Doppelgangbanger

by Cortney Lamar Charleston

  In all this motion, the pictures projected against

  the inside of my forehead start to move, solid shapes

  and colors melt—I bootleg a movie with my eyes closed:

  baseball bat smashing a box of wires;

  gold knuckles alphabetizing a threat;

  a skirmish inside a pizzeria;

  cars painted in the scheme of American flags;

  blue and collared shirts;

  a pretzel of hairy, muscular arms;

  nightstick against neck;

  white teeth clamping to stale air;

  fresh sneakers, spasmodic, levitating above the ground;

  a black pupil with no reflection;

  a black pupil with no reflection;

  a black pupil with no reflection;

  fire, the block on fire, the block hot, hot, hot.

  And in time, I’ll learn when the music is hot,

  it will look like this under the hood, under hood rules.

  Under the hood, I burn. And in the hood, I burn

  up—fight the power outage, through the blown fuse

  from running that dusty AC unit for however many

  hours, which I couldn’t count even if a clock hung from

  a wall in this room devoid of moons or from my neck,

  like a hype man’s medallion.

  Lesson for Cortney

  after Lewis Holt

  Those are traffic lights. They help stop people from

  driving into each other. That’s a crescent moon and star

  on top of that building. It means the people inside are part

  of The Nation. That’s a gas station. That’s a McDonald’s.

  That’s a Burger King. That’s a fried fish and chicken joint.

  This blue thing is a mailbox. It’s for letters. You use it when

  you have someone to write to who left. You’re right, that’s

  an old car. The window broke so they use a trash bag to keep

  the heat in or keep the cold out. This looks like a paper cut,

  son. That’s a drop of blood. It’s warm because you’re warm

  inside. That’s an ambulance for taking people to the hospital

  when they’re hurt or losing blood. Not like you did, but a lot

  more than that. That’s a police officer. That’s a gun on his hip.

  Those are dangerous. That’s a fire truck and those people riding

  on the side of it are firefighters. That’s really a church, they just

  put it inside an old store. Yes, that’s a painting of Jesus. His skin

  is different colors in different people’s houses sometimes. That’s

  a bad school. Those metal bars keep bad people out. That’s where

  grown-ups get their alcohol. Yes, kids can get candy there. This is

  money and this is money, too. Not everyone has that. Don’t pick that

  up. No, I’m not quite sure what that is. That’s a tree, son. No, I’ve never

  climbed one or wanted to. Those are probably pigeons. C’mon, you know

  that’s a belt. No, belts aren’t only for when kids are bad. This is a good school.

  This is why you’re here. This is your uniform, a blue shirt and black pants. Yes,

  that’s a picture of Jesus hanging over there. Remember what I told you about that.

  Self-Portrait as a Tea Bag

  Submerge: to harmonize with others under

  some banner, a symbolon which to place

  the prepositional phrases ofin belief, in faith.

  And the congregation sings “Wade in the Water”

  as I cleanse within an ocean of grace;

  their voices,

  distorted by a wall of liquid, sound the mouthing of the

  word whale inside my four-year-old ears,

  the whale’s voice being the frequency of waves history

  is written in to be forgotten

  more easily, if even heard at all.

  For that moment, I am lonely the way God was lonely

  after flooding the earthfor the sake of

  better. As I float,

  the pool begins to blacken as though I am several

  tea leaves rolled in a white robe.Pastor’s

  prayer silks in, through, and out of my body, getting

  it clean of the word nigger before I have ever

  heard it in the context of my type of darkness.

  As in, the darkness of skin. As in, the darkness of souls

  inside dark skin. I see the water further

  shading around me. I have to resist the temptation

  to drink all the sin I inherited back into myself,

  it being reflection to the comforting Southern brew my

  granny keeps refrigerated at all times, that my

  granddaddy gave me as a baby instead of milk.

  Back then, what it meant to be called sweet by

  a church crown: this boy is full of everything

  my diabetes can’t handle,

  everything my blood has tried to erase.

  It was the reason I was raised in a church,

  why any Richard Wright novel of a child

  is raised in church, especially in a city where gun

  and Godinterchange on the revolve of person

  and what rests in their chambersof heart.

  And either way,their circle will say:

  “We baptize you my young brother, in the name

  of the Father, in the name of the Son, in the name of

  the Holy Ghost.”Either way, make amen.

  “When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a Martyr”

  is surely a peculiar answer for any teacher to receive when

  asking a kindergartener, but on second take, what word best

  describes me—crossbreed of butterfly and Super Fly aesthetics—

  other than peculiar? I suppose calling me a keen kid would

  also suffice in explaining my avidity for the kind of death that

  progresses the narrative of a gentling history, because that’s

  the only frame for greatness I seem to find for boys my shade

  and age to aspire to, short of having the height and hops to

  touch the rim, or the bulk and burst to break through the

  defensive line like a bullet.

  And, no, I haven’t given up

  on the prospect of Bulls starting shooting guard yet, but

  the God-fearer impressed upon me begs the mythology of

  goodness delivered to the multitudes like loaves and fish;

  how King is talked about in a black Christian tradition still

  in mourning over his lost rays of light, the way mentioning

  the name of Malcolm makes mice of shady white men some

  thirty years after the shotgun and he’s sung of as a prince:

  I want to evoke that level of pride in American democracy’s

  dark downtrodden because I know what it invokes in me,

  young and impressionable, watching Denzel’s mimicry

  for the one millionth time in my abbreviated existence—

  drawing an X on my undeveloped chest, pushing it out

  into the unknown-ahead hoping a Mecca for melanin rises

  from the man-shaped hole I’d left in my loved ones’ lives.

  I bet my parents would be so proud of me.

  I bet post offices would close on my birthday.

  I bet God would dap me up

  when I got up there and Jesus—

  dying on a cross to meet me.

  Sonic & Knuckles (1994)

  for C. Latrell

  Sonic is a hedgehog: a blur, a ball of the bluest energy.

  Knuckles is an echidna: he’s a blood-red climber of rocks.

  I’m the firstborn, like a ghost of my father in childhood.

  He’s the second-born, blessed with my mother’s mouth.

  Knuckles is the echidna, a blood-red climber of rocks;

 
Sonic is known for speed—he’s my proto-protagonist,

  but am I for the boy blessed with my mother’s mouth?

  He, more likely than me, moves toward his knuckles.

  Correction: my parents were my real proto-protagonists.

  I quickly learned the game, traded obedience for freedom

  and I wonder if that pushed him toward his knuckles:

  before Shadow the Hedgehog, the kid liked the echidna.

  But because I learned how to game obedience for freedom,

  I know a shadow, to its sadness, can’t achieve autonomy;

  living in shadow has him punching walls like an echidna,

  but recall Knuckles wasn’t a real villain, just an anti-Sonic.

  Is my shadow the reason he couldn’t achieve autonomy?

  When folks say we favor, are they calling him a shadow?

  Trust me, he’s not a bad seed, just acting like an anti-Sonic

  and as I’m known by my speed to straitlace, we knuckle.

  Being told we favor must feel like getting called a shadow,

  like getting pressured to shape your life in another’s image:

  the boy known by his speed to straitlace. So we knuckle,

  but we skip out on fists: they’re proxied by clashing pixels.

  To relieve pressure, I say shape your life in another image

  but struggle when it’s not an image I think he should own,

  and that fight can never be proxied by a clashing of pixels,

  so we glitch, our laughter frozen in 16 bits. We hit reset.

  I watch him struggle with what images he should disown;

  in this way, I become a ghost of my father in fatherhood.

  Blood is glitch-prone, so sometimes our eyes will be reset:

  why looking through my feelings, Sonic’s energy is red.

  Still Life with Young Black Woman’s Face Etched into a School Desk

  Everything is everything

  What is meant to be, will be

  After winter, must come spring

  Change, it comes eventually

  —Lauryn Hill, “Everything Is Everything”

  Locks, felled like piano wires of rain over brown eyes—

  this is what I remember most clearly. And her name,

  true, either Iman, spelled like a declaration, or Yman,

  spelled like a question, and one to which I must admit

  that I don’t know: not much, not a thing at all. We are,

  or were, just a bit too young to fathom even a fraction

  of the Lord’s rationale for the workings of the world.

  During weekday mass, we said our prayers as taught

  and went back to class, our uniforms ironed onto our

  very personalities, hurriedly, with wrinkles setting into

  awkward creases. This is to say we knew when to obey,

  which was almost always, and we knew when to act out

  of our skin, in those thin moments, when, in the instinct

  of young color, we clapped our hands to the beat, sang

  along to what some right-winger would label obscenity—

  being kids first, and being satisfied with what that meant

  for three or four minutes at a time. About her life, I didn’t

  know much or why. Her grandmother was her guardian,

  arching over her like the vaults of a church. I filed that

  into a manila folder, how a social worker might, except

  I wouldn’t truly know, not deep into the bloody business

  of life back then, though there were always the gun songs

  blazing in the night like a waste of a good guitar. There were

  always the car alarms and the sirens and the sneaker prints

  stamped into the sidewalk near 83rd & Yates: a running stride.

  As they say, everything is everything, or it was, before it came

  apart at the fringes beyond our reaching hands, like dread

  hairs gone astray at the tips from touching too much water.

  To think, she could be a ghost now by any number of means,

  for any reason, good or not. Accidentally, like a pregnancy,

  or planned, like a pregnancy, and me, filled with so much

  blood, aging color, making a declaration spelled, maybe, like

  her name: I, man. She: what? Another girl gone, a whisper

  in the alley? Reclusive musician? Public defender, perhaps?

  I want to believe she’s somewhere watching the nightly news

  right now, asking a question spelled like her name might be,

  the air empty of any answer, her mind wandering, wondering

  what happened to the sweet little boy with the gap in his teeth,

  if everything is everything. Like it was. Like it ain’t and never

  really been because the wheels on that yellow bus went round

  and round, not stopping even on a drop-off. Because the sixty

  seconds from that door to the next one were our only allowed

  outside, all times otherwise spent locked inside: school, house,

  or hallelujah. So, have mercy on us. Hope we were meant to be.

  Devotion (“I Am on the Battlefield for My Lord”)

  By way of my mother, the deacon with the slick gray hair and money

  clip in his pocket can claim a percentage of my body like tithe rights.

  And on this Sunday, as with every other Sunday, he is a slender

  ebony panel in the fence of faith, one man in the company of men

  standing shoulder to shoulder in suits, tapping their toes, clapping

  their hands, putting muscle to work in the making of praise music.

  We Baptists call this devotion, my working definition of which

  is faithfulness to the light. To the extent that God is as white

  as the clouds of heaven, this theory holds. To the extent these

  particular men are dark, I must consider other possibilities:

  that God remade himself in my image so that we could be closer

  or that devotion means the commitment of black men to stand

  with one another, form a barricade of soldiers against anything

  as necessary, the Lord being the force holding them fast in line.

  It isn’t always easy for me to see these explanations as separate:

  any film, any photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. leading a march,

  with his position centered in a line of bodies covering the entire width

  of the frame—if I take a wide view of that scene, I see the Lord at

  work. If I zoom in, on a single person or the breach between two, I see

  no trace of the Lord at all, a hint that He can’t exist in small spaces.

  And what’s more, consider this:

  say Chicago PD pulls a long line of youths into the precinct for

  photographs—all of them dark, all of them wearing the same colors—

  and stands them shoulder to shoulder. Zoom in: nothing. Zoom out:

  the Lord? Why not? There’s clearly commitment there, devotion.

  They’re all definitely soldiers, on the battlefield for something:

  maybe it’s white, maybe it’s green, maybe it’s a colorless

  feeling. I’ve got no good answers, only darkness. I’m still trying

  to decipher if it means anything that Dr. King lived in Vice

  Lords territory when he spent ’66 in Chicago, that the words

  “vice” and “Lord” are affiliates, homeboys, next-door neighbors.

  I think about their coming up together in the mind of a boy

  living on that side of town, a percentage of his body, perhaps,

  claimed as a tax; I can’t shake this feeling that when he throws his

  muscles into praise music, when sound leaves his precious mouth,

  people scatter. I can’t help but believe our songs, to one another,

  would be fam
iliar, church family:

  I am on the battlefield for my Lord

  I’m on the battlefield for my Lord

  and I promised Him that I

  would serve Him till I die

  till I die, till I die, till I die

  Still Life with Light-Skinned Rapper Wearing Newsboy Cap

  The way my dad speaks of the event, it must have represented

  a wrong corner being turned: says they found his friend Nathan

  facedown on the sidewalk near the liquor store, soul frozen in

  the puddle that is the human body, and his as cold as the pole

  at the intersection holding the traffic light, because this is the

  South Side of Chicago, because this is Roseland, because this is

  the winter of 19…

  not too far from Grandpa’s bungalow on State Street.

  Where he used to live, anyway. That house always had a

  peculiar smell, I thought: thoroughly clean yet sterile the

  way I imagine a ghost is in the nostrils. For me, it was a

  museum of everything I was but didn’t fully understand.

  For my father, it was the womb filled with echoes of

  my grandma clattering pots and pans in the kitchen.

  For my grandpa, it was purgatory, something she escaped

  but he didn’t. Besides those things, it was a just another

  home in a notorious neighborhood. Whenever I went over

  there, I always had to ask my father for some commentary.

  He would tell me about playing ball over at Abbott Park,

  how all the adults policed the neighborhood and anybody’s

  mama could lawfully punish you, how fights would break

  out but nobody broke out the guns unless they wanted to

  admit they were a coward. He loves his hood, but it doesn’t

  love him back anymore. Most of the folks he knew are long

  gone: either moved out or were on the losing end of spades.

  The only thing that looks familiar is the way boys crowd the

  corner, there no matter the time of day, or if a classroom is

  open nearby. It never made him nervous back then, but things

  have changed, he says. And they have in the most important ways:

  he has two sons now, and the eldest, judging by that new rap

  CD he keeps in rotation, has soul beyond his years, as if it had