belonged to someone he grew up with that never grew to be
his age. Common sense says you have to be careful with boys
like that: they always try to find out where they come from.
Moving Day (New Kids in the Neighborhood)
after Norman Rockwell
I pack my entire life into a box and then: checkmark.
Census says there are few like us where we’re going—
a land of milk. We are a posse as much as we are a family
of five, complexions of common connotation and towing
a dog that looks like a coyote, even our minivan the
color of a slur. As we roll deeply down the unfamiliar
highway, I look through the tinted window and make
inferences; I’ve got a knack for naming the makes of cars,
but realize the further we get from familiar roads, the more
foreign the brands: Japanese luxuries, German, Italian; had
I been just two years older I’d recognize this as, possibly,
the makings of a war. Instead, the grass distracts me—
the abundance of it, the fresh diagonal cuts striping it
with a touch of shade on every plot, sprinklers spitting on
opposite sides of the smooth street. The houses themselves
are clearly of the same pedestrian mind; a sense of order is
baked into the architecture, the condition of park land, and
somehow, this causes disturbance in me I fear replicating.
Kids, who appear to be about my age, run between the
gateless yards; some bicycle with helmets and kneepads on,
mothers policing from behind. When we pull up to the bricks
that belong to us from now on, I pause a moment to take in
the size compared to what I’ve known; the world, apparently,
can’t be as small as the saying goes. The driveway is a long
shadow of the lanes we’ve stayed in to get here with a big
mailbox at the end. It reminds me of the address I couldn’t
memorize for giving away. I wait forever for letters that never
come, or at least till dark. I can’t recall if the boys across the
street spoke to me that first day, or if they just watched me
stand there, patiently, from some immeasurable distance.
I recall a large, empty room with light carpet, almost
white. I recall starting to unpack my box: looking inside and
it being so dark I couldn’t be sure the bottom even existed.
White History Month
formally begins on February 1st and concludes January 31st.
You can always tell when it’s that time of year, what with all
the flattering commercials, the rampant TV documentaries,
the dedicated Jeopardy! category everybody breezes through
with their Washingtons, Twains, and Rockefellers instead of
tackling more difficult subjects such as astrophysics. Now,
on such an episode of Jeopardy!, were Alex Trebek to read,
“This twentieth-century historian, author, and journalist pioneered
celebration of the precursor to modern White History Month,”
“Who is Carter G. Woodson?” would be both the correct and
incorrect response. The most amusing thing about Jeopardy!
is that, to its three contestants, it frames questions as answers
and answers as questions, and in such a setup the pale truth
can be lost inside technical fact and suppressive spotlights.
Frankly, the founder of the historical-cultural celebration
known as White History Month isn’t one man, but a strange
phenomenon of physics—a rip in spacetime we’re pulled to
by a form of gravity. I’m not sure if Einstein would agree, but
I believe a black hole can be as small as the space in the lips
of a blue-eyed boy’s mouth mid-question, as he innocently
inquires with our Social Studies teacher as to why there’s not
a Black History Month. I don’t even hear the explosion before
I’m sucked from my chair into a chasm behind his teeth where
light doesn’t exist. I’m not sure if skin color can even survive
where light can’t but, in that void, my voice to say or sing sweet
songs that spirited away slaves from their sufferings would be
reduced to a vibration only sonar reads. To confirm, I’d have to
wait for that same boy to spit me out to the other side, which is
a perfect copy except for the color of the question itself—not
its asker, or answerer, or the calendar thumbtacked to the wall
with other cheesy curriculum-themed decor, though I see on
the banner above the chalkboard that WHITE was scrawled
over a word I ache inside of every day, on every side. I guess
in either universe, my peanut allergy isn’t solely fit for game
show trivia; maybe what makes my body too sick to process it
is the same thing making George Washington Carver notable—
and though it’s good I alerted my teacher the first day of school,
maybe she just saw me and knew. I bet she saw me and knew.
Still Life with Black Boy’s Face Overlaying Project Buildings
Hall of Famer Frank Thomas, from 1990 to 2005,
hit 448 home runs over the fence for the White Sox
with the notorious Robert Taylor Homes standing just
beyond ballpark grounds across the Dan Ryan Expressway:
the high-rises, bruises against the city-flag-blue sky,
eyesores. When the last tower came down, I don’t remember
the president, the mayor, or any other politician standing
in front of the rubble with a megaphone vowing to get
the ones who did this; incrimination isn’t done quite so
publicly here, plus a project is a project is a project.
Whenever folks rolled to Comiskey, they saw those towers
and thought of G-Baby from Hardball, comedic little black boy
baseball player shot outside a building that looked sort of
just like those; Keanu Reeves’s character was kind of torn up
about the whole thing. Good riddance!—their one Red Line
train of thought, tears in their blue and green eyes. Hood
riddance, too. As we drive past, I glimpse the ghost of my young
face in the car window, overlaying the empty lot with reflection.
It’s a place where many people died but many, many, many more
lived. Those are the folks I identify with: I know what it’s like
to live; I have no idea what it means to die—I guess I’m not black
in that way. I’m, as they say, “blessed and highly favored.”
Triggernometry
For
you, the
first triangle:
Father and Son and
Holy Ghost, and you hear
from everybody Southern fried in
your life the devil be a master mimic—
be a mathematician speaking the language
of the boot that kicked him out of those pearly
gates. And you’re smart, so you take notes: sanctuary
sits between 108th & 109th Streets on Halsted. That’s in
The Hundreds, high numbers, too many names of dead boys
for you to count, and your church sits locked behind an iron gate,
black like both sides it divides. Both sides root for a basketball team
that ran the triangle offense all the way to glory, and Jordan is God to
this day, and people have died for his feet, so many over the years, nobody
counts. And Chicago is the angle between sides, between brothers:
a tangent of death. You question if the letters in your textbook
are pronounced sign or sin. You know the devil be a shape
shifter. Nothing about this particular triangle is right.
You’re smart. You take notes: see that same shape
in your history class drawn in red, a long trail of
blood between Africa, Europe, and America
that gives the ocean a crooked mouth on
the map. It speaks to you, begs an old
practiced recall: slaves obey thy
masters. And you’re smart,
so you realize that all of
you Southern frieds
have been had,
are owned to
this very
day:
it’s all algebra, trig-, you say,
jotting your name boldly
atop your test, that
test itself being
just another
A+ plus—
plus.
Jumpman: A Ghazal with Pivots
In a city where bird is basketed on a bed of white bread and french fries,
flyness is predicated on what emblem is rocked on feet, see: Jumpman.
Gospel’s basis begins by testimony, always. In this case, He: Jumpman.
God disguised as Michael Jordan, quipped the man nicknamed Legend.
It’s gotta be the shoes, right? Gravity-defiers. Deifiers, for real. The way
he hangs crooked in the air as a hanged man’s neck. He got jumps, man!
The latest pair released. Bad move: these kids just might be jumped, man.
Tongue sticking out: how boys brashly walk windy streets when they got
them things, three digits easy. He makes shoes for Republicans, too. Puffs
cigars, clipping balls off tees. Logo of a personality: he been jumped, man.
Posts up. Double-teamed. Kicks out. Re-posts. Three dribbles in. Fakes right.
Pivots baseline. Fades away. Defender? High enough? He can’t jump, man!
Hoop. Ear ring. Peddle cologne. Open restaurants. Eat free: like Jumpman.
All I want to do is ball. Be at least six feet, six inches tall. Wear that gold.
Die. I’m a kid, you see. I got dreams of mansion wings. Let me jump, man!
Don’t start talking to me about sweatshops. Wife-cheating. Rolling loaded—
another pair snatched off a body: should’ve ducked, but he jumped, man.
If I could be like Mike!, choirboys sing, but come June His phone just rings.
He came back a second time, but with no growth spurt in sight, I minded to
bookish things: ballistics, statistics, saving lives. A better me jumped, man.
Jim Opus [jim oh-puh s]
[2nd Period, Honors English
during class reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]
* * * * *
pale people can’t even imagine
nigger
loveus loving our families
my mompushed me out
nigger
and thatwas history
she and my dad took me out of
nigger
schoolnow I can read
an acclaimed book with
nigger
inside itand I am blessed by
slave sharecropper blood
the pigment of ink
coiled into alphabet
a manner of celebrating
commending complimenting
my blackassness as precious metal
counting me in Du Bois’s fraction
giving me deed to my industrious
mindthe “gap” between my
Jim
bodyand an idea to hire
niggasas in employment
where white made kin felons broke
prospectsa chance at
homes that weren’t shotgun
propertya paradise for
nigger
spawnthe shady the sketch
somebody who knows
better still than only
living in my look
Still Life with Skateboarding Rapper Orbited by Nerd Paraphernalia
The Internet is an alternate ghetto: around the way girls hiking
skirts or cutting their shorts above the cheeks and the blush of
virgins; a gang of brothers pushing bootlegged music and movies
in a barbershop full of avatars, trying to keep their given names
out of the mouths of piracy laws. And I actually fit into this hood
for once, as if my arms were dictionaries, my fitting jeans held up
by a barbed wire belt. FBI done warned about my coming back
in the 60s: the black male intellect, wearing newly prescript
glasses, my haircut manicured low like so many suburban lawns
surrounding me, grade point average likely on point, and it was,
because in my high school, I played the first guard against every
stereotype adding negative numbers to our credit in the eyes of
administration, and even then my jump shot was still wet like
the back of her lip, her referring to whoever the homie was
play games. I had goals on my mind at all times, and my teachers
recognized that because my fire—like Chicago’s of either hooves
or guns—was real, and they were real, the ones who recognized,
pulled me to the side after class, asked if I would be a mentor,
be a tutor to some of the younger kids in the school who, like
me, were trying to escape the shadow of American history to
varying degrees of success, from second-degree to first-degree
to felonies and misdemeanors. And here I am, shadow with bone,
trying to get my first diploma, then go to college and get a second,
adding to my kill count like a kind of domestic terrorist. And this
became my motivation for taking that plea to heart: trying to
help get more black bodies into black gowns and mortarboards.
And before I knew it, them same kinfolks tagged the name Lupe
on me: a co-sign, a big-up, a verbal dap. The first time anybody
ever mistook me for a rapper, an early legend of the Internet,
where all the knowledge in the world lives, making me to them:
Google in a Coogi hoodie, or a file-share, or just respectable.
No Weapon Formed Against Me Shall Prosper
unless planted after the fact. I’m talking a loaded pistol
with the serial number filed off. I’m talking powder, pills
and paraphernalia. I’m talking any and everything criminal
that can be stashed in an evidence locker until a suspect
moment in the suspect’s eyes: a locker that may be made
of malleable metal, or even a combination of collagen and
calcium compounds, you know, just like skull bone is.
Yes, I know exactly what I’m saying, ma’am. I know what
the knock against black students in this school is, overheard it:
all of us knuckleheads, always on some ole knuck and buck,
knuck and buck, knuck and buck, very few in folk but just
enough around to burn posh ’burbs to the ground, for blinking
red-dotted eyes to remain peeled, thrown on hallway walls,
in corners and crannies waiting for slip-ups over small shit or
suspicious sleight of hand; there are no blind spots here, no.
And here I thought it was the exam that made me so
jittery—junior year, ACT, Ivy League on the line—
but how could I be certain in these circumstances?
I’ll admit it: when you kicked me out of the exam for even
looking in K. Chen’s direction, I appreciate that you did so
q
uietly for the sake of my rep as the smartest kid in that room
and the next one over, college brochure material; I don’t know
if you appreciate how quietly I went, first to tutor after class,
then to register, again, secure my 99th-percentile triumph just
one month later, sitting in the front row of a foreign classroom,
staring at the drab wall like I was already living in a jail cell.
There is nothing that can be said about all of this because this
is something polite people don’t talk about. I can’t say you
were right, but I won’t say you were wrong, either. Maybe
there really was a dime bag in my backpack that only you
could see; I don’t have but the faintest idea how it got there.
Thugonomics
Beyond the GPA boost, AP Microeconomics comes to life
for me once Veit introduces the concept of indifference
curves: a graph, a line drawn between two bundles of goods
where a consumer is given equal satisfaction and utility.
I think about where I’ve seen one before in real terms—
on the face of a bigger, blacker boy. Wife-beater
wearing. Fitted hat banked hard left, the brim flipped
up like a finger to the law. He’s looking me up
and down, lips crooked like a checkmark as he
takes a secret ballot on running my pockets
skinny of heavy coins and a few dead presidents—
nayyaynayyaynay.
According to theory, the choice behind his smug grin is
between a large order of french fries, fists and handcuffs,
or just one jawbreaker, his cheeks swollen in the suck
of sugar, as if punched by some sucka who ran away.
How many beautiful boys have been bruised that way,
by the bleakness of being broke or the blow against it