented days of the week: their worst
day never ending scared them to death.
NAKED WHITE MEN MAKE CONVERSATION WITH ME IN THE GYM LOCKER ROOM
Most of my people have a story
about almost drowning, maybe
because they fell into a body
that did not love them, maybe
because someone pushed them.
The men ask me how I’m doing,
which means, What has failed
to claim you so far? I draw a circle
with my eyes on a point behind them.
No, it’s not a bull’s-eye. No, I’ve never
shot anything that was still moving.
I don’t have a story about drowning.
I have swallowed several floods.
I am nothing
if not terrified of puncture. If I am
to storm, let me not see the break
that lets me fall.
He is still wet as slaughter,
toweling away the shower
as he tastes each word:
Did you get a good workout
in today? How long
you been at it? I need to be more like you.
I’ve never seen my daddy
swim, but Lord knows that man
can take on water. There is a picture
of him in a creek
up to his shins in brownish ripples,
runoff from a river he was told he was
too dark to play in.
Is it shame that makes an automaton
of me? A fast-twitch response?
Does being a quick dresser
make me any less the auction?
Would I ever be so exposed
with my neck within
a snare’s reach?
I can see the teeth
of an ocean without
entering its mouth.
I can feel the downpour
of an uncovered man even
when I close my eyes,
even after I have found home
and locked all the doors.
Most of my people have a story
about almost drowning. They
keep the water in their lungs
because someone has to pay
for the trespass.
NIGHTMARE COURT
Two weeks
before Ty dis-
appeared into
the frozen dark
of the East
Side, he held my
friend over
the railing
of the bridge that
stretched across
I-77 like a pearl
blade capable
of cutting daylight.
He didn’t have
an evil laugh
or a love to retreat to
but his hands
were large as
forgiveness
even when
he held my chest
and all its simple
horses away
as my friend
finally surrendered
his wallet.
My friend cried
harder
when his mom
ignored his yelping
and called the cops
anyway. I guess
what I’m saying is
that I don’t miss
Ty and I don’t
know what moons
he has left to visit,
but I know what it
feels like to be rid
of the monster
and still fear
the sword
that slayed it.
HE SAYS MY BLOOD PRESSURE IS EXCELLENT SO DEATH IS WASTED ON ME
I tell my doctor that my knee
makes house-settling noises
when I run and my doctor says,
You’re 40, so stop running.
I could have claimed
so many times by now
my knee ain’t got enough
bass in its voice to stop me.
I remember. I’ve been smoke.
A car crash, a boy broken into
several eulogies, and somebody
saw a gun supposedly, but we
always ran before we could
commit anything to nightmare.
A CrossFit class at six means I’ll be
driving home at night, full of my
own survival, the quickest way
home, hoping no cop finds me
under such a perfect moon. I’m just
trying to see my girls
again, pray the black of the ending
day can tell when I’m joking—
I didn’t really mean that I just want
this day to be over, I was just trying
to squeeze out ten more sit-ups.
The punch line is always
that we’re training in case of
the apocalypse or the race war
or any scenario we pretend isn’t
already happening. But what does
“apocalypse” really mean? My grandparents
been dead. Zell still
in prison, they killed Bobby over
a turn signal. Teri flinches every
time the beat drops or a man says
her name like a lost city. Curt was
a boy just waiting to go pro and then
he was a white cross along the highway.
By the time I learned the term
“extinction level event,” the fields
had already been torched. I can’t
skip the last set—I sit for too long
and the future gets bored with me.
You know what they say about sharks?
I’m more concerned with animals
that aren’t hunted. If I say I need a new
workout, I’m asking which animal
is the hardest to kill. What beast
is so evolved they just aren’t worth
the trouble?
AGING OUT OF SOMEONE ELSE’S DREAM
EVERY BLACK KID OVER 30 HAS A STORY ABOUT PICKING THEIR OWN SWITCH
Even if it was a belt, really. Even if their hood
didn’t have trees. Nobody wants to believe
any bullet fired around them wasn’t meant
for them if they survive it. If your God is truly
merciful, may you be blessed with every scar.
Suffered the diminished hearing in your left ear from
the summer Wu-Tang took you hostage. You know
the world wants to hollow you out because you
loved someone that was once your age and now
they no longer have an age. You don’t know shit
about flowers, but you remember the auntie that
bloomed once a year when the cops would finally
take her husband and his hands to jail for a week.
Elders are the only folks who take cruises because
they took a lifetime to get over crossing that much
water. If you are to keep religion, let the thin trees
with air-whip branches, but nothing tall enough
to swing from, be the totem.
Let the man that
blocked your exit remain one man and not
every man that moves into a vacancy on your street.
Everyone has an idea of what their savior’s face
looks like but never wonders what the bastard
is holding behind his back. You haven’t been right
since your high school teacher told you to stop
showing off in class. Now you get nauseous
when your daughter aces her spelling test.
When you were younger, your father overheard you
talking to your white friends and told you
code-switching will kill you. You remembered
the day he took you
to work with him
and you offered back to him,
you first.
IMPACTED
My father has all of his teeth, even now
after he lost people, lost a childhood
to the sixties, lost blood above his brow,
lost time, memory, recalled what he could.
The smile remains, mostly blood in blood out,
mostly weathered by nightmare or waking,
mostly invisible, mostly in doubt.
Almost whisper, almost ripe for taking.
Full row of survival across the top.
Solid line of succession receding
into himself, unseen, a small Aesop
of still-here gospel, church of weeding.
So much taken, so hammered till softened.
Hard to steal what is hid and forgotten.
Hard to steal what is hid and forgotten
if you don’t care enough to lock away
a boy, or man who takes his downtrodden
smiles for granted. I, a plucked-clean bouquet.
When they say permanent, they mean until
you are ready to part or abandon
the practice of staying. I cannot fill
a smile like before, a fractured enchantment.
I acted like I didn’t need it, so they took
a molar out of my head and never
replaced it. I am my father now, shook
free of perfect, jackknife to his tether.
My inheritance cracked apart before
I ever cursed the kingdom’s successor.
Before I cursed the kingdom’s successor
I gave smiles away like paper-cut teases—
to know me was to survive a Cheshire
secret and worship new altarpieces.
Surely I have loved enough in the rain
to pass on something to a child that won’t
come apart in someone’s hands. What is pain
if not a prayer that never left the throat?
You can bribe a target or child with smiles
as long as it is united and not
a wall of past lives with aisles
of almost and not yet and what you wrought.
Maybe the dentist saw too much of me
in my daughter’s mouth. Cutting me out, a new free.
In her mouth, cutting me out. Is a new freedom
the day you recognize gifts then cleave
them from your body? If he is less than his sum,
bury a father before he can leave.
They said our girl’s teeth were too impacted.
Better to carve, root, excavate. Blood wells
in any cave where magic was held captive,
bequeathed or lashed into when all fails.
I gave her the teeth and the rot that took
over, the whistle through all her empty,
a new smile that isn’t a smile, a look
too close to the one a man once lent me.
And later, which is always, I held her,
wounds closing, looking less like her father.
INHERITANCE
Though they wilt as well let us
forget about trees for a moment
the sometimes-tended garden
bushes with modest thorns
pricked-proven fingers with love for the grasp
and pretend that blackness were a shrub
once cured ready for the earth fresh start little black
flex like you don’t owe anyone a
language
or a service If I knew
the dirt would hold me like a secret
I might
not fear
its embrace I may not love like my great-
grandfather did or his great-grand before him
when there seemed
to be more use
for it but I know what it feels like to
leave something behind
that occupies so much of your body I mean
all those teachers are in the ground now
well before
they planned and I asked my mother if anyone
in our family opted for cremation
and she never answered but I knew from the way
her breath left her throat where no language
followed that we probably put our black in
the earth because at least
we know the ground ain’t supposed
to be on fire too.
WILDERNESS
What began as the garden became the overgrowth
of everything; crabgrass, dandelions sprouting
under the swing set, folia pushing
through the mulch.
I have not trimmed the fence line,
as the days of August have claimed me too,
so the stalks erect themselves like monuments,
the morning’s wet dangling high above the ground
until the sun takes what it always takes.
I know the frost will come
eventually, though later each year and I will
no longer collect the clipped lawn or
the blown-off heads
of weeds into brown bags. Like the wild growing
around the fence posts and the porch steps,
I just want to be left—extending
until I topple toward the ground, slow enough
to see it coming until I can bury
myself from where I began
or mercy finds my legs and takes them
from under me.
SACRIFICIAL
I shave my own head now
because I am old in the way
that I have survived enough.
The hum, heat, schism against
my scalp, between my fingers,
in my killing hand. I know
the curve of my ceiling like no
one else could. A neck that no longer
needs to remember to prop the head.
I run my fingers back and feel the shy
needles under my nails. The shaved
country and lands held close
by fire. I trespass against daily.
Which doesn’t mean that I don’t need
the barbershop. I still miss the good
violence of someone else’s blade.
How my head fits cradled
in an artist’s grasp, how we both
decided how much of me is worth
keeping and how much
I can afford to give.
MATRIARCH
It is important where
the food came from, but now
the ant carries it in her mouth
and this is a constant. Silently
she moves across a leaf
that has paled from the sun,
the thick vein of the fall
looks like an obstacle, but it is
not. She was built for this, after all,
stronger than she should be.
The world asks so much
from the branch, not the leaf,
to another leaf of an
other
fallen branch, she has tired
of the ground and finds a tree
to scale. She does not need
to fly. She can make the climb
without the sky deceiving her.
Usually, they are famous in colonies
but this one scavenges alone, hardly
seen unless you know to look.
She disappears
behind some loose bark, somewhere
the tree keeps hidden away
from eyes and wind, maybe
from others. Maybe from the sharp
way a season perishes. The tree is
old, upright in the yard, its branches bare
and incapable of shielding
my mother’s home. It has been weeks
since I have been here, but my mother
will claim it as months. She isn’t wrong.
I’m late for dinner, but still the first
to arrive.
FENCES
Between the fences grows everything
hard to reach. Full of thorn twisting
through the gaps of the planks, some
pricking the wood while the stem
continues skyward, caught
on other weeds. Dew collects
on the stiffened leaves, translucent
then purple like its host. There are
more of them when unbothered,
burning the soil with more community
until the yard is a harvest
of trespass creeping farther into
the land, where the child does hand-
stands and vaults. This is where
we lose our nerve. A child’s palm
drags itself across the natural scythe
of a rock. Shears search out
the necks at a distance, shortening
potential, no ambition of precision
falling onto the grass, trying to spread
its own remains before the pyre,
the slickness of morning now gone,
an evening’s breath upon it,
a long-deserved exhale. And now, in its final
hours, the last secret, truant
with discovery. An animal scurries
under the rails from a well-dug-out
and thorned reprieve.
CARBON DATING
In the old neighborhood we skipped
stones across the lake’s face,
found smooth or flat volunteers where time
had done its lashing just to release
them across the water. The goal was
to see how far we could travel
without drowning, we all
sunk eventually. We all wake