by a brother’s balled up hand if not a black hole hollowing
a black body after a star is born inside a barrel of steel?
In economics, as applied to the urban—increasingly
the suburban—is there anything more scarce than love?
How do you price a kilo of that? Would somebody
gut you for a bag of the purest anybody can find?
Here is why I have no answer:
because I never needed sell myself short of profit. Because
my mother made enough for me to feel enough. Because
my father made me in his image, with his hands. Because
I made straight A’s, a strong return on their investment—
after all, it’s the black child’s burden to always know what
they cost somebody, though I forget how many thousands
of tax dollars it takes per year to keep one locked behind bars.
To keep one out? Some love. Hundreds of stacks of thousands 77
in loans to get that elite college degree, and my parents are short
on something valuable or another between the two of them, so
I hedge. Hustle. Sell myself to my future self, borrowing time,
in theory, the way borrowing guap goes, if not a third me gently
into the night, a Glock in my invisible hand and no immediate
faith in God, or anyone else, to deliver me my daily breadbasket—
my lip line drawn straight on the horizontal
like something out of a textbook. Indifferent.
Ode to FAFSA
Skimming school pamphlets, I’m convinced books cost more
than drugs do; I’ve got an expensive habit and hold myself
in high enough regard that I want paid what’s owed to me for
the labor of achieving despite the gymnastics of their logic
trying to both flip me out and flip me off at the same time,
but these universities are still saying that I need to pay up.
I know my parents can’t pay the sticker price for prestige.
And I certainly can’t pay, not out of pocket with pennies,
but with a promissory note and key discount we can maybe
make it happen for the kid this Christmas and the next few.
(And before you ask, no, I’m no ghetto boy though
I’ve wanted to be at various times for foolish reasons
including right now and for more money, ironically.)
So, convoluted paper-god, provider of divine deductions,
make it so the trustees make it rain all over me like manna,
because I’m not above using my body to make a little extra
money, because that’s how all bodies end up being used,
whether we’re talking about the mind or the muscle matter.
I’m placing my faith in math on this one, in the numbers, like
my granddaddy making a play at the corner store, looking for
a cash-out, a jackpot, being made a slight jackass of when it
never comes back big enough or even back at all: you wouldn’t
play me like that would you? That would be so cruel. To even
get to this point I had to go through years of being glossed over,
endure getting called out of my color and back into it so quickly
and often, depending on what was most convenient for them
at the time, every time always convenient for some purpose.
I’m telling you, it damn near made a thug of me, like they
wanted, and had it, then I wouldn’t be here now—like they
wanted—on the cusp of a kind of comeuppance for them,
a come up for me, so please, dear financial-filibuster buster,
steer me through this ambition. Take the wheel of fortune
in your hands. Let this be when capitalism shows mercy.
Better yet, let it die and blackness recoup: merci beaucoup.
On Recidivism
In hard times we fall on habit, or so shows the research,
all the academic literature, and my look backwards into
the texts of their troubled lives, even into my own text
messages from these past three years overpopulated with
ellipses and silences. I’m knee-deep in a thesis on the cyclical
nature of imprisonment, which means that, statistically speaking,
I’m knee-deep in an exploration of negritude, which is likewise
an interior study with unflattering results. Survey says I fall
back on withdrawal like my interviewees fall back on the block
when nobody is willing to hire them legitimately; all of us are
socially isolated but with me it is slightly different as I have
the vocabulary my professors have given me to describe and
define it, one that white people can understand, in theory. But
racism is more their problem to bear than mine at the moment.
What unsettles me is undiagnosed, mixed into the cocktail
of my blood with an angst about the future—where I will find
myself, where I will find the money, where I will find love
if I believe I’ve already found it here. How selfish, how silly and
straight sucka of me to think this way when I don’t have to get
my hands dirty like they do, be it in the dirt planting grass seed or
selling a little bit of grass on the side. I sit at my keyboard and type
a sentence about nonviolent offenses. I sit at my keyboard and type
an e-mail pleading for financial assistance to finish school. We play
phone tag, the lot of us: with each other, with God, and that’s just
how all the stories get committed to the ethnography. Blacks are
incarcerated at five times the rate of whites in Philadelphia. I type.
Blacks make up 66 percent of Philly’s daily prison population. I type.
I pick up my phone and send a text. I’d have nowhere to go but
back. If I don’t get this degree, survey says I was all for nothing.
Ode to the Paycheck
Blessing. “All good” pass in lieu of hood pass. Legal tender
that makes me tender: more sensitive to swings in the market,
more susceptible to swings in mood. When the money is
funny, nobody actually laughs, including my cornball self,
and on a related note, fisticuffs is no laughing matter but
is a funny word to use in casual conversation, in my opinion.
Now, I’m not trying to suggest money is the only reason
marriage didn’t work out for them, or might not for us, but
it’s also not smart to gloss over something that’s drawn
guns into people’s hands like a black gravity, and black
not in the sense of a race of people with which I run but
black in the sense of evil, though English is designed such
that the two meanings converge, such that it’s important
for a black man to be on payroll somewhere that the feds
can watch by way of an Employer Identification Number,
where he has a desk and telephone his life partner can call
to make sure he’s not messing around in the streets all day.
And again, it is a blessing to be moderately safe between the
hours of 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. at least—completely safe I’d
say if there’s no reason to step outside the office complex
for food, though in thinking like this, like I don’t look how
I look, like business isn’t one major sport white men dominate,
I’m probably selling violence short. I suppose, in some strange
way, this slip of paper tethers me to the way out, shapes me
a superior slave by granting me fuller freedom; it’s a biweekly
ain’t that
’bout a bitch I somehow manage to do for the culture,
no cure for racial poverty but a treatment I’ll damn well take
because mama ain’t raise no fool nor a trust fund, trust that.
“I Ain’t Mean to Scare You, Lil’ Nigga,”
he conveyed to me after turning the corner from the ATM to where
I stood with a switchblade made of sharp breaths in my right hand,
but, to keep it 100, I saw about as much fright in him as I saw fight
in me. What shook me, instead, was a psychic dissonance, a neurospasm
in the split second I spied that I cast two shadows at once and
wandered at light’s speed all possible outcomes of this encounter:
me, hurt and/or dying, right outside my door, just as the sun downs.
But, honestly, this ain’t that type of story since I’m still here to tell it.
For what it’s worth, he wanted a dollar I could spare and the damn
I couldn’t, and that day I thought he was asking too much of me,
tried to ensnare my lyric-loving heart in the beat and rhymes of his
so-said life when I had myself, at that point, given up on the persona
of poet, a person who could potentially express love for someone
from the wide world beyond their own small sphere of influencers.
And therein lies the shame of it all, I feel: how I’d become so small
in my time away from those whose limits I knew that I could even
fit in his pleading mouth without him choking on the whole of me,
and a fool will say that sounds suspect, would agree with what some
past acquaintances suggested when I wouldn’t bull over somebody
who threw threats of red in my face, but listen—what I’m getting at
is that I’m not bulletproof and know it; I’m an eggshell with an ego
inside, painted a shade of brown with some cream in its complexion.
I hear my mom’s voice and scramble like a pay channel that wasn’t
paid for this month. My patience pops sometimes when I talk to him:
Pops, onomatopoeia of my genes. I go off; I snap on my siblings as
if they’re instrumentals though I can’t spit in any lucrative sense,
just as I can’t really tell her how this will work out when we speak
on the phone late at night, the tides of adulthood pulling us gently
separate like slight rowboats, trying to sink us under flooding doubt.
O, lil’ nigga of my life, how does one deal with all this angst, all
this unrest and arresting of concern? I’ve kept my head on straight
for this long. I try to do the right thing, I really do, but that got
my big cousin killed down here, helping out that poor woman,
years ago, as my granny reminded when I first said I was taking
a gig in Atlanta tracking sales of coca leaves. Twisted thing is,
I’d never slept better than I did that same night. I’ve always been
more comfortable being remembered fondly than being needed.
Acknowledgments
First, let me begin by saying thank you, lovely reader, for living with these poems. Nothing could be more personally rewarding or affirming than knowing that you decided to give these poems your time and care when you could have been doing any number of other things.
This book could not exist without the enduring love and support of my wife, Ruani; my parents, Vincent and Pamela; my siblings: Cameron, Camille and Calah; and the rest of my family. Thank you all, always, for your belief in me and for your never-ending encouragement. All I want to do in life is make you proud.
I extend my gratitude, also, to my dearest homies who have held me down in my lowest moments and been their to celebrate the greatest joys, and I also thank the poets who have inspired me to persevere in language and in life: I refrain from placing the long list of names here so as not to exclude anyone unintentionally, but you know who you are, and I cherish you. Thank you for teaching me and inspiring me to be the best version of myself I can possibly be. I hope that I hold you as securely as you’ve held me.
Excelano Project: thank you for finding me and helping me find myself. Cave Canem: thank you for helping me find the confidence and the conviction.
Haymarket gang, y’all have been amazing through this entire process. When this collection found its way to you, it found a home in the truest sense. I want to give a special note of thanks to Nate Marshall, Kevin Coval, Maya Marshall, Aricka Foreman and Jim Plank for taking such great care of this project and for believing in its merit and potential, even in those moments when I myself doubted.
Finally, I must note that the poems comprising this collection have generously been published by a number of journals and magazines ahead of their appearance here, some with variations in the text or with different titles. Thank you to those publications who gave first homes to these poems as listed:
32 Poems: “Grand Street”; “Sonic & Knuckles (1994)”
AGNI: “Dissplacement”; “Etymology of Hoochie Mama”
African American Review: “Animal Phat Farm”; “Jim Opus [jim oh-puh s]”
Ambit: “Genesis 10:11”
Barrelhouse: “The Attitude Era”
Chiron Review: “Still Life with the Color Orange”
Common: “Lesson for Cortney”; “Moving Day (New Kids in the Neighborhood)”; “Still Life with Black Boy’s Face Overlaying Project Buildings”
Crab Orchard Review: “Still Life with Torso of Cornrowed Neo-Soul Sanger”
Crazyhorse: “A Character Solemnly Torn”; “Newton’s Third Law / Negritude’s First Law”
Drunk in a Midnight Choir: “Hip-Hop Introspective [Ninth grader, and I’m still very unsure if sex is]”; “Still Life with Crooked Painting and Bullet Holes in Grayscale”
Ecotone: “Doppelgangbanger”; “(Sub)Urban Dictionary”; “Thugonomics”
Forklift, Ohio: “Grand Theft Auto III (2001)”; “Jesus Piece”; “Ode to FAFSA”; “Ode to the Paycheck”
Fractal Literary Magazine: “Still Life with Woman and Balloons in Noir”
FreezeRay Poetry: “Hip-Hop Introspective [Starting point: South Side, Chicago. Mid-90s.]”; “Still Life with the Dropout Bear Sitting in the Stands”
Gulf Coast: “Family and Consumer Sciences”; “Triggernometry”
Image: “Psalm for P.”
Iowa Review: “Jumpman: A Ghazal with Pivots”
Juked: “Apologia with a Pregnancy Test and a Weeping Jesus”; “Keep Your Mouth Shut”
Kenyon Review: “Etymology of Gangsta”
Kinfolks: A Journal of Black Expression: “A Can of Murray’s Pomade, 1990–Present”
Lunch Ticket: “Self-Portrait as a Chicken Dinner”
Missouri Review: “No Weapon Formed Against Me Shall Prosper”; “On Recidivism”
Nation: “Self-Portrait as a Shadow”
New England Review: “Still Life with Young Black Woman’s Face Etched into a School Desk”
Normal School: “Self-Portrait as a Tea Bag”
North American Review: “White History Month”
Prelude: “‘I Like My Women Like I Like My Cars,’”; “Louis Vuitton Timber-lands”; “The Love Song of Percy Sledgehammer”; “Waves”
POETRY: “Devotion (‘I Am on the Battlefield for My Lord’)”; “Elegy for a False Sense of Security”; “The Unauthorized Autobiography of Jung Thug”; “‘When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a Martyr’”
Rattle: “A Brief History of Poetry”
RHINO: “Gangsters, Disciples”
Rupture: “Giving Dap”; “‘I Ain’t Mean to Scare You, Lil’ Nigga,’”
Spillway: “Hip-Hop Introspective [Summer is the fever of a year and it refuses to break,]”
Storyscape Literary Journal: “Still Life with Light-Skinned Rapper Wearing Newsboy Cap”; “Still Life with Skateboarding Rapper Orbited
by Nerd Paraphernalia”
TriQuarterly: “A Brief History of Violence”
Washington Square Review: “The Ballad of Addy Walker: An African-American Girl Story”
Word Riot: “Still Life with Kendrick Lamar’s Mama’s Van”
Additionally, “Devotion (‘I Am on the Battlefield for My Lord’)” later appeared in Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2020) and “A Brief History of Poetry” later appeared in Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016). My deep gratitude goes to the editors of these anthologies for including me among all the other incredible voices.
About the Author
Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Cave Canem fellow from the Chicago suburbs. His debut collection, Telepathologies, won the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by D. A. Powell. He began writing and performing poetry as a member of The Excelano Project when he was an undergraduate studying business economics and urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His poetry is a marriage between art and activism, and a call for a more involved and empathetic understanding of the diversity of the human experience. In 2017, Charleston was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He currently serves as poetry editor at the Rumpus.
About Haymarket Books
Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago. Our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, international left.
We take inspiration and courage from our namesakes, the Haymarket martyrs, who gave their lives fighting for a better world. Their 1886 struggle for the eight-hour day—which gave us May Day, the international workers’ holiday—reminds workers around the world that ordinary people can organize and struggle for their own liberation. These struggles continue today across the globe—struggles against oppression, exploitation, poverty, and war.
Since our founding in 2001, Haymarket Books has published more than five hundred titles. Radically independent, we seek to drive a wedge into the risk-averse world of corporate book publishing. Our authors include Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Rebecca Solnit, Angela Y. Davis, Howard Zinn, Amy Goodman, Wallace Shawn, Mike Davis, Winona LaDuke, Ilan Pappé, Richard Wolff, Dave Zirin, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Nick Turse, Dahr Jamail, David Barsamian, Elizabeth Laird, Amira Hass, Mark Steel, Avi Lewis, Naomi Klein, and Neil Davidson. We are also the trade publishers of the acclaimed Historical Materialism Book Series and of Dispatch Books.
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