The Sobbing School

by Joshua Bennett; Selected by Eugene Gloria

  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
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  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.