do not yet know the word performance
as anything other than what happens when
halftime hits & the latest radio fare
slinks through the speakers
as if a hunter made entirely of oil
& it is time to feed
the people what
they came here for.
THE SOBBING SCHOOL
is where I learned to brandish the black like a club,
you know, like a blunt object, or cobalt flashes of strobe
dotting damp walls after dusk drops the dark motion
our modern world can’t hold. There’s a process
by which bodies blend in, or don’t, or die, or roll on
past the siren’s glow so as not to subpoena the grave.
Mama never said surviving this flesh was a kind
of perverse science, but I’ve seen the tape,
felt the metal close & lock around my wrists, witnessed
bone bisected by choke hold. A crow turns crimson
against the windshield & who would dare mourn
such clean transition, the hazard of not knowing
you are the wrong kind of alive. But enough
about extinction. Entire towns mad with grief, whole
modes of dreaming gone the way of life before lyric,
all faded into amber & archive, all dead as the VCR,
all buried below the surface where nothing breaks, bleeds.
BLACK HISTORY, ABRIDGED
When I was four, an elderly white woman bought my elementary school while I was still going to school inside of it. Tore the building down. Now, it’s a parking lot.
HOME FORCE: PRESUMPTION OF DEATH
erasure of Florida Statute 776.013
person is presumed to have a self or body.
person gains unlawful dwelling, or occupies
against will. personhood does not apply
if the son against whom force is used
has no lawful owner or title to protect.
violence against the child is wise.
official duties: the officer identifies
any applicable reason. so tempting
to attack, retreat, stand and meet
force with dead. it is necessary
to prevent the body, harm
him, sing get over it.
TENACIOUS ELEGY: INSURGENT LIFE IN THE ERA OF TRIAL BY GUNFIRE WITH A LINE FROM SYLVIA WYNTER
Keywords: kin, walking, home, store, cop, child, mother, gone, shots, badge, blue, no, no, no, no
Abstract:
To be sure, our moment demands a song. Yet the question of how one responds at the level of lyric to the relentless event that operates under the sign of the public lynching—this wound that doubles as the primary ghost of black social life in the modern era; that is, the transformation of a friend’s life into figures, fictions, ink almost stoic against the page, details that bloom & fade at the speed of an eye’s aversion—remains open: a dehiscence, howling. What to do with all of the faces? Or the trembling they leave in their wake, the toy guns & playdates we take from the children? How does one marshal imagery in the name of such a cause, asserting flora where doom has staked its ground, its claim to the very language an author might wield to smith a vision worth its weight in blood? In an effort to wrestle with these questions & others until a proper ceremony can be found, this poem is interested in enacting the world it yearns for, & begins with the image of its speaker on the second day of teaching his daughter to fly a two-wheeler, the machine’s yellow steel like a thrush of finches shredding the natural sky, our speaker thinking for the first time in weeks that he might not be dead in every meaningful sense of the term, that he has in fact never felt so full, never felt this much like the sea unbuckling its mouth that all those old drowned saints might walk.
ANTHROPOPHOBIA
Before people question why the contact was made in the first place, they should understand that Myers was no angel. . . . This is not a victim; this is a victim-maker. This is not a martyr.
—JEFF ROORDA, BUSINESS MANAGER OF THE ST. LOUIS POLICE UNION
The steel blue ghost standing
at the podium says VonDerrit Myers
was no angel & all I can hear is
the boy was a human boy. The boy
had a best friend & 206 bones. The boy
had a name that God didn’t give him.
When he died, he did not bleed
starlight or gold. He was not half-bird.
The gun spoke, & no flaxen wing shot
from each shoulder, as if to carry him beyond
the bullet’s swift assignment. No, the boy
was not a pillar of white smoke bright
enough to break a nonbeliever, make a penitent
fall prostrate, heaving, heavy with contrition, but
let me be clear: we are simply running out
of ways to shame the dead. How else to say
that we are guilty & yet unburied? How else
to erase him, if we cannot feign omnipotence,
lay claim to the sky, excise heaven,
take aim at the boy just one more
time while everyone watches?
AUBADE WITH INSOMNIA
Are you a land inside the body? Or an elsewhere
the body collapses, where it goes to prune
the imagination, that thick orchard of lights? Are you
an especially stern vice principal, curing the hallway
of chatter? Is there a way back to between
your borders yet unrecorded, a path without maps
or meds? Is there a language beyond language,
that I might describe what comes before the stillness,
the staring upward for hours that pass like punches
to the inside of the head? This is the most lonesome anguish,
I think, though any such distinction is blurry at best, counter
-productive even, given the nature of our moments together,
how solace, a mangy fox, always slips from presence
to memory without leaving a note, not even to say
I miss the way your breath comes & goes.
SAMSON RECONSIDERS
One has to consider the material
conditions that produced this fate
-ful moment. A scatterplot of men slain
by jawbone. Violence as a kind of boomerang. Battle cries
at first sight of sun, the stretched bow
of these impossible arms, all that foreign blood
making magenta planets in the sand. Her beauty.
Enough gold to feed a family thrice over
if she budgets it right.
The most expedient option here
is to make this all about Delilah. Her easy
scissors. The vile ways of women lovely enough
to make you dry up the moat, damn the armor for scraps,
open the heart for new business, et cetera, et cetera.
But what about my player card?
The empty bed she could never bet on? What of the calls
from her countrymen, or their hungry gods, or the comeuppance
of a thousand boys left kinless by the same hands that held
her sleeping body like a lyre, built our kitchen table from scratch,
stroked her faithful, moonless hair every night
for minutes on end all because she once said
that it helped with the insomnia?
LOVE POEM ENDING WITH TYPEWRITERS
And maybe no one’s happy,
I think to myself, usually during
the plane ride home or as I read dead French
philosophers on the couch,
> only a child’s height away
from my girlfriend, who, for real
for real, is a Platonic ideal in her own
right, all any reasonable citizen
of desire might dare
to imagine in these times
of breakup over text message
& earnest tweets left
unanswered for days. We fit
like the grooves on a bullet.
We both love Rilke & want
children & think furniture
design is pretty important.
Three months into our tour
of the human condition,
I dropped half my rent
on a Corinthian leather sofa
because it sounded cool
& she didn’t eat anything
with preservatives in it,
so I figured, No biggie.
This is what all
functioning adults do. They lie
expensively. They lie
awake. They lie
on their side, eyes ajar,
lover dreaming of cormorants
right next to them, counting
the minutes until even this bows
to the sovereignty of rot. Beloved,
if I came from anything unworthy
of shame, I would say so. I wouldn’t
brood across the country this way.
If I knew how to stop calling
your presence pity,
my therapist’s couch would grow cold
as a slaughterhouse.
And is that what you want?
To break such a flawless routine?
To stop screaming at typewriters, expecting rain?
ON FLESH
I ran from it and was still in it.
—FRED MOTEN
Not the body,
but its bad
alibi. Its black
& blueprint.
Whole summers spent
at Messiah Baptist gave me
a hundred ways to kill the creature
that lived in & as my skin.
Saint Paul had a whole thornbush
in his. Whether this was metonym
or mere approximation of the shape
& texture of a wound too florid
to forgo mentioning, I was never quite sure.
But what is sureness to the shoreless?
When certain certainties fade
& every part of you poses
itself as open question to a world
it knew best through the lens of legend
(myth & maps & dead men with one name)
how do you reframe the body’s conversation
with itself or other selves? & where is
the self these days? & what is the body
but a bag of blood? & what is love
but an excuse to melt into mad, wet math?
& who can stomach the math of meat?
What does the animal have or not have
that makes its body not a body, its death not death
as-such as Heidegger or a devout Heideggerian
might say? Who is to say where
outside begins & flesh ends? Perhaps we
are all just webs of blue information
intersecting, collapsing across strata
& calling it something else,
something other than entropy
or decay, a turf war with time.
So many names for breaking into this life
at angles unplanned & unknowable. It’s true.
There is much to be praised in this house
of lightning & dust, this sloppy armor
we yearn to move more beautifully in.
STILL LIFE WITH LITTLE BROTHER
Every time I attempt what I’m attempting
right now, it ends up as some sad lyric
about diagnosis & that sounds like
the one kind of violence I don’t have
a pretty name for. In advance, I don’t know
if this poem will bring the problem onstage
& then pretend it went away to college. I don’t know
if there is any way around the problem itself,
which is that I can only call something love
if it comes packaged in language I can feel
the weight of & my brother doesn’t always
look at me when I visit the house. Sometimes
he walks in & sits on the couch & watches
TV while I’m watching TV & our shared
thereness is a prize. Sometimes he asks
about me when I’m gone
& no one else ever does that.
Levi is my brother’s name
& I wrote a poem
about him once
& it wasn’t about him
as much as how fear stalks me
like an inheritance, how I fear
for him with all of my love,
how I know the world
like I know the names
of famous poets & the world
has claws, Levi. When you were born,
I ran back & forth across Auntie’s
apartment until the floorboards complained
& I am still like that. I am still more proud
than I am brave & you are still the great joy of
our rugged hometown, an outlaw all the same.
Please, excuse my shadow. I can’t
stop leaving. I don’t know how
to name what I don’t know
well enough to render
in a single sitting. Every poem
about us seems an impossible labor,
like forgetting the face
of the sea, or trying to find
a more perfect name for water.
ON BLUENESS
which is neither misery
nor melancholy per se,
but the way anything buried
aspires. How blackness becomes
a bladed pendulum swaying between
am I not a man & a brother
& meat. How it dips
into the position
of the unthought,
then out. Trust me.
Foucault isn’t
helpful here. I am after
what comes when the law leaves
a dream gutted. The space
between a plea & please.
A mother marching in the name
of another woman’s dead children.
Not the anguish she carries alongside
her as if it were a whole, separate person,
but the very fact of her feet
addressing the pavement,
the oatmeal she warmed in the microwave
that morning, sugar & milk
& blueberries blending in a white bowl
as she reads the paper, taken aback
only by the number of bullets
they poured like a sermon into him.
How despair kills: too slow to cut
the music from a horn, or set
my nephew’s laughter to dim.
I am dying, yes, but I am not the marrow
in a beloved’s memory just yet.
Who can be alive today
& not study grief?
There are bodies everywhere,
but also that flock of cardinals
making the sky look patriotic.
X
As you are both Malcolm’s
shadow & the black unknown
he died defending, I praise
your untold potential, the possible
/>
worlds you hold within your body’s
bladed frame. I love how you stand
in exultation, arms raised
to welcome the rain, the bolt,
whatever drops from the sky’s slick shelf
without warning, as all plagues
do. Miracles too. & bombs that fall
from planes which hold men with eyes
aimed through long glass tubes. Tubes
that make a civilian’s life look small.
Small enough to smoke. X marks the cross
-hairs, & the home an explosion turns to blur.
X marks the box on the form that bought
the bombs, paid the triggerman, sent
the senator’s son off to school
without a drop of blood to temper
his smile, stain leather
boots, mar the occasion.
X: every algorithm’s heart
-beat, how any & all adjacent
quantities bloom. A kiss.
How a signature knows
where to begin its looping
dance. Two hands balled
into fists, crossed
at the wrist, repping
the borough that gave
us B-boys, the Yankees,
my mother’s left
hook, swift enough
to knock any living
thing off its feet
like a cartoon villain
bested by banana peel
or spilled oil, his eyes
now two black x’s,
denoting absence.
The wrong answer
on a test. How
my great-great-
grandfather,
who could not read,
signed his name,
as if an homage
to his own opacity,
as if to say, I contain
the unthinkable, or, I abstain.
PREFACE TO A TWENTY-VOLUME REGICIDE NOTE
after Krista Franklin after Amiri Baraka
Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way
each newly dead face flashes like a crushed fire
-work across the screen. The red mass
of each name. How each name settles,
a fistful of ash at the back of the throat.
The Sobbing School Page 4