The Sobbing School
Page 2
the bleeding. This many black bodies deep,
the synonymy between ropes & gunfire is lost
on no one, you assume. You assumed, brother,
that this was your solitary cross, the only anguish
your daughter might actually be spared: the bull’s-eye,
its glare, this hunt you know better than any other algorithm:
subtraction by bullet, our daily negation, how ageless it is,
the laughter too, yes, the grisly surprise
of every birthday past the age of 18,
the music we have yet to invent
for mourning this specific.
Detroit wails in the wake of a shotgun blast
& you do not know how to write
what you can’t imagine the end of.
Why don’t we grieve for women,
for girls, the same way we do
our men, our vanishing boys?
Perhaps it is this body, ever mutable
in its danger, always shifting between target
& terror that demands too much
recognition, this history of sons swinging
& drowned & cut up & caged
that elides revision, leaves no space
for other grief. Genuflected by disbelief,
you spend entire nights alone,
folded into the shape of a mouth,
cursing the limits of strength.
RUN
My mother claims that I began to run
long before I walked or spoke
or wore shoes & she too
is not a man that she should lie.
Thus, if we are willing
to count this creation myth
as admissible evidence, what
conclusions can be drawn
about my own penchant
for leaving, all this slow heat
in my blood, propelling me
like a denouement toward the door?
In seventh grade, Anthony tells me to “run” my pockets & I am only vaguely familiar with the term. His fists, like this new word for truancy, are intruders, thieves come to break the world in half. Final inventory: three dimes & a pack of Winterfresh I bought that morning, my mint-condition, holographic Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card now the property of another boy, his smile a firing squad I will face every day for the next nine weeks. I hate Anthony. Not only for the theft itself, his crime against civility, but for the shame I will wear like a brother’s shirt for years to come, replaying this scene over & over. In the final edits, I surprise the brigand with a left hook to the jaw for good measure, hands still empty apart from a righteous rage at the helm of each wrist, as if Ahab in the storm, praying the bolt strike true & make him holy.
So I have this dream, right? Where it’s the first few minutes before whichever apocalypse option is first to leap off the shelf—
Option A: The boys in blue kill every sick, sad one of us sans myself in a mad dash for department honors.
Option B: The sky cracks open like a green bottle in the freezer, which lays the groundwork for God’s volcanic rage to turn the entire grid to cinders, & I’m just standing there, right, surveying the scene like some bizarre homage to Lewis & Clark, & look up, full of mourning, ignoring every cockroach in earshot singing Motown with scraps of human bone in their mouths, belt out, “Well dammit fellas the fall was hard & swift as wrath, but great while it lasted, yeah? We had a nice little run there, didn’t we?”
STILL LIFE WITH FIRST BEST FRIEND
after Jericho Brown
Danny in the scrum
& his hands are meadowlarks,
their fulvous ascent. Danny after
the fact. Danny listening to you weep,
quiet as this umpteenth L must be
kept. Danny does what all best
friends who growth-spurt first must do.
Danny defends. Danny deflects
classroom heat, the jokes that land like lash
& linger. Danny suspended like twice.
Danny can’t safeguard in absentia. Danny talks
about his daddy same way you do yours
when yours goes phantom. Danny ethics.
Danny don’t go missing. Danny forged in flame.
Danny igneous. Danny obsidian. Danny covert
nerd on black ops mission. Danny Magic cards.
Danny Charizard. Danny still blacker than you
depending on that day’s definition.
Danny Bigger Thomas & Big Bird & Big Pun
in the same bookcase. Danny all-inclusive
literary tradition. Danny claims your block,
its very bricks as kin: you tell him
duty is a dead idea. Danny won’t listen.
Danny principles. Early twenties you talk tough
& Danny gets defensive. You do school, J.
Someone starts problems out here, you call me.
That’s my business. Danny stabbed twice & shot once
& still smooth as a piston. Danny illegible.
Danny family. Nobody else checks in on Dad
when you forget to miss him.
FADE
My childhood fade was so high and well moisturized
I would often tell passersby that it was a black box built
by rogue scientists in case anything in my body
ever crashed again and they needed access to backup
recordings of all my best and most important dreams:
Y’all remember when Wahid fought Jason back
in 4th grade because Jason kept making
all those jokes about Wahid’s little brother
riding the small bus and this man Jason caught
the FADE in front of our entire school?
Y’all remember that? How Wahid just
stood there after, staring at the crater
Jason left in the grass? Like he forgot something?
WHENEVER HEMINGWAY HUMS NIGGER
it feels less like the southpaw cross
your friends foretold, more like fresh talon
sailing across the eye’s tundra.
your neck snaps
back: a black
bow in winter, a black boy in summer.
you register the wound. halfway down the page,
waist-deep in The Sun Also Rises, you admonish
your twenty-first-century fragility. gentle theorist,
your life’s work depends on mastering men
like this, on surviving
that which shames the tongue’s lust
of utterance, demands:
just look at this
and try not to hate
what you can’t make
bleed.
TEACHER’S AIDE
My father showed up to school that day dressed up
as a man with a son with a rage problem; that is, a boy
whom violence—as if rumor, fresh from out of town
—followed everywhere. Ms. Hollinger never mentioned
the more practical elements of this ongoing conflict,
that I fought the other students because I liked my blood
very much & wanted to keep all of it inside of my body
once the playground went feral, as it was wont to do.
From his first day on the new job, my father
would bribe the bullies as only a Casanova of his stature
could, butterscotches & dirty jokes quelling all prior conflict.
The shift was immediate. Now baptized in the flame
of an older man’s beauty, the war on the wise guy
was no more: a cease-fire forged by sheer esteem,
the stuff of corner-store science fiction it was,
this lovely Marine standing watch, half smile
drawing both teachers & seventh-grade girls
to him like lightning to a god of gold.
PRAISE SONG FOR THE TABLE IN THE CAFETERIA WHERE ALL THE BLACK BOYS SAT TOGETHER DURING A BLOCK, LAUGHING TOO LOUDLY
What is this nonpower at the heart of power?
—JACQUES DERRIDA
Thomas was a riot. By which I mean funny
to the point you thought he practiced the same
set of jokes on the bus each morning
with the sole intention of ruining AP Bio,
but also as a gesture toward the chaos
he brought with him when he entered
the room, what his presence stole free in us.
When he walked by, white girls would flicker
their eyes at him like golden apertures, as if
they were trying to copyright his splendor,
or keep his swagger as an exhibit in a museum.
Quiet as it’s kept, the combination of me & Thomas
& Jeremy & Devin & Eddie was the most color
our school had ever let through its doors
in a single year, our collective body both
a kind of shame & a pretty sweet school record
all by itself. All we had was A Block’s release:
Thomas clowning everyone’s clearance-rack running
shoes & lack of game; Devin’s impromptu raps;
Eddie’s impressions; & Jeremy, silent as a marble,
speaking only when he had a gem of a dagger
to drop like a dead bird in the desert, like the day
he called Thomas a corny-ass rich boy
& how from then on I could think of nothing
but the force of the slur as it sailed across
our plates, how selfish it was of Jeremy
to kill the vibe that way. I mean, really,
what’s a biography worth
if your boys won’t let it stretch?
Who in their right mind would want us,
our threadbare lives, without a little legend
to sweeten the frame?
What mattered the miles
between The Hood, its protean
borders, & our actual homes, or the first times
that never happened, or the nicknames
no one called us in real life,
when such warm fiction was shared
among this huddle of strangers
made lifelong friends
by a Scantron’s omniscience,
by our careful parents & their justifiable
fear of the world?
IN DEFENSE OF PASSING
Most of us call it cloaking,
though the academic
term for the practice slides
just as smoothly off
a teenager’s tongue:
holographic deracination.
Within days of wide-scale release,
the Times will hail this device, its
attendant social phenomena
as triumphs of modern technology,
inevitable advance given the speed
of post-racial desire,
how expensive it is
to purge the murk
from an infant’s skin
by most other means.
The machine’s inventor
will make no such claims.
A plainspoken woman, she was.
Stanford grad, white as a lab coat.
Cited her time overseas
as primary inspiration;
all the suffering she’d seen
caste cause. The device came
to her in a lucid dream, this silver ellipse
small enough to wear on the wrist
or lapel. With just one touch
any future you choose could be
yours. Soft, false flesh, draped
like a new lover over your body
& just as clumsily until you work out
the rhythm of it, the slang,
how to maneuver this
cold glass suit, light as it is.
Protest faded in days.
Sky-high pricing kept the cloaks
an upper-class concern for months, years
before poor folks got ahold
of any prototype worth the worry.
Once they did, you would think
they had stolen something worth more
than a date with the quarterback,
or a job interview. You would think
they had killed someone important,
or blown up the moon, the way cops
flooded the slums, clubs in hand,
beating the color off of them.
FLY
Trust, it was not so much that I thought the icon of Michael Jordan’s smooth, triangular flight on the back of my first cousin’s new shoes a proof of God, but rather that I likewise yearned for glory & honor. And so, after thirteen years of living at the lower end of the freshness spectrum, I figured there was no better way to spend a first check: white and red Retro III’s with a triple-XL tall tee to match. Ecko jeans. Size 7⅝ Oakland A’s fitted cap, New Era sticker above the brim shining like a Spanish doubloon. So fly, later that night I would stroll into the party slow as water shifting phase, bathed in strobe light, unfazed as every yet-uncoupled senior-class girl swooned without hesitation or shame, their glances cast like fishermen’s nets through the air above the dance floor, giving musculature to the darkness.
◆
The first time I saw a black patent leather shoe fly across the living room, I knew Mama was nothing to be fooled with, though the lesson did not last long. Up to my senior year at the prep school she spent all the extra cash she hid from Dad on, I was wild as any brown boy with half a head of sense could be, slamming doors and sneaking through windows once the streetlights were already warm. It would be another year before I found the Beretta, or the spare bullets—which, back then, I took to be little more than the broken steel fingers of an elaborate necklace strewn, as if rock salt, throughout the dresser drawer. Let me try this again. Once, my mother gave her life to three great loves: Jehovah, travel, geraniums by the porch. These are not arranged in any meaningful order, depending on what your last great claim would be given the grace of a window in which to speak before it all goes dim. It is only a list. Hear me. My mother, South Bronx–born, state-sponsored gun for hire, threw a shoe across a packed room and hit no one. Not even the boy she bore and taught to walk, now a foot taller than the man she named him after, yelling for minutes on end at no one but her, whom he loves, whom he would give all the blood in his body for.
12 ABSOLUTELY TRUE FACTS ABOUT RICHARD WRIGHT
after e.e.
When Richard Wright was five years old he torched
his mama’s living room curtains just to see cinder blacken
his father’s hands like the insides of a loganberry pie.
Richard Wright was a steel-driving man. Richard Wright
could fly. Richard Wright wrote his last book about lice
& magnolia blossoms & it went viral in Mississippi.
Richard Wright had a zoologist twin sister named Giovanna.
Sadly, her work did not outlive her. Richard Wright outlived
every talking horse he ever met. Richard Wright loved
to hoop. Reputable sources swear he was trash with his left.
Richard Wright was born in a hornet’s nest. In 1975,
he beat Earl “The Pearl” Monroe in a game of H-O-R-S-E.
Took him for seven large that night on a bad bet.
Richard Wright was a code word & a mountain range
& a treble clef. I tell you, Richard Wright could fly!
Old heads say they saw him soar in circa late summer
of ’59, sitting cross-legged & singing gospel
from the saddled back of an inner-city tortoise.
Richard Wright taught us how to forfeit.
Richard Wright was a steel-driving man.
Richard Wright outlived everything he ever built.
Richard Wright built the White House.
Hammered each nail into place
with his unadorned hands.
Richard Wright was a monument
all by himself. Richard Wright
was a soda can.
CLENCH
Retire whom? I am the unrestrained fleet
of bone that cancels your shame.
The deadliest squadron of five.
Every time this cannonball dives
into airborne thrust it is always
all over, playboy,
& don’t you forget it.
Before pen or pot handle
unlearned you the splendor of blood,
I taught bully’s breath to bow,
plowed your father’s truancy
into that punk’s front teeth
like a rust
darting through snow.
C’mon, now.
Who knows you better
than the black of your hand?
Who held you down
when the whole world went
spaghetti western & you
were six bullets short of a coffin’s kiss?
Exactly.
Now look at you.
All emotional,
as if there was ever a choice.
As if all this glory
was up for discussion.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS PERIPLANETA AMERICANA
Unnatural nasty.
Inimitable mirror.
Latchkey kid lyric
condition of possibility
light-years before blocksong
seep in or creep over crooked
pew of glass teeth. Both mainstream
science & neighborhood lore afford me
life after aftermath is afterthought. I am always