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.
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