The Crown Ain't Worth Much

by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

  NOTES ON WAITING FOR THE DOG TO FIND THE PERFECT PLACE TO TAKE A SHIT WHILE MORNING CUTS THROUGH THE SKY, FRESH FROM ANOTHER DARKNESS

  perhaps on the crest of each stiff blade of grass hangs the

  eternal name of someone who was once loved but is now

  vanished and just another

  name in an endless field

  of names that is newly remembered with

  each return trip of the eager nose,

  the trampling paws creating a frantic circle in

  the soft ground

  in preparation for this most naked moment the

  romance is always in the ritual

  before the ritual

  how I pace flat rings into the carpet

  on the days my wife is gone long enough

  for her name to grow beneath my feet

  and stretch up the walls while

  sunlight takes its final drinks from a

  cracked-open skyline

  but I know the words for this

  for what it is to leave and eventually return to

  the space in a bed

  that is yours and yours alone

  even after a lover has starved

  themselves with distance how

  exhausting it must be to come

  back to this stretch of

  grass each morning with no language to

  speak an apology for your absence

  what it must be like to have nothing to give

  of yourself but what has been consumed and then

  passed through you

  a gift to show that you can still

  hold things

  That you are not yet

  ready for burial.

  THE AUTHOR WRITES THE FIRST DRAFT OF HIS WEDDING VOWS

  (An erasure of Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter to her husband, Leonard)

  Dearest,

  I feel certain I am going mad again.

  we will go through terrible times. And recover. I

  begin to hear your voice, and can’t concentrate. So I am

  doing what seems

  will give me the greatest possible happiness.

  I don’t think two people could have been happier with

  this disease. I know

  that without you I can’t properly feel.

  What I want to say is You have

  saved me.

  Everything has gone from me

  but the certainty of your goodness.

  ON SAINTHOOD

  Used to be,

  when one of our own was made ready for heaven, before the bullnecked men were sent off with their shovels to heave whatever dirt they needed to make a dark bed for the bloodless, someone’s child filled their cheeks with newly precious air and blew a horn. Someone’s daddy, even weary of this scene, pressed his hands to a drum. The mothers threw back their heads and found some

  song, restless to fight its way out of their grief-drowned lungs. Something slow to clamber up the clouds and let God know they weren’t done praying yet, even as his house overflowed with husbands, or wives, or sweet sons and daughters who never got to watch their name waltz along a lover’s lips for the first time. And then, there would be another horn. Another drum. More joyous clatter and sweat-licked skin pressed close together, singing out the same gospel.

  And eventually,

  someone in a suit too loud for such dark ceremonies would break out into a dance, spilling themselves onto the pavement while a hearse rolled slow enough to keep time with the beat the bodies gathering in a holy sway, a two-step kissed with despair, one hundred black hips pulled towards the sky, two hundred black hands grasping for the tips of every ropeless tree

  and then the street would become its own country

  and then the sweat was a cool river that the babies pushed their

  cupped palms into, discovering thirst

  and anyone who ever woke up from a dream where they were

  making love to a ghost got out of their cars and danced

  and anyone standing by a cracked window for whole years, waiting

  for their child to walk through a door, ran from their homes

  and sang

  and the ground would shake for miles with

  the skyline, bending down to give shade where there was none

  before

  and everyone put a hand on the casket, even if the person inside

  did not share their blood, but did give the reason for the clap

  and holler or

  the sweetness of a long goodbye for anyone

  who had made a room of their emptiness

  and longed to fill it with another celebration

  stretching itself into a ripe and hot night

  Yes,

  it truly must take nothing but grief to turn our people into a choir.

  I know the way a song can turn up in a mouth when the wind

  blows another city’s burning into our own. A boy bleeds

  in the street for four hours and I hum

  a song I do not know

  in the shower with my grandmother’s voice.

  My mouth widens with each black body left

  for dead.

  But,

  there is still no dance today for the rage that grows over

  your own skin and builds an unshakeable home.

  Or, at least no dance that

  doesn’t look like dying can look when it sets upon someone

  who wishes to live.

  The man pleads enough

  while we watch an arm fasten itself to his neck and squeeze out

  what breath he has left.

  His thick and heavy limbs twitch

  against their own leaving

  The legs jerk, the hips thrust towards the

  clouds in offering again like hips used to

  when the clouds were still interested in such

  sacrifice.

  And,

  as the man finally gives in, I call

  out to God.

  A horn cuts across the sky.

  IV.

  GRACE: You know, we all hear about all the stages of grieving that you‘re supposed to go through to get healthy again. I don‘t know how you can do that when you wake up every morning and relive the whole thing. How – when you first wake up in the morning, Ms. McSpadden, before your feet hit the floor, what‘s your first thought?

  MCSPADDEN: I don‘t even know. To be honest with you, I don‘t even know. I can‘t even tell you my thought process since August 9th. My mind is just all over the place.

  GRACE: Mr. Brown, I remember I would wake up and I would think everything had been a horrible, horrible dream, and then it didn‘t take me long to remember it was real, and that is how my day would start. And that lasted for years. When you first get up in the morning, what hits you? What‘s the first thing?

  BROWN: That I‘m not going to see my son again. It‘s hard to even close my eyes – flashes and pictures. It‘s just – it‘s hard. During the time when I‘m asleep, I don‘t even know I‘m asleep. I just wake up, like, Wow, I‘m asleep, you know, because it‘s so hard to just – I close my eyes,

  that‘s all I see.

  From the transcript of a CNN interview between

  Nancy Grace and the parents of Michael Brown

  I DO NOT CALL THIS “WAR”

  I do not stand in the doorway and kiss my wife like I will never see her again

  I do not say noose when I mean bullet

  I do not say bullet when I am asked what keeps me awake at night

  I do not keep track of the names

  I do not keep track of my own body

  I do not look at graves

  I do not look at televisions

  I do not look in the eyes of the interviewer

  when he asks how there can be so much violence in my poems

  I do not look honest enough to survive

  I have maybe left my home

  for the last time

  MY WIFE
SAYS THAT IT’S A GOOD THING HUMANS DON’T HOLD FEAR

  in their skin the way dogs do

  which I guess is easy to say while driving at

  night through a neighborhood where the houses got

  more rooms than the bodies inside them could

  ever fill even after they have chewed the skin off of

  another old black church & built a shopping

  mall over its bones

  but on the eastside of Columbus the

  police ain’t been around since that new

  year’s party where I learned

  that you can tell the difference between

  gunshots & fireworks by how fast your

  mama pulls you back from the window

  & begins to say another one of those

  hushed prayers & on the eastside of Columbus

  them boys flash headlights twice on

  saturday nights to let the

  women know to get the babies inside cuz

  another one of the homies bled out behind

  greenbrier on friday & now someone else’s son ain’t

  gonna make it to church in the morning

  & maybe their younger brothers will praise

  the empty space in the bed

  after all of the mourning has

  peeled itself off of the project walls

  & maybe boys will begin to

  praise the bigger portions served

  at the dinner table after

  a brother leaves & never returns

  we from the hood after all

  so maybe distance is a currency

  when boys pile themselves on top

  of their families & that is how a bed is

  made for the night

  it must be nice to have enough rooms

  in a home to store things

  so that you never have to make a rupture

  of your own stomach & fill it with

  all of the times you could have been

  dragged through the glass-ridden

  street choking on the memory of

  someone who could maybe save

  you but will never come & there are

  so many moments like these writhing

  under the skin of black boys

  you would think that we would

  always be full & never hunger

  for anything

  & yet

  ODE TO JAY-Z, ENDING IN THE RATTLE OF A FIEND’S TEETH

  teach us how to hustle so / hard that they / never come for our daughters and / feast upon their dancing limbs or / the thick tangles of hair swarming / over their dark eyes / have we prayed at your feet / long enough for them to keep / what they came here with / after they are entombed in / the dirt / this is what is happening / in our America right now / another black girl was emptied / in Brooklyn last night and / I watch this on the news / in Ohio and weep / even though I know that it is not / my mother / because the girl on TV has / no name other than gone / and my mother held on / to her name until her body / became ash / until she was a mountain of white / powder / that’s that shit / we take razor blades to / and drown / the whole hood in / that shit that got us out / the projects / and left whole families / of men / starved and longing / is this what becomes / of the women we love / consumed even in death by / a flock of men / who have mistaken their grief / for a persistent hunger / that comes again each / sweat-soaked morning with / a new set of freshly forgotten corpses / overflowing in its arms / after coming down from / the cross / how did you fix your hands / to hold a child without / covering her in decades / of blood / and have you taught her / to run yet / not the way we run / into the arms of a lover / but the way you ran / before the first gold record hung / in a home far enough away / from the block / you finally stopped / hearing the clatter of ravening jaws / clashing together at sunset / we still hear it out here / it gets louder with each / black girl hollowed out / and erased / if you can’t feed them into silence / again / can you at least rap for us / over all this noise / everyone I love has had / the hardest time / sleeping

  WHILE WATCHING THE CONVENIENCE STORE BURN IN BALTIMORE, POETS ON THE INTERNET ARGUE OVER ANOTHER ARTICLE DECLARING “POETRY IS DEAD”

  I mean is it dead really did we watch its mother pull its limp carcass from the mouth of a night that it walked into living are there one hundred black hands carrying its casket through the boulevard did it die in a city that no one thought about until it was burning did broken glass rain onto the streets in its memory did people weep at the shatter did people cry for the convenience store and forget the corpse did the reek of rising gas drain the white from a child’s eyes did we stop speaking its good dead name when a fist was thrown do we even remember what killed it anymore I think it was split at its spine but I can’t recall I just woke up one day with this new empty can we uproot the corpse and drag it through the streets will people remember if we lay it at the boots of those who last saw it alive are we calling it dead because white people got bored with its living who will be left to bend the night into a chorus how will we harvest skin to pull tight over a wooden face who is going to ready the drum

  USAvCUBA

  after Frank O’Hara

  It is 3:15 on a Saturday & I am in a car on I-95 on the way to the soccer game & Nate is riding shotgun which is also the name for when you plunge something sharp into a can of beer & split open its aluminum shell before swallowing its urgent sacrifice & I once saw Nate do this five times in one night before the Mount Union game & we got to the field late the next morning smelling like something coughed up in the heat of a 1980s summer & it was almost as hot then as it is right now in this traffic that isn’t moving & hasn’t moved for what feels like thirty years which is to say that it feels like we haven’t moved since we were too small to speak & burden everyone we love with our refusal to crawl back into silence & every car on this highway is in park & somehow people are still pressing on their horns & Nate turns up the radio & David Ruffin is singing I wish it would rain & his voice is unfolding long & slow in the backseat like an eager lover & there is a whole history of men demanding the sky to shake at their command & I’m not saying out loud whether or not I believe in god & I’m not saying out loud what I know the rain means I’m only saying that I need this dry summer to stay dry I’m only saying that the tickets to this game cost as much as my best suit & kickoff is at 3:30 & we are absolutely going to be late & there is a whole history of black people being late to things & there is a whole language signaling our arrival & there is an entire catalog of jokes that dissect this happening & they never get old & by they I mean black people in America & I can hear the joke our college soccer coach made when the only two black boys on the team stumbled late onto a hot field & lateness always makes for a good joke

  the punchline is I slept through my mother’s final breaths or the punchline is I stumbled into a living room thick with a family’s grief while clearing a night’s salt from my eyes or the punchline is that I’m always running late I’m always running I’m always trying to move time backwards & tell everyone that I love them & isn’t that funny & Nate points to an ambulance speeding down the highway opposite us & disappearing into the sun & I don’t want to think that there might be a body inside of it & then all of the cars start moving

  AFTER THE CAMERAS LEAVE, IN THREE PARTS

  I. The Ghost Of The Author’s Mother Performs An Autopsy On The Freshly Hollow City

  They listenin’ to the wrong music again, child. When the smoke rises and sinks its teeth into the meat of another dark sky, people always wanna act like “Mississippi Goddam” was the only song Nina Simone blessed the earth with. Probably ‘cuz if you sit on the floor with a record player in a room quiet as a dirt-lined casket, you can hear the black bones cracking right there underneath the piano keys. You can taste another man’s blood climbing slow up the back of your throat. Feel the water cannons start to press through the walls and soak your feet. Might even be able to see the one hundred snapped necks hanging from the
edge of the needle when Nina sings “Lord have mercy on this land of mine…”

  And if that don’t carry you to the front lines of any city trynna paint its streets with your blood, lord knows nothin’ will.

  But didn’t nobody sing “Sinnerman” like Nina. Didn’t no one else cast that spell right. The confessional ain’t no good if nobody confessin’. Nina, though. Let every note of “Sinnerman” hunt for a wicked tongue. Forced it to lift its secrets to the warm air. You play that song over what’s left of any scorched city, and watch. All them white men gonna start runnin’ from they homes, crying what haunts them into their bloody palms. ‘Til the middle of the street splits wide open. Swallows them whole. I know. It ain’t gonna bring nobody’s dead child back. But I ain’t seen “Mississippi Goddam” do nothin’ ‘cept flood a house of black bodies ‘til they washed up in the heat of a city, bloated and dying.

  My daddy never taught me to swim.

  I ain’t never take my babies to the water.

  II. The Convenience Store’s Broken Glass Speaks

  have they stopped / whispering the dead thing’s name yet? / I was promised / the brick’s heavy kiss / would spread me thin / over where they killed the boy / and then I would become the new / dead thing / to grow ripe in every mouth / I would become the thing they remember / in the summer / I show up to the party late / and loud / I drink the house into a desert / I keep the whole world thirsty / I stay after everyone else leaves / I keep you awake until the sun comes / I crumble the body / I leave the jagged void / I part the whole country / I Moses the Midwest / come children / walk through my toothed bed / to the other shore / we don’t talk about death over here / we don’t speak its name / we don’t speak of leaving / we wake up to a new day / we don’t think of who didn’t / look at me here / stretched out on this holy ground / like I’m almost human / like I’m almost worth grieving / and why not? / people have to mourn the shatter / of anything that they can / look into / and see how alive / they still are