THE POETRY COPS
COPS: Okay, we’re going to ask you again.
PAPO: Ask me again.
COPS: Most of what you told us—
PAPO: When you’re Poeting, and the feel is real, then you might as well cut the deck and deal. I’m not fronting on you right now. I’m really not. I’m just saying I found my bid to sing early; and when I found it, Judgment Day, which once ran local, announced that it was going express.
COPS: But the Readers might say—
PAPO: Ask Phat Phil, Baby Los, any of them brothers that are still around. When the bodies & blood began to add up, we were there to do the math.
COPS: Then it was your life as you saw it.
PAPO: Well, one could say it was as if my life saw me seeing my life and said, Yo, Skinicky, when you gonna tell that story about the crew? You ever break night with a brick?
COPS: Like a bad shot?
PAPO: For the record, it’s fucked up how they banned those drums in Mount Morris Park. And, now, I go uptown and try to find friends in the faces of strangers. How to arrange yourself so that the ending is right?
COPS: Who was it that said death is the mother of beauty?
PAPO: I think it was Brother Lo.
COPS: No, it was—
PAPO: What I can tell you is that Shit & Fucked Up speak Spanish too. The image has a way of making you take a stand. So, if beauty is death’s daughter, then where is that nigga’s father?
SHOUT-OUTS & BIG UPS
A Gathering of the Tribes, The Yale Review, Poetry, Green Mountains Review, 2 Bridges Review, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump, The Common, Free Verse, Sun’s Skeleton: Thanks for placing earlier versions of these poem stories in your journals and anthologies.
Vermont Studio Center, Phillips Exeter Academy, Cave Canem, East Harlem Tutorial Program, Lucas Artists Residency Program at Montalvo Arts Center, CantoMundo, Hurston/Wright Foundation, VONA/Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, City College of New York, Urban Word NYC, The Poetry Gods, Poets House, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Camaradas El Barrio, Los Gallos Social Club, the Titere Poets, Cooley High, and #PoetsforPuertoRico.
Leslie Shipman, Paul Slovak, Allie Merola, and Maria Massie: The Dream Keeper Crew.
Raymond R. Patterson, wish you were here. RIP. Like you said in ’93, a tale of the tribe. East Harlem, stand up.
Ed Randolph, the Mad Poet of Harlem. I salute you.
Poet Homies: Patrick Rosal, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Sevé Torres, Tameka Cage Conley, Tyehimba Jess, David Tomas Martinez, Major Jackson, Didi Jackson, Fernando Lorenzo, Mitch Jackson, Vincent Toro, John Murillo, Nicole Sealey, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Afaa Michael Weaver, Belinda Toomer, Michael Bennett, Marcus Jackson, Millie Gonzalez, Randall Horton, George Guida, Paul Flores, Mercy Carbonell, Joseph Rios, Javier Zamora, Greg Pardlo, Jeffery Renard Allen, Mitchell S. Jackson, Matt Miller, Ralph Sneeden, Michael Cirelli, Todd Hearon, Sami Atif, Khadijah Atif, Cameron Brickhouse, Ana Portnoy Brimmer, Denice Frohman, Noel Quiñones, and Rocio Peña. 100 shouts for weighing this brick. 100 gracias for chopping it up. 100 big ups for pushing your own bricks.
Paul Beatty, Tracy Sherrod, Renaldo Davidson, Mike Tyler, DCP, and Marie D. Brown, for always showing up at the right time.
To my children: BJ, Neruda, and Carmen. I’m not playing. Y’all better call me when you get home.
To my wife, my goddess, my everything: Sandra Perdomo, who was there the night this book made an unannounced visit. Te amo, amada mía.
JON CRISPIN
WILLIE PERDOMO is the author of The Crazy Bunch; The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Smoking Lovely, winner of the PEN/Open Book Award; and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, Poetry, and African Voices. He is currently a member of the VONA/Voices faculty, a Lucas Arts Literary Fellow, and he teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy.
*From Smoking Lovely by Willie Perdomo. Used and adapted by permission of the author. He was cool with me using this poem.
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The Crazy Bunch Page 6