The Crown Ain't Worth Much

by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

  go outside and lean into the city’s first snowfall that year

  I watch the skyline huddle and shiver

  like I was seeing it from my mother’s backseat for

  the first time

  DISPATCHES FROM THE BLACK BARBERSHOP, TONY’S CHAIR. 2003.

  I guess they ain’t cuttin’ hair in them college towns you lil niggas live in these days damn nigga you got naps reachin for the whole sky bet your mama up there with that black pick she used to chase you down the block with I ain’t make the funeral cuz big mike got buried that same day I see you got a little beard now nigga what you think you grown anyway you know niggas gotta choose what funerals we go to these days shit feel like we just moving dirt from on top of one dead body to another feel like heaven just got all our mamas and brothers and them niggas from the corner up there round one big table talkin bout how much they miss the hood you seen that coffee shop they put where ms tammi’s soul food spot used to be right down the block ms tammi ain’t been the same since her man stopped comin’ home last winter you know when all that snow come through some niggas just chase after the sun and don’t never come back when they find it but now that coffee shop got all them white folk comin round lift up your chin bro yeah my girl said the hood gonna be alright but I swear the shadow on that coffee shop be growing every day swear that shit be gettin darker with each sunrise saw it stretch over some niggas on Livingston and when it went away they was just gone like they got swallowed by some other kind of black niggas ain’t drinkin coffee niggas don’t need to be any more awake niggas seen too much death to sleep I ain’t slept since they tore down the school and built a new graveyard I ain’t slept since my son got that toy gun for Christmas but my hands still steady I still got my name on this door my girl said the hood gonna be alright

  SHERIDAN AVENUE, 2002

  Ain’t no Uzis made in Harlem. Not one of us in here owns a poppy field.

  This thing is bigger than Me. This is big business. This is the American way.

  Nino Brown

  Blessed

  be that which blooms from the hand of an unruly child and unravels in the spring air to make its way back to that which birthed it. the home,

  both this one in front of us, and all of the other towering kingdoms on this land which is not truly ours, but still feels like it is ours by right, or by the journey

  of our ancestors. the april night and the arrogance it pours over our bones. the first reminder of warmth. blessed be the bathroom stalls in saylor-ackermann hall, and those inside

  of them tonight, digging for the toilet paper that will not be found there, but instead will be found suspended along the tree branches outside of these homes

  our college majors will never allow us to afford

  blessed be the repurposing of these everyday tools. how it was perhaps learned from our grandmothers who learned from their

  grandmothers. how a rubber band could also tie back the untamed hair. how the potatoes and milk could become a meal. how so many things could be used

  to whip,

  to force the skin open and risen like a loaf of cornbread. how that which cleans us can also cause such chaos when it mixes with the anger built into the one black

  boy in every class, the one black boy on the soccer team, the one black boy at the cafeteria table, the lighthouse in a still ocean

  blessed be the trees, and all things hanging

  from them. the wind, and how it tastes faintly of salt and sweat after it catches our 2-ply revolution and calls the lowest hanging remnants to dance until the ends of the toilet paper resemble violently twitching

  legs, and everyone keeps laughing but I look away, only for a moment, to remind myself of the trees and how many bodies they have claimed

  and still claim. how they do not ask for forgiveness, and therefore have earned this reckoning. blessed be the ghetto.

  the one six blocks east, where the foundations of churches lean to match the wasting bodies of those inside. where I am convinced my father is watching this exact moment over prayer beads and mumbling I ain’t paying no 25,000 dollars a year for this shit. where the gunshots became late

  night spirituals, rocking entire blocks to sleep. and where the police no longer come, though it is silent right now and there are whole families alive in these houses, and the sidewalks are even and this is how I remember that we are not in the ghetto

  tonight, even before the sirens. even before the blue and red lights, and how they consume everything in the dark and guide us home, the way light used to when “home” was another state, or another country. blessed be this blending of running and laughter. a language known since the abandonment of crawling.

  this time bomb of youth which explodes in an alley behind Johnson’s Bar and paints the walls. these shoes that carried us, mine pure, and white as the weapons we chose this evening. mine, too expensive for my work study job. mine, the reason I borrow

  Stephanie’s books for our women’s studies class. mine, a home on an even sidewalk with whole families alive inside. blessed be the crack of a good can when it opens. the empty case of natural light on a dorm room floor, and how the contents of that case once combined

  with the bed of flaming hot Cheetos lining inexperienced stomachs. the burn of rejection. that which dances down our throats and then claws its way out screaming, the friend next to me right now who cannot take this truth, and the heaving that follows, and the thick river of orange-red that follows that, directly on top of my shoes, white mere seconds ago, but now a mural of the setting sun, beyond saving.

  Blessed

  be the destruction of all things too beautiful to endure an untouched life. until God gets even.

  SAYLOR-ACKERMANN HALL, 2004

  My white friend Chad lets the word nigga spill and

  paint the dorm room a whole new shade

  of trouble but I know he doesn’t mean it the same way

  police on Sheridan Avenue mean it when they ask

  why I’m dressed that way in this part of town while I fumble

  for my college ID so that I might be spared the handcuffs

  this time

  or a few less grass stains on the one good

  pair of pants I own;

  anyway I know Chad doesn’t understand how a word can

  hang in the air and multiply twice its weight before it ever

  comes down I guess because we slapped

  hands and hugged tight like brothers in the hallway

  just ten minutes ago or maybe because Biggie died on this night

  back in ‘97 and we mourn loud enough

  for a room full of white kids to rap

  every word without the slightest blush like when Biggie says

  niggas bleed just like us and I watch the air get thick above

  my head and become an anvil.

  I MEAN MAYBE NONE OF US ARE ACTUALLY FROM ANYWHERE

  it’s so hard to trace these things right

  I just rolled out of bed one morning and

  I had this head of good hair and when I say

  good hair I mean it was passed down from someone

  who was once dragged through a field by it until

  their scalp became a wide open mouth but it looks fly

  tucked underneath this fitted hat on the dance floor no

  you cannot borrow this dance you cannot stand over

  another dark and shaking body and breathe in the

  smoke we leave in our wake I get that we are all

  human or whatever but I don’t even

  know what that would do to your bones I don’t know if

  your bones bend like mine I come from a boxed in

  culture I come from people who traveled entire oceans

  wrapped around each other I was born from a woman

  who is now inside a box so you see some things are

  just natural for me you’re right maybe there is no such

  thing as a country

 
maybe there is just gutted land and rows of sharp

  teeth that have torn at my flesh for so long I’m not

  exactly sure which wound is the one I belong to I mean

  the only way I recognize my skin is when it is

  open

  and spilling how can I even keep track you know it must be

  nice to wrap your hands around an unscarred body it must

  be nice to wrap your tongue around all of the words in that

  song without also asking to bleed out on a sidewalk look all

  I know is

  I began running when the fire started and I haven’t stopped

  since maybe I come from running maybe running is a

  country maybe everyone who lives there misses someone

  they thought would live forever

  I’m glad you don’t know how to find it I’m glad

  that you haven’t caught me yet I’m glad you have a

  black friend I’m sorry

  that your black friend may die soon

  and then there will only be me

  OK, I’M FINALLY READY TO SAY I’M SORRY FOR THAT ONE SUMMER

  when I watched American Pie 2 twice a week & listened to all nine

  minutes of “Konstantine” on the way to every party with the sun

  still out in a car thick with sober voices spilling out of the windows

  & making another mess all over the sidewalks. I guess this is what

  it looks like when youth is writhing on its deathbed but the boys

  who claim it are still very much alive & blooming & being split in

  half by a beam of moonlight stumbling in through a window and

  falling all over the sheets in a bed that is not ours. In the heat of

  that summer, I escaped the parties on Friday nights to find the

  near-silent bedroom of a girl who I pretended to stop talking to

  when my friends said we’re college guys now, but who I used to

  shoot hoops with in the backyard & skipped out on prom to go

  record shopping with last spring & that summer, we would sit on

  her floor & let the Supremes record play all the way through twice

  & tell each other stories about how our college roommates snored

  all year & how we didn’t sleep like we used to under this city’s

  moon & how we never got used to eating alone & how we instead

  got used to hunger & how small we’ve become because of all these

  things & then we would lay with each other without ever touching

  & I didn’t know how to talk about distance out loud & in the

  mornings over breakfast with the guys when Jeff would yell how

  was it last night across the table & I knew what it carried even then

  & I still smiled into a brown tornado of coffee until the plates

  rattled with fists pounding & laughter & high fives & isn’t it funny

  how silence can undress two bodies & press them into each other?

  & when I say funny I mean the feeling that stretches itself out in

  your stomach while you watch someone cry into their palms & turn

  their face to the night before they walk away from you for what

  you know is the last time before there is new sharp & boundless

  city between the both of you forever & when fall came, boys sat up

  in their beds alone & gasping while their hearts rattled out the

  ghosts of every unspoken love that dragged them there & then a

  whole country crawled itself across the ocean & went to war.

  ODE TO PETE WENTZ, ENDING IN TYLER’S FUNERAL

  There is already more than enough blood in your city tonight and yet I know you are at the edge of another tower of speakers, stacked higher than the dead boys pulled from the southside and forgotten. To jump knowing you will be caught is a type of mercy I have never known, yet craved. You can love a whole scene until it becomes a flooded house, and then I suppose climbing is the only option. Still, we wore all black every summer like the sun didn’t snarl. Didn’t have teeth, never wanted to tear into our skin and let the salt of us pour out in waves, or like our skin wasn’t suspect enough before we decided to be rebels. Before we walked into corner stores with no money and walked out with chocolate melting against the warmth of our thighs. We wrote “IGNORE YOUR GOD COMPLEX” in every bathroom stall on campus one of those years even though we knew the right lyrics, because on a night we were too poor to afford concert tickets we pressed our backs into a hill overlooking the LC, and the way Patrick’s voice swung into the air when singing “Loaded God Complex”, we couldn’t tell the difference, just knew we discovered a message that had to be delivered on the walls of places where people emptied themselves of everything they challenged their insides to own. In those days, we were drunk on reaching up and pulling the night sky apart, swallowing it in chunks, until we were as dark inside as we were out. Until it held us tight like no one else dared to. We boys and our misery, Pete. I know you fumble over your instrument. I know your trembling hands approach the strings like a virgin lover, reaching to pull fabric from the edge of the first person to whisper their desires in an ear, but if not for the bass, how else would you fall into our outstretched arms? Who else would we have to drag us home by the collars with the windows down on 270 after another set of hours in a Midwest that is not like the one in your songs, but if we turn up the music loud enough we can pretend they aren’t breaking our old neighborhoods into swarms of dust? We can pretend there aren’t boys running out of scattered glass temples, with their hands raised, begging for someone to open their chests, the heat unthawing whatever happiness they have left. And I know these are just my problems, I know there is blood in your city that craves the rush of a cold sidewalk every night, that there are so many ways to stop a city from breathing all at once, to twist it into something sharp and metal and turn it in on itself, and you can’t possibly fit another tragedy in a song after all these years, can you? Not even for one of us who fell so in love with his own loneliness that it became a flooded house and he climbed like you did to the edge of a rooftop with wet shoes and jumped because Pete, when you were lonely and you jumped, we sang and held you up to the roof and you survived another night, and then another year, and you gave a boy a name that we laughed at, and we did not have to bury you underneath a split tree in Columbus. But we still wore black then and every summer after, we still stole candy bars and planted them on a hill outside the LC and prayed for them to melt this time into the ghosts of everyone we had ever loved, and would never see again. Then we lost so many friends that we truly became criminals, and rummaged through this splintered city to find god because a man outside of a bar convinced us all of our friends were in heaven and none of us knew any other way to get there saddled by all of these sins and all of this sadness. Until one night, drunk off the sky again, we figured maybe we can all get to heaven if we ignore our god complex. Maybe if we stack all of the speakers in this town as high as we can and begin to go up, we can escape even this.

  ON MELTING

  I am still fascinated by the glint of warm

  light that echoes off the snow and arrives to throw a small blanket

  on the uncovered flesh of anyone brave

  enough to walk through another harsh winter

  even after decades encased in the Midwest during such loveless

  hours when the streets become covered in white like

  everywhere we look is another anchored ghost clawing at the

  window but this is the season where I will make the face

  of a girl on a cookie and pass it to her across a room full of

  strangers which is a weird way to say

  I think I could love you until even the sun grows tired

  of coming back every

  spring to forgive us for another season of hiding

  but it is not like me to be brave

  at least not unt
il there is enough warmth for the corner to flood

  again with this city’s melting

  until the boys tear their hands from the cold glass and

  burst fearless again into the wetness

  especially not when I can miss a stranger who may not remember

  me for months, or fill a notebook with

  questions I might ask from across a table in the soft buzz

  of a coffee shop while two drinks grow cold

  yet still not as cold as the night we first laughed at the

  same joke or at least

  the first time her laugh drifted across a room and

  I hungered for better humor

  before I walked home in three sweaters and two pairs

  of pants, shivering in the darkness

  asking myself how long it would be before I could finally

  peel back all of those layers and become a

  new, unbreakable device

  III.

  Loneliness comes with life.

  Whitney Houston

  THE MUSIC OR THE MISERY

  I do not mean the cartoon heart. the one that swells from the wolf’s chest. when distracted by a girl wolf. his tongue rolling onto the hot pavement. right before the anvil drops from an impossible height. and he is crushed again. foiled by a man’s hunger. I say “heart” and mean the actual heart. I saw my heart in the eyes of my mother. it was too small to save her. I wrote my heart in a poem. it took up the whole bedroom. it doesn’t pay rent. it stays up watching cities burn to the ground. I am so sorry that you have nowhere to sit. I just loved someone yesterday. so you see the dilemma. I just promised someone that I would watch them grow old in a country that wants them dead. so I just can’t spare any more room. here. take this mixtape I made. it is just 30 minutes of the wind. how it sounds when being cut by something heavy. falling from the sky. making an endlessly dark shadow at my feet. while I blow a kiss.

  THE AUTHOR EXPLAINS GOOD KID, M.A.A.D. CITY TO HIS WHITE FRIEND WHILE DRIVING THROUGH SOUTHEAST OHIO