Doppelgangbanger

by Cortney Lamar Charleston

  Then, when she came to visit me, her hair would

  be slightly out of character, having just climbed

  all the precinct stairs. I’d tell them inside:

  “it’s flour.” By that point, she wouldn’t ask me

  or have a dollar. She’d be        stumbling through

  legal fees and all life else—residuals of my bastard presence.

  Animal Phat Farm

  ... the quarreling and biting and jealousy which had been normal

  features of life … had almost disappeared.

  —George Orwell, Animal Farm

  Almost

  all niggas are fly, but some niggas are flyer than others.

  This is law like how all squares are rectangles but not

  all rectangles are squares. Collapse that: some niggas are

  squares. Some need the threads to carry the conversation,

  the freshest cuts of fabric currying favor for their flavor,

  and that’s the bare minimum to establish blackness as

  his mind’s orientation. Regarding crack sales, B.I.G.

  left behind ten commandments but the boys went and

  settled on a cool seven to truly see if skin is kin, two

  being the designer wear and flyness-inequality edicts

  already stressed. The rest: whatever approaches with

  two raised fists is a hater that must be dealt with swiftly;

  whatever goes up on four legs, or has wings, gets chopped

  up and fried for dinner in the grease trap; no nigga shall

  put sleep or studying above the pursuit of sex; no nigga

  shall refuse to sip the reddest Kool-Aid; no real one shall

  be killed on the court, or on the field, or on the joysticks

  on multiplayer mode, or in any situation where somebody

  can corroborate his apparent inadequacy, strip him down

  to the most supreme stereotype and then deny, deny, deny.ss

  Etymology of Gangsta

  And here the original one saying hello to my little friend is

  my own hand, oh so carefully cradling my equipment like

  an athletic cup though likewise being a boast toward the boy

  in the mirror that is black but ain’t buck, his jaw literally

  glass and needing to be freed of nerve, made to feel nada.

  It takes hard practice to accept the grammar of the G’s body

  language as second nature, to represent physically how the slick

  replacement of the –er sound with an –uh sound simultaneously

  implies more effortless and more ruthless. Eric “Eazy-E” Wright

  of all people once lunched in George H. W. Bush’s White House,

  so don’t tell me about dead ends; don’t tell me about the dead

  since I’m clearly one of the realest alive.

  All my life church ladies have said glorify, glorify, glorify and

  that was game if I ever heard it: as I see it, in a bigoted society,

  I’ve either got the respect that the homies give me or I’ve got

  no respect at all, plus God forgives anyway and Jesus was black

  like dude that played Nino Brown. Name a better way to make

  through the cold, cruel world than this; we didn’t write the rules

  governing our lives, so we have to break them all on principle.

  It’s been said sweet-singing Frank Sinatra ran with the Mafia;

  Al Capone’s picture hangs on the wall at Portillo’s and you

  want to tell me the country has beef with crime when it really

  only has beef with me and mines.

  What didn’t click with Ice Cube ’n nem in y’all’s heads is exactly

  what did in ours. Since you gave us hate when we wanted justice

  something had to come of it: remember energy is neither created

  nor destroyed, fool. So what if I’m a ruffian who would only wear

  a suit to my own funeral? Go on, throw that salt somewhere else.

  I’m your gross, domestic product, America. A lie you sold yourself.

  Only my mama can judge me, and you wouldn’t believe what I’m

  buying her as soon as I get on:

  paradise, paradise, paradise—

  a big-ass crib, a white maid.

  Still Life with Crooked Painting and Bullet Holes in Grayscale

  I re-route Wi-Fi signals with hair

  curled like copper wire. I talented

  tenth, top one percent of my high

  school class. I type of teacher’s pet,

  some special black mascot running

  laps on a spinning wheel. I tongue

  English with a train track switch,

  proper syntax and sin against it

  separately with kin-skin. I shoot

  the basketball as well as white

  boys do. I jump when I feel like it.

  I politically correct fools without

  pity, left-hand strong-arm the whole

  debate. I Palestinian sympathize.

  I stan for equality of marriage and

  pay in opposite of Slim Shady. I

  grassy knoll know-it-all, act a bold

  question of trifling men. I prorate

  COINTELPRO coin for our big

  payback. I conspiracy of dead slaves

  given bones to fall back on. I flag

  America like football referees for

  penalties recorded in blood. I try to

  tackle black girls with my chapped

  lips and miss them all. I gospel rock

  and two-step. I thuggish-ruggish

  on some ham bones. I put a suit on

  and shake their hands, thank you

  sir and ma’am. I pull my pants up

  high and then I let them sag.

  (Sub)Urban Dictionary

  I think there’s a little white man inside all of us.

  Though my look precedes me, in this case,

  I’m not talking about the shack-creeping slave master

  but the crown-funded discoverer of pre-existing things,

  the explorer of the exotic via means aquatic or terrestrial.

  Oh lookie here, another settlement by a river—between two rivers,

  in fact. Fresh off the boat of the skies, I walk among the savage

  appetites tearing into thin steak strips and Cheez Whiz with

  pointed teeth. How they strut, I study. The men dress their faces

  in bales of black hair from cheek to cheek; the women braid

  or lock or unlock or under-tuck theirs beneath the most humble and

  homely cloths. My ears snag on the rusty dialect like fabric; my eyes

  widen when I recognize the continent staring me back in the ego,

  a vowel and three consonants exact:

  J-A-W-N. Entry, dated 2003: a person, place, or thing.

  Oh lookie here: I’ve been

  a person, a place,

  a thing.

  It used to be they would put every rap record in my mouth

  and press play. It used to be my body was Africa herself,

  something with boundaries they didn’t understand. It used to be

  “Charleston Chew” or “C-Murder” they’d call me in place of

  my mother’s wishes. See murder:

  first entry, the killing of another human being under conditions

  specifically covered in law, I explain; second entry, slang, something

  extremely difficult or perilous, I explain; third entry, a group

  or flock of crows, I explain; I explain, explain, explain the world

  while they circle ominously, in omen, oh man, I really want them

  to just go away, or that I fade away, or they catch the fade from me,

  or hair clippers give me a fade and they can’t recognize me anymore,

  except for the savagery, of course—measured in melanin and
/>   my talent for tearing through the meat of grammar with my teeth:

  fools got me tweakin’ off this ghetto glossary gimmick fo’ real. 23

  Them, always taking my word to take my word: jockin’, jackin’—

  whatever. Just let me live where I live is what I say, or be trying to.

  Dissplacement

  Come. Come dear

  stranger. Look into my life and witness what has become a kind

  of motif for my particular existence. What started in childhood

  has carried through to college like the habit of studying; as I did

  back then, I mull the young men and women around me through

  two corrective lenses. On quiet nights I visit their various rooms,

  press my sorry face through TV screens stuck on static in attempts

  to introduce myself: get scrambled into a mix of black and white

  pixels, my melanin utterly unreliable in helping place me into a

  “fux with” or “don’t fux with” box on the fly. Where I’m from

  has always been the harder question for me to answer than why

  I’m from there: the aspirational cultural cliché of better schools,

  less crime, less violence, less us but only because they would

  never allow any more, which is an incomplete truth that we use

  to convince ourselves we haven’t left our own behind, including

  ourselves in a metaphysical sense. Every place I’ve ever been

  I’ve touched like a friendly ghost, and not that of a boy who bit

  the bullet with his chest but one who died of natural causes and

  got lost on the way to heaven for not having his smartphone to

  look up a map or a city grid to deduce the direction. Try dialing

  me sometime, actually. My area code falls outside the boundaries

  of the place I most cherish but can’t claim more than a fraction

  of my impeccable rearing, and wouldn’t anyway; yet that exact

  same phone number doesn’t lead me anywhere I feel safe being

  anything less than exceptional, which is certainly not a home or

  hospice one visits to find peace, and that’s before I consider what

  the house has become in my absence. And all of this is to say that

  I don’t know what to say anymore or never did. I don’t know what

  I did to deserve being looked through as though my organs aren’t

  here to hide my naked blood. That’s how it feels, truly, so believe

  me when I tell you this: there really is no hell on Earth quite like

  standing right in front of you.

  Elegy for a False Sense of Security

  Tell me how you entered this poem, how you even got in

  here. Where my parentals come from is where I’m coming from

  and where where I’m coming from is from we lock the front door

  and the back and the side and can’t spare a single extra key. Where

  where I’m coming from is from we shut all the windows tight like

  our eyes to an ugly view: a jail if I ever saw one, and maybe I did,

  and maybe that was enough for me. Maybe you made the mistake,

  by coming here. Unannounced. Uninvited. It takes a lot of talent

  to step in someone’s crib and be welcomed without any alarms

  going off, so shake your ass something dangerous if you can,

  sing me a song real sexy-like or be suck out of luck if I feel

  like shooting strangers today. If home is where the heart is

  then four red bullet wounds across the chest of the city’s flag

  say everything there is about my feelings toward you and

  the whole damn world right now. Because it was my own

  blood this time and yet I’m still here, and the funny thing

  about that town and this one is that they both burned down

  once. And down the hall they’re burning bud and I want some

  kinda sorta but without the friends. Which makes you foe,

  I suppose, as if you are the presence of all colors and I am

  the absence of said colors. But maybe I got it backwards,

  twisted it all up. It just hurts to have my hair pulled even if

  it’s by my own hand. My mind is spinning blanks inside every

  chamber; everywhere I turn on the TV they’re shooting boys

  like what I used to be before I wasn’t anymore and when did that

  happen? And what am I now? Are you the phantom or me, me

  or none of the above? The last shadow I cast on a sunny Sunday

  stole my wallet and bought this gun and all the rounds and all

  the rounds at the bar, too. Where I’m coming from, when in love:

  squeeze. When lonely, loan yourself some time and don’t pay it

  back. Beware, because I’m both lonely and in love like the living

  embodiment of the code switch. I’m polluted air and poisoned water

  and whatever else they say except when I say I’m not and I’m not

  one to play for a fool for the record. Fear me. I’m godly and I’m just

  and just get the hell out demon and do come again. Come again:

  it’s my igneous ire toward you that keeps me a live wire, and alive.

  Newton’s Third Law / Negritude’s First Law

  To at least one force I’m equal

  in magnitude and opposite in direction,

  a law of motion enveloped in a man.

  Swagger, sway—whatever you want to call it,

  it’s scientific. Measurable, if not quantifiable. Fixed,

  if not stationary. Gravitational. Unfuckwitable.

  I praise and cuss by parting the same lips

  and there’s not one thing you can say to

  persuade me that God doesn’t like gangsters

  or appreciate their habitual leans.

  It’s not stated explicitly in Genesis, but

  He had to come from nothing, too. He gets it,

  as does His son who ran the streets with whores,

  who were just women until men pulled wordswords

  out of their itchy throats.

  I know these types, speaking as if to scratch,

  always so willing to dress you down to

  your holey drawers and socks, getting lost

  in some idea of respect, getting off on power

  like a light switch standing erect.

  Merely by breathing I disavow and distance them.

  I danger up a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

  I dance around their burning straw man

  pedaling backwards on the balls of my feet.

  I ball by any means necessary; they banish

  me to be in absentia until I make bail. But

  no boo hoo here; I won’t cry over spilled

  blood anymore. I steady my base, build

  momentum at the hips, and swing through

  the me behind the me you see to get to you.

  II.

  Genesis 10:11

  for C. Janise

  An awkward time in life is learning what a boy’s boy-parts can do

  just as a new baby enters the house to everyone’s surprise. This

  symmetry in sequencing is not to say anything of preteen pregnancy—

  God forbid—though it’s true the human body speaks in blood and

  bone density what language tries to catch up to with labels: attributions,

  implications of ownership or responsibility. The textbook says there’s

  a difference between a father and a brother, biologically speaking, but

  know this: parenting is an unlicensed practice, which is precisely why

  any fool like me can do it, and she was unsolicited my parents tell me

  but never knew of my bedside prayer that night of the full-bellied moon

  that she would come make o
ur tribe more evenly divisible; thus three kids

  became four, two boys and two girls to file as love dependents, and since

  I asked for this when I could’ve asked for a growth spurt or my first kiss,

  I feel I bear a certain weight for her, partly due to her growing each and

  every day, becoming heavier to hold with my hands, in my arms, even

  in the name I was given a chance to pick for her and did from the front of

  the Bible. But still, I know most of the holding is in the upward direction

  and height of my hopes for her, in the eleven earthly years between us

  that are tanks of experience, of wisdom she can draw out like oxygen, air.

  It’s sort of weird and maybe unfair to say, but with some of my own ways,

  she could become an heir—to the unrepentant love of video games and

  Japanese animation, the dismissal of juvenile company—though those

  only reading complexion will claim she takes after her real daddy, and

  mine, missing her look up to me. I, however, can’t afford to do the same.

  Apologia with a Pregnancy Test and Weeping Jesus

  It happens with a splash of urine, and then a condemnation:

  a tiny red cross that means with child. Prior that, it’s two

  bodies—church girl, boy that won’t pull his pants up—rubbing

  tectonically in dark rooms, on the backseat of a Buick, making

  barnyard noises: I know that. And this is, what, the second or

  third baby? And I’ve never seen him, or them, come through

  these sanctuary doors on their knees, bowing their heads,

  begging for mercy squeezed from vined fruit, not one time.

  Every strong black woman, every preacher I know has told me

  this is how our men destroy, and I don’t want to be the kind of

  Negro that does the easy thing: trifling. My voice, though not

  ripened, shows resolve, unnerves the young woman’s mother

  when I, the golden boy, ask about marriage and why it hasn’t

  happened yet. That I don’t grasp, or couldn’t grasp back then.

  What I did: Mary was a pregnant teen, but also a virgin. Jesus