forefront of family fight, why Ma sling Pop
side-eye over supper five nights out of seven
on a good week. I put the pest in pestilence.
The silence too. My nondescript haunting
be quiet as a fist & damn near immortal.
& ain’t that some kind of perverse
irony: our ubiquity in this
crumbling kitchenette,
the sheer pluck
of indestructible
vermin eons older
than the human
eye, its irrelevant
contempt?
ON STUPIDITY
In the first instance, we might say the word stupid is a tiger the black child does or does not outrun from birth. The data bears this out, though we can linger with the following image if we want our claim to be death-proof: by the time Ms. Hollinger told my father I would never function in a classroom, I held as many years as a handgun’s worth of ammo in my body. The term function is of singular import here. Not only as an allusion to the mechanical—which is to say, grade school as the Industrial Revolution’s unclaimed offspring—but also its broader implications for the social field: the function as a math problem involving one, two, as many unknowns as you can fit into a fist. Still, it was clear that I was not what most would call stupid, though there was certainly something stupid-esque about my refusal of Ms. Hollinger’s most basic orders: coloring when it was time for naps, my index finger sketching narwhals onto the air as she droned over ABC’s: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; but I am not so certain about the universe.” That’s Einstein. Seriously. Which leads me to believe that what Ms. Hollinger intended was not as vile or violent as it first seemed. Perhaps what she meant to say was not so apocalyptic at all, but her attempt at gluing language to the ineffable, not unlike how we give human names to tropical storms, or look at the stars and say the word stars, like our mouths are big enough to capture all of the light at once.
FIRST DATE
I take my cue from the blizzard
making a name for itself outside
the café window: give myself away
in shards. First, each hour spent
on the threshing floor, so hungry
for the force of the Lord
there were days I dared not move, poring
over ancient law until the walls bled.
Then, the flashing image of Princeton
in 1856, every slave a young man brings
to campus dressed in black, an extra pair
of hands to mend the trousers, or brush
his hair before bed. Then my father scaling
the side of our house with no ladder, too poor
to call the locksmith. Then the blond man
on the A train last month, his broken nose turning
each fist into a bolt of red silk. Then my father again,
but smaller this time. This time no one pities him.
He is prettier than everyone else on the elevator.
My mother still jokes about catching him catching
himself in the switchboard’s reflection, as if an Afroed
Narcissus seconds before the fall, all thirty-two teeth
shining bright as Lucifer’s waistcoat.
VARIATION ON THE FATHER AS NARCISSUS1
FRESH
I wasn’t being fresh when I told
my father his word was good
as fish grease in a heatless house
as far as Mama or I was concerned.
So I don’t know what cut him clean,
what tensed each arm
or gave his precious temper
flight. I never say the right
thing. All my rebuttals land
awkwardly, as if
they started dying
on the way down.
Back in his day Pop was the freshest dude this side of the BK Bridge, & the runner-up wasn’t close enough to make out the color of his socks, you dig? He used to rock these three-piece polyester suits that made him look like a redwood come alive just to stunt. Story goes, Mama saw him in a club downtown & his rendition of the hustle was so smooth she got stuck in his glow for like a whole minute before the bridge of the song gave her body back to itself. Or maybe it was the other way. Maybe Mama was both the dance floor & the light that called it forth. Maybe Pop never danced, but was so lovely Mama released her hold on the room for like three or four whole minutes, just to show the charmer how to move as if the heat was its own currency: the kind of danger you could pay rent with.
The freshest memory I have
of my father takes place
in an IHOP in Washington
Heights & he is eating eggs,
describing my diction
as if it were on display,
floating in a bulletproof box:
The way all those words
come out of your head, man.
It’s amazing. It’s like a book
or something.
THE ORDER OF THINGS
The boxing gym was across the street.
Its blue floor was soft and dull.
The coach was kind enough.
His name was Ralph. His shirt was clean
and nonspecific, the inverse of my moth-worn
Syracuse lacrosse sweatshirt.
The first class would be free.
The gym was across the street.
From my apartment, I mean.
The five-floor walk-up full of art
students and great-aunts
with names that ring like elegies.
I live next door to a Planet
Fitness full of shiny people.
My arms are smooth as shellfish.
There is no time like the present to pray
for difference. This is how the hunted persist.
◆
Christina and her friends threw me
up against the fence, held me
like a portrait in a museum boasting
free admission for students under the age
of ten. The chain-link made latticework
of my unremarkable back. Thankfully,
no archaeological evidence of this
remains. When I fell to the ground,
the other children circled me like a plague.
Humor was no reliable salvation:
Eight on one can’t be that much fun for any of us,
am I right? The jury returned in a flash,
a unanimous decision to shake up the show
-off. From the blue floor of our newly
renovated playground, Ian’s face
was all I could recognize. I charged
at him like a mother walrus darting
through the deep. Ian fell as a tooth
might, his space in the phalanx
suddenly filled only by my supple ghost.
◆
My dad could beat up anybody
else’s dad. I knew this largely through folklore
he spun from the day of my birth
until first signs that his jet-black
curls would soon settle into winter.
In my unkempt head, the transition
from Jim Crow to Vietnam was clean
as blood could ever be, two battlefields
branding him iconic, unkillable.
He chased Tamara’s ex-boyfriend
through an entire apartment complex
with no break for breath or drink. Punched a hole
in a wall after a parent-teacher conference
ended with the indictment of his favorite son.
His third second chance. The youngest one.
The loyal prodi
gy, destined never to crystallize
into proper mirror, never master the alchemy
of knuckle blooming into broken nose,
jaw left hanging like a half pendulum,
red asymmetry shaming a stranger’s face.
ODE TO THE EQUIPMENT MANAGER
In a sense, you are the valve
through which the game’s hard
beauty finds its most fitting
point of egress. You who turn fist
swing & broken limbs into box scores,
boost a benchwarmer’s prayer
with every figure you sketch
in that green book you keep, always,
flush to your chest, as if a secret
weakness or tale of a simpler time
long since gone rogue. Let popular culture
have its jokes, its jockstraps & sweaty socks
thrown like gossip across the locker room, the business
end landing squarely on your face each time.
What do they know of the math you bend
to make scholarships materialize, the scores
of glistening boys you daily break free?
It is a kind of love, I think, your tireless glare
trailing every shot, the waltz of iron
& wood you give back to the page, all those
small, black gifts exploding into song.
FAMILY REUNION
for Tariq
The question quarantines.
My cousin’s usual talk
of anime & first apartments
& Kiana Thomas’s flawless
hips has long ceased, faded
like ghost kisses into the tepid
night. I try & fail at least four times
to make this into a conversation
about wonder, do my best
to make the doubt sound pretty:
But who did Jesus think he was,
exemplar or experimentalist?
I watch the chariot wheels
spinning in his eyes turn over & over.
This is the longest we have spoken
in ten years, the sword now so deep
I could not retrieve it without killing us both.
PRAISE HOUSE
It all started with the Hammond B-3
electric organ I saw at the thrift store
on 234th Street around two in the afternoon,
while everyone else was in a seminar
on Hegel, feigning agreement.
I captured the image of the holy
device on my new phone, sent it off
to all my fellow former saints.
Within minutes, we had a space
and a plan. Our agnostic church
would meet in my apartment every
other week, just the three of us
on beanbags and half-broken
chairs, belting the hymns our mothers
sewed into our hands.
For a name, Jamall suggests First
Humanist Church of Washington Heights,
but Jeremy finds that rather dull
& I don’t disagree strongly enough,
so we toss out a few more, most
involving Brooks, Baraka, Hughes,
three or four other poets who called God
lonely—not as insult, but as
a critique of perfection, a guess
at what sovereignty does
to one’s social life—before
settling on Praise House,
a unanimous choice once
I pulled up the photo of a man
old enough to have lived
when it was illegal to do
what we do for a living now,
his arms akimbo, standing
in front of an oat-white lean-to,
the name of our new sanctuary
typeset across the side.
Though I do not know if this building bore
any relation to what our parents
would call sacred, if those living
at the borders of this black
& white still did anything more
than walk into a splintering box
and cry the hours into their hands,
I can say, without certainty
or shame, that we have come
here with no aim higher than that
kind of blood & saltwater prayer.
As all those who went before,
we know God is an event,
that the spirit will not fall
if the music ain’t right. Thus,
gathered in the name of what
gathers us, we lose our selves
in spite of our dialectical
minds, invite the groove
to take us in, take us
higher, alight.
VCR&B
All my favorite singers sound like modems.
I intend this to be read as a loving observation
the same way an aging mechanic lifts the engine
from the torso of his Cutlass Supreme
& sends it off to become someone else’s future.
Which is to say, coolly, I know what time it is.
All my favorite singers sample dead legends
& let the spirit speak in HD:
Heathen’s Desire, Holy Diffraction—
the only difference worth noting
is whether you want your body
to be something it is not or someplace
it has never been when the synth-laden outro
begins. Whether you do or do not believe
that freaky cyborgs are indeed among us
when the bass kicks you upside the knees
like a little brother testing his legs, his luck,
your love. All my favorite singers tend to refrain
from using terms like love unironically,
which could be read as a way of distancing
what we came here for or what we built
this petulant hunger from. Zapp & Roger
hum compuuuter luuuuuuv & I don’t
imagine another person on the end
of another screen, blowing emoji kisses at me
from across the distance, but a glowing Xbox
One, my first iPhone, this smooth black alphabet
full of wires & light, lying to my escapist
heart, daring this flesh to be its own
system of stars & gas giants, unfurling
into the slick ether like cellophane, like everywhere
& nowhere I have ever wanted to be.
IN DEFENSE OF DMX
No one knows Ella Fitzgerald
was raised in Yonkers,
which probably makes you
the most famous person
to ever hail from Yonkers & most days
I’m pretty cool with this gap in the archive
if only because of that part in the Grand Champ intro
where your homeboy says, Fact of the matter is, I trust dogs
more than I trust humans & I feel pretty
much the same way only
you should switch out dogs
for written agreements
or Apple products in my case.
I love how you love the ostensible
subhuman. How you praise even
the unworthy muse. How even
your prayers sound like fighting, which
reminds me of my mother & her Bapticostal
ilk, the way they would bless the air
when kin grew sick or shut in, every line
of holy petition invisible & yet swinging,
this knot of bodies locked to Mama’s tone.
You are churchy too, but in a dangerous way
& I respect that. Such multiplicity is no doubt born
of your nameless hometown & no friends to speak
about such things with, the lack of empathy for boys
from yet-unpopular wars. When strangers ask
where I’m from, I either lie (some nonsense
about a BX birthright by maternal bloodline)
or invoke your name to laminate my hood credentials.
It never works as intended,
but I don’t blame you.
Our voices occupy different spaces
on the Trust, You Don’t Want No Problems
spectrum, & I usually follow up any claim
to our home, our beloved, mutual shame
by mentioning the Ovidian qualities
of your more recent work & you know
how it is, Earl. You know nothing beautiful
comes from where we come from.
So when I talk about you like that,
I think it confuses people.
ODE TO THE MASCOT
Older even than sport itself is this sex
of soul & pelt, this leap & sway to set
a crowd aflame. By all means, play
on, fanciful false animal snout
slick with fang & teenage gall,
strut till the fur feels like a spare
body you could claim as chain
mail, as buffer, as college essay
fodder par excellence if it weren’t
for all the other awesome stuff
you do when the suit is left
hanging like a salted hide
in your gym locker, days when you
are just a scholarship with teeth who
writes what you cannot name
but know is there, the way your father
knows each bone in his back
is there, by the pain that cracks the quiet,
the spell your skin casts over every classroom
you enter. On principle, the dancing
routine complicates things but you, sir,
are distinctly postmodern
in your ideas about race
& performance though you
do not yet know the word postmodern
The Sobbing School Page 3