INCENDIARY ART

POEMS

PATRICIA SMITH

***

TRIQUARTERLY BOOKS / NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

i

Copyright

TriQuarterly Books

Northwestern University Press

www.nupress.northwestern.edu

Copyright © 2017 by Patricia Smith. Published 2017 by TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smith, Patricia, 1955-author.

Title: Incendiary art : poems / Patricia Smith.

Description: Evanston, Illinois: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016036601 | ISBN 9780810134331 (pbk. : alk. paper) |

ISBN 9780810134348 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Till, Emmett, 1941-1955--Poetry. | African Americans--Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3569.M537839 153 2017 | DDC 811.54--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.Ioc.gov/2016036601

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences--Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

ii

Contents

I. Incendiary… 3

That Chile Emmett in That Casket... 5

Enigma of the Shadowbox Swine... 7

Incendiary Art... 9

Bless Blessed… 11

Incendiary Art: MOVE, Philadelphia, 1985… 13

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure... 14

The Then Where... 15

Incendiary Art: Chicago, 1968… 17

Reemergence of the Noose... 18

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure… 19

Rebirth day... 20

Incendiary Art: Birmingham, 1963… 22

Runaway... 23

10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She's Fine... 25

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure... 27

Hey, who you got in here?... 28

Incendiary Art: Los Angeles, 1992… 31

Black, Poured Directly into the Wound... 33

No Wound of Exit... 35

Incendiary Art: Tulsa, 1921… 38

See What Happen When You Don't Be Careful... 40

Mammy Two-Shoes, Rightful Owner of Tom, Addresses the

Lady of the House... 42

Incendiary Art: Ferguson, 2014… 45

XXXL... 47

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure... 48

How to Bust into a Black Man's House and Take a Boy Out... 49

II. When Black Men Drown Their Daughters

The Five Stages of Drowning... 53

Sentencing... 59

Why the Verdict Just Don't Sound Right; or, The Bobbing

Baby Blues... 61

This is no movie... 63

On every inch of me, there are rumors of fathers... 64

Meanwhile, the Mother... 65

When Black Men Drown Their Daughters... 66

Blurred Quotient and Theory... 68

III. Accidental… 73

Sagas of the Accidental Saint... 73

The Mother Dares Make Love Again, After... 109

IV. Shooting into the Mirror… 113

Sometimes... 113

Elegy... 114

The First... 23 Minutes of the First Day without... 124

Requiem... 125

And He Stays Dead... 127

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure... 128

Incendiary Art: The Body... 129

Acknowledgments... 131

iii

INCENDIARY ART

1

[BLANK PAGE]

I INCENDIARY

3

[BLANK PAGE]

That Chile Emmett in That Casket

Photo, Jet magazine, Sept. 15, 1955

Sometimes the page was tacked, flush against plaster with a pearl hatpin,

or jammed into a dime-store frame with a glowing Jesus. In some kingly

front rooms, its place was in the shadowbox, propped on one ripped edge,

or laid curly-cornered on the coffee table, smudged and eaten sheer

with the pass-around. In the kitchen, it was blurred by stew smoke

or pot liquor-blotched until somebody got smart enough to scotch-tape

it to door of the humming fridge, and the boy without eyes kept staring.

Mamas did the slow fold before wedging it into their flowered plastic

coin purses, daddies found a sacred place in pleather wallets right next

to the thought of cash. And at least once every week, usually on Sunday

after church or when you dared think you didn't have to speak proper

to that old white lady who answered the phone at your daddy's job,

or when, as Mama said, you showed your ass by sassin' or back talking,

the page would be pulled down, pulled out, unfolded, smoothed flat,

and you had to look. Look, boy. And they made sure you kept looking

while your daddy shook his head, mumbling This why you got to act

right 'round white folk, then dropped his smoke-threaded gaze to whisper

Lord, they kilt that chile more than one time. Mama held on to your eyes--

5

See what happen when you don't be careful? She meant white men could

turn you into a stupid reason for a suit, that your last face would be silt,

stunned in its skid and worshipped, your right eye reborn in the cave

of your mouth. Look! she screeched. You did. But then you remembered

there weren't any pictures of you in the house, pinned high on the wall,

folded up tight up against the Lord, toted like talisman in wallet or purse.

You'd searched, woe climbing like river in your chest. But there were

no pictures of you anywhere. You sparked no moral. You were alive.

6

Enigma of the Shadowbox Swine

What was the import of the wee porcelain piglet?

Nobody really knew. But there it blared, zippy-eyed,

nuclear, curly tail ass-backed by a reflection of itself

. On a prime shelf, often joined by its more mystical

kin--unicorns, roosters with lips, tawdry dragons

gazing deep into days they didn't have--the moppet

bore no resemblance whatsoever to the fragrant

carcass we siphoned of blood and scraped clear

of bowels for the reunion barbecue. Every Negro

household had at least one shatter-prone piglet

as treasured keepsake, swiped lovingly with Pledge

every other Sunday, shuffled fro and to depending

on the angle of morning light. As decreed, the Lord

was represented, wistful on the sweat-stained back

of an old AME fan, or ceramic and indigo-eyed,

all-knowing, always crucified. And there was that

funeral program for Uncle Walter, Mama's big brother

who got old and older then just wasn't anywhere, but

sure did look like he could just sit on up outta that

casket, and a nicked souvenir saucer from Natchez,

with a dewy cotton field undulating in pastel steam.

Higher up, that grease-fingered still of dead dead

Emmett as deterrent, next to a tiny gold-rimmed

teacup--all we knew of elegance--and that one

7

murky Polaroid of gray, unreachable relatives.

But always, stark center, our plump-cheeked porker,

a gilded city hog crafted to remind us of where we

had come from, what we had come to live high on.

8

Incendiary Art

The city's streets are densely shelved with rows

of salt and packaged hair. Intent on air,

the funk of crave and function comes to blows

with any smell that isn't oil--the blare of

storefront chicken settles on the skin

and mango spritzing drips from razored hair.

The corner chefs cube pork, decide again

on cayenne, fry in grease that's glopped with dust.

The sizzle of the feast adds to the din

of children strutting slant, their wanderlust

and cussing, plus the loud and tactless hiss

of dogged hustlers bellowing past gusts

of peppered breeze, that fatty, fragrant bliss

in skillets. All our rampant hunger tricks

us into thinking we can dare dismiss

the thing men do to boulevards, the wicks

their bodies be. A city, strapped for art,

delights in torching them--at first for kicks,

to waltz to whirling sparks, but soon those hearts

thud thinner, whittled by the chomp of heat.

Outlined in chalk, men blacken, curl apart.

9

Their blindly rising fume is bittersweet,

although reversals in the air could fool

us into thinking they weren't meant as meat.

Our sons don't burn their cities as a rule,

born, as they are, up to their necks in fuel.

10

BlessBlessed

The burglar-barred church is warp, cardboard tilt. Spiced

smoke from salvation candles fogs the way in. Amen to

the lil' flailers, stiff in pinafore and patent, scalps greased

to glow, their squirming buoyed by the adamant yowling

of that organ and best-sit-still glower from the elders--those

dry baffling women who bop synthetic cinnamon heads,

their tinny voices straining for the rafters. Pious knots, frayed

but holding, they will be lovingly unraveled by Jesus soon

enough. In spit-shined halls doused in brocade, they pray

past Him in stunning rote, vowing to be undone by His

wounds, His azure-eyed swoop, some stuff He said, all

those hazy guide marks floundering in a confounding text.

This Sunday here, a real good Sunday. The reverend leaps,

threatening his natural spine, screeches of joy in the next

world: Just no feeling like when the Lord brings you home

then wraps His arms around you. Pews of the grizzled tingle.

Tambourines crash, ripple straight through to the backside,

Tony the organist stomps feral in his own sky, the choir sets

its sights on all those old bones. The Ghost shoves the agile

into the aisle. Stockings rip, matrons swirl, even the elders

careen in their seats when the reverend turns his lesson to fist:

You might not wake up tomorrow. You might not make it

home tonight. But think hard on what glory you got waitinl

Service ends, or tries to, with a keen blaze lapping the walls.

From the basement wafts the siren stench of church supper--

chicken necks wilting in oil, collard greens, pork chops,

roasted yams rolled in brown sugar. Old folk groan gratitude,

say grace twice, slurp bounty from slow fingers, hiss hush

at those black obnoxious children. When they finally stand,

11

it is clearly an unfolding, pleats released and tumbling low

to brush brogans. Goodbye is blessbless and then the plod

from their church home to their own, passing corner stores

dank behind padlock and link, brick scarred with names

of ruined children. No matter which way they trundle, it's

a wade through a dimming drum. Cars buzz their skin, street

signs blur. They think it's faith poking them forward through

ambling turn and turn, but it's that devil, besotted by sermon,

who guides them home. Tonight, again, he'll sit patiently by

their beds, clucking suggestively in the direction of their rest.

12

Incendiary Art: MOVE, Philadelphia, 1985

It made sense to let the holocaust flaunt its swallow.

Only Africa noticed. The bomb spit-rained revelation

and vanishing, it rained skin and windows. On every

head, every wall. Headlines sang of complicated hair,

referred to water pooled just beneath the fold, out

of the way of burn, just out of the way of government.

Veering as bluing lesson through veins of boulevard,

a strident heat eclipsed the struggling breath. The stink

of shifted skin, monstering the air, held on, held on,

steel-jawed, strangler. Obsessed with order, bullhorns

blared nouns that unreeled vaguely like continents

while manned squad cars spun in their own sweat.

Spying on smothered drums and death throes, 6 pm

maestros rattled urgent update, used their perfectly

flat mouths to romance cult and threat, hiss resist,

debate the absence of cry and cringe. They passed

verdict while babies twirled and leapt in the wildfire's

lemony core and cinders snapped in perplexing braid.

No utter tenet whispered forecast of the scattering

regiment, stench of shea, the gorgeous collapsing

choreography of a vexed and bumbling infantry,

vendetta as dread. One little soldier was torched back

to birth. His ash eddied, drifted past domes of rule,

settled. In the swelling pile of him, rumor glittered.

13

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure

Mamie Till had hoped to take her son Emmett on a vacation to visit relatives in Nebraska. Instead, he begged her to let him visit his cousins in Mississippi.

Turn to page 14 if Emmett travels to Nebraska instead of

Mississippi.

Incessantly, his mother quotes her God

while wrestling with the Plymouth's snarl and clunk.

The country's hellish breadth, its dank facade

conspire to make him blue and snappish, drunk

with dozing. Windows blur with foliage

and sweep. At roadside stops, the poison-eyed

and devilish slurp their tepid Cokes and gauge

his spine. Pretending he's preoccupied

with being from a place they can't decode

and knowing what they don't, he steels his back

against their hawk and spittle 'til the road

and Mamie call. To swagger past the pack,

he's learned to turn their threats to anecdote

and chuckle at the squeeze that begs for throat.

14

The Then Where

It's not supposed to happen here…

--Caitlin Viccari, a resident of Newtown, Connecticut, after 26

children died in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School,

New York Daily News

In most of here, with its constant fields of stomped sienna, nothing much happens beyond riotous yawn, ill-judged trajectory. Signs, nailed to torsos, point the way

to record-shattering skillets and gargantuan balls of twine, always elsewhere,

far down unbraided interstates, silent except for semis slicing through.

The desperate stuttering neon of commerce peppers the highway's fringe, preys

on the gluttonous minivan. We are the fretful hue of a shriveling copper wind,

all wobbling toward a noble, sunstruck end, witnesses to the patient unwinding

of a country where the sound of weeping is a prelude to sleep. And what happens? Bawling willows, paperbark maples with storm-scarred limbs, men who praise

the sleek symmetry of smoke. Often we awake to violent daybreaks weighed

down with gilt. Toothy, malicious cities maneuver our necks to lead us through alleyways, down chattering boulevards, into the maws of splintered doors where

the notion of here is hastily clawed against a flattened backdrop, into places where

the doubly negated screech double negatives and beg for the brief respite of a wind against their skin. Staking teary claim to Oh say can we see, slapdashing through

lyric and mutilating that meandering key, we still want a verse that just happens

not to be there, one enamored of boys and their wormy canines, boys living way beyond the mint religion of trees, sun-slapped boys, legs like carbines, who pray

east toward their sun, the blue-blinged pulse of firepower. Where's their praise,

that slant-rhymed yelp from shining sea to sitting sewage, reaching places where

tots slurp warm dairy, dress oddly and toddle into the barrels of guns? Once, way

past my birthright, craving here, I crossed the united heart in a car with the wind

15

at its ass, I crooned a twangy ballad that explains how restless sojourns happen,

how an unsettle in the paunch can lay open a road. So many theres tingle through

so many trigger fingers. My itchy digit obsesses on that road there, straight through

the scabbed gaze of the Natchez pump jockey, nigra a syrup on his tongue. Praise

him and the county roads, hammered with flags and directive, that led to him, hapless two-lanes slicing through the bodies of children, past itty paint-perked tombs where the dead lust continually for breath and mileage. We need a song that cages the wind and keeps it at our backs, steering, shoving us through blurring vistas until one way

is here. Here. Egged on by gasoline's creamy reek and billboards of mouths, away

from fat bank accounts and the ragged rims of community, we blaze giddily through Moline, Camden, Philly, Saugerties, we flee there while some clunky clock winds down. Wowed by caffeine and donuts dipped in snow, we hum stanzas praising, hailing the whole sweet muddled everywhere of it. The calendar flips, here where murder strums its bloated belly, picks its teeth with the edges of maps. And happens.

16

Incendiary Art: Chicago, 1968

Nobody expected Goldblatt's to burn so fast.

Heard it said the store was flat before Martin's

blood was cold. A slapping stink turned the air

toxic--Dacron, plastic necklaces and earbobs,

rose-dotted acrylic Easter cardigans, reams

of forged patent leather, mirrored shadowboxes,

hundreds upon hundreds of knockoff Barbies

(flinty breasts still perked past combustion),

shiny cardboard living room suites sloshed

in wood hues, stacked cartons crammed with

eerily patient layaway tickets. Who knew our

pudgy American dream was so combustible?

Anyone could read the mind of the young boy

careening down Madison Street, rabidly clutching

a coveted pair of what he was convinced were

Converse All-Stars, the sneaks clearly on fire:

Run some hot water in the sink, put a little Tide

on a rag, wipe all the burnt off, these gon be

alright. They sizzled in the moonwash, mad-ass

light lapping at the laces. When they cooled off,

one shoe showed blue, the other red. And shit,

they were different sizes. Cramming in his toes,

he wore them anyway, stumbling into daytime

trailing tendrils of smoke. Spouting triumph

amid the reeking ruins, he limped with conjured

pride, careful to hide his raw and swollen hands.

17

Reemergence of the Noose

Some lamp sputters

its dusty light

across some desk.

Some hand, shaking,

works the strained

rope, twisting and knifing,

weaving, tugging tight

a bellowing circle. Randy

Travis, steamy drawl

and hiccup on the staticky

AM, backs the ritual

of drooping loop.

Sweat drips an awful

hallelujah. God glares

askance, but the artist

doesn't waver--wrists

click cadence, knots

become a path to what

makes saviors. The sagging

hoop bemoans a need

to squeeze, its craving

for a breath within the ring.

18

Emmen Till: Choose Your Own Adventure

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered after allegedly

whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, the proprietor of a

small store in Money, Mississippi. She also claimed that he showed

her a picture of a white girlfriend he had back in his hometown of

Chicago. The photo, which Emmett's mother insists came with the

wallet, was said to have been of movie star Hedy Lamarr.

Turn to page 19 if Hedy Lamarr was actually Emmett's girlfriend.

His paltry age was never my concern--

I wrapped my pouting smoke around his heft

and crushed. The aim of our illicit burn

was sin, my purpose was the blatant theft

of everything that rendered him a child.

In shadowed rooms, my famous tongue was all

the blessing he could stand. I drove him wild,

I sucked him dry, my pudgy butterball.

Beneath my writhing sway, his color drained

and dripped its lazy drip onto the floor

'til every surface of our tryst was stained.

I waved his boyish body to the door.

His mama simply had to send him south--

my rampant crime, my little blabbermouth.

19

ReBirthday

On this slab of chilly steel, I am the morning's work,.

your project after coffee and--yes, that woman's son.

Whistling to break the still in the room, you hold most

of my head in your hands. Your fingers gently adjust

an ear, probe a hollowed eye socket, flick chips of dried

blood away from a blown-open hairline. No one but you

and I hear as you inhale and, without exhaling, argue

clumsily with the four tangled downbeats of my name.

Grimacing, slow-edging away from the overwhelm,

you clutch the photo, glancing from swaggering smirk

to exploded child. The only sound is the blade's dull

skim as you free fluid from my blue mouth to whittle

a twisted smile. Reaching deep into your bag of tricks,

you pull out a nose, a sliver of chin, a jagged scalp,

and see them as just that--shards of skin, that scalp.

You've stitched my leaked light into the cave of your

own chest. That brown woman, gnarled with loss,

gestured wildly for you to rescript my days, wailing

that the bullets should have passed east of my name,

screeching Please make him the way he was, as close

as you can to not dead, not dead, not gone, and you

said Yes. You promised she'd be able to gaze at me

and whisper, with lunatic hope, He looks just like he's

sleeping. She's the reason you etch, snip and paste

with such stark focus, why you snap bones only to reset

them. I know you love this blanched landscape, fevered

fuse and stitch, patient attempts at ordinary hue, why

20

you've been so frantic with my breath. Whistling perk

past numb ritual, you stop now and again to behold

your gift to the woman who told you my name, just before

she showed you that dimming snapshot and begged you

Please, as best you can, my baby--

21

Incendiary Art: Birmingham, 1963

For Avery R. Young

Baby girls boom. Baby girls blow

and burn, skin balloons, booms.

Baby girls burn, boom. The Lord

dangles, festive and helpless.

Hymnals blacken while brown

baby girls pucker, leak. Blood jells,

muddles pigtail, makes lace stiff.

Baby girls blacken, crackle

in the vague direction of His hands

nailed still. Baby brown girl bodies

gap wide, wider, char and shut.

22

Runaway

First, somebody's got to run. There's no sport

in it otherwise. Everybody needs to be drunk

on sun first, then just straight drunk, and there

will be rot-tooth cackling, dog-tired horses

spewing snot, straps slashing gashes in dead

air. But somebody has to run like he wanna be

in a place he can't see, like Jesus blew a whistle.

The hunt needs a man who finally believes

the murmured come-ons of that blaring star,

who lingers a second too long in the red twist

of a preacher's promise, and thinks that being

free just may be that muted flash at the end

of his pointed finger. Over there, out there,

over yonder, north, always north, he chants,

his whole body primed, egged on by a fleeting,

luminous orchestra. But first he's got to run.

Everything he utters drips with a muddled,

sugary faith, his first halting steps click into

rhythm, and night lunges forward to scar him.

Sometimes he is minutes gone, maybe hours,

sometimes a day, before he realizes that all

land is throat, that it swallows and swallows

then dribbles a dust that lies and calls itself

light. The fear that he's on a journey that has

23

already" ended sparks the smell, the salt that

just barely blues his skin. And the dog doesn't

know why or what it hates, it just knows that

Negro blur and the damn repeated spin of it.

The hound's strained heart is everything, an old

gray muscle gasping backbeat for a flailing rage.

Fevering against the leash, it snorts the deep

sweaty bowl of the runner's hat, one thinned

gray sock, an old work shirt. The cur quivers

with what it was born to do. There's just no

sport in it otherwise. Straining forward on their

steeds, the hunters whoop, addicts for the chase,

while that wily northern star spits its sickly light

along the length of the quest, nudging the huntsmen

and their quarry to very different versions of free.

24

10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She's Fine

Dumbfounded in hospital whites, you are picture-book

itry-bit, floundering in bleach and steel. Braids untwirl

and corkscrew, you squirm, the crater in your shoulder

spews a soft voltage. On a TV screwed into the wall

above your head, neon rollicks. A wide-eyed train

engine perfectly smokes, warbles a song about forward.

Who shot you, baby?

I don't know. I was playing.

You didn't see anyone?

I was playing with my friend Sharon.

I was on the swing,

and she was--

Are you sure you didn't--

No, I ain't seen nobody but Sharon. I heard

people yelling though, and--

Each bullet repainted you against the brick, kicked

you a little sideways, made you need air differently.

You leaked something that still goldens the boulevard.

I ain't seen nobody, I told you.

And at A. Lincoln Elementary on Washington Street,

or Jefferson Elementary on Madison Street, or Adams

Elementary just off the Eisenhower Expressway,

we gather the ingredients, if not the desire, for pathos:

an imploded homeroom, your empty seat pulsating

with drooped celebrity, the sometime counselor

underpaid and elsewhere, a harried teacher struggling

toward your full name. Anyway your grades weren't

all that good. No need to coo or encircle anything,

25

no call for anyone to pull their official white fingers

through your raveled hair, no reason to introduce

the wild notion of loving you loud and regardless.

Oh, and they've finally located your mama, who

will soon burst in with her cut-rate cure of stammering

Jesus' name. Beneath the bandages, your chest crawls

shut. Perky ol' Thomas winks a bold-faced lie from

his clacking track, and your heart monitor hums

a wry tune no one will admit they've already heard.

Elsewhere, 23 seconds rumble again and again through

Sharon's body. Boom, boom, she says to no one.

26

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure

Mamie Till insisted on an open casket so that the world could see

her son's mutilated body. More than 50,000 people filed past

during his funeral. Many screamed or fainted.

Turn to page 27 if Emmett's casket was closed instead.

We're curious, but his imploded eye,

the bullet's only door, would be the thing

we wouldn't want to see. We justify

his childish glint, and sigh, imagining

the knotted tie, the scissored naps, those cheeks

in rakish bloom, perhaps a scrape or two

beneath his laundered shirt. The mourners' shrieks

are tangled with an organ's point of view,

and someone moans Mahalia. Mamie's fanned

and comforted, her gorgeous fallen son

a horrid hidden rot. Her tiny hand

starts crushing roses--one by one by one

she wrecks the casket's spray. It's how she mourns--

a mother, still, despite the roar of thorns.

27

Hey, who you got in here?

My boy. Who you come to see?

My son. How old your boy?

21. How old your son?

19.

I seen you here a lot. Where you live?

West Side, over by Garfield Park. Where you live?

New York. Well, close to New York anyway.

And you come all this way?

Sho' don't feel like it.

Hot in here, ain't it?

Yep. Hot in here. Always is.

Wonder if the folks locked up is this hot all the time.

Hell, they in jail. Ain't sposed to be comfortable.

Hard coming out here.

Yeah. Hard.

I like your hair. Been thinking about getting those braids.

Take a long time.

I know. Three hours?

Girl, more than that. Your boy done cut all his hair off yet?

Uh-huh. Bald as the day he hit this world.

First thing they do, shave that head. Wonder why.

Ain't much else to do, I guess.

I guess.

They need to get some air in here. What they mad at us for?

Chile, you right. We ain't done nothing.

Always so damn hot.

Why your boy here? What he do? You don't have to--

Chile, I don't care. He in here for being stupid. Lord knows I--

Tried, I know.

28

Maybe he learn something in here. I tried to warn his black ass.

But they don't listen. Think they grown 'fore they grown.

I hear that. Shame to see so many of them in here though.

I know. Feel like we in another country.

I get tired of coming out here.

Me too.

Don't nothing change. Always so hot.

Girl, turn around, lemme see. I sho' like those braids. Real nice in back.

Thanks.

I need to get rid of this perm. Hell, gon' sweat it out in here.

Gotta remember to ask that boy if it's this hot--

Um-uh, all the time.

How long he gon' be in here?

End of next year. But he got another think coming if he think he--

Trying to come lay up in your house, huh?

Oh, he think he is. How long your chile here?

Another two years.

That's a long time.

Pass fast when you get old as me.

What you, 35? 36?

Almost.

Chile, I'm 40. Too old for this shit.

I can't get over how hot it is. I'm gon' say something.

Me too, let's say something. It ain't like we in jail.

Look. Look over there. You know that sister? She here a lot.

Uh-huh. Hey.

Hey.

Hey. How you doing? Figured we might as well speak.

We see you here a lot. Who you come to see?

My son. Who y'all come to see?

We got boys in here too. How old your boy?

He 20.

29

Damn, it's hot in here. Girl,

we was just saying.

We gon' say something about it this time. Don't make no damn sense.

Yeah, we gon' say something.

It's like they tryin' to--

Chile, I know. Kill us in here.

30

Incendiary Art: Los Angeles, 1992

Heard on the day they found Rodney King face down at the

bottom of a swimming pool: Nigger could take an ass whuppin,

but he couldn't swim! Ain't that something?

1

You can name yourself a man, walk taut and tall and will your voice

to stomp, but still be upended by demons, ain't that something?

Tiny bones in your cheek, smashed, went fluid. Dumbstruck, you were pissed

by the sour taint of your sad, sputtered imploring. That something

you thought God was supposed to do for you wasn't this--your neck

slamming shut for its own safety. You were a man. That, something

else, and something other were whupped straight out of you that evening,

whizzing cudgels answered and answered when you swore that something

your swagger said that morning should still apply. All you wanted

was to find your feet and stand up. And you prayed that that something

curling orange on the horizon would be fit to breathe, because

you'd rather burn than die cowering, clobbered flat, a numb king.

2

It's no surprise that you coveted the water--born, as you

were, up to your neck in fuel. We wished we could undo that night--

31

your ragged floodlit flail and swell, bulge of bone, all those scars of

incendiary art. Roadside Jesus, all you knew that night

were ways to turn and turn the other mangled cheek. You gave them

no choice but to heft the cross. You were pummeled blood-blue that night,

then looped and relooped for moral while brick buildings took on ghost,

and mamas howled and clawed their babies' naps for ash. You, that night,

were wick, and your city was a heinous grin, a hard-struck match.

It took all those years to shush your fume. Yes, you lived through that night,

but dreamed of plunging into a blameless cool, your hot head sick

with steam, a cheap tarnished crown bobbing--at last--into the light.

32

Black, Poured Directly into the Wound

a double golden shovel

Prairie winds blaze through her belly, and Emmett's

red leaving won't name Mamie any kind of mother.

A round-faced sugar whistler, her gone boy is

(through the stiff-clenched mouth of remembering) a

grayed and shadows child. Listen. She used to be pretty.

Windy days blasted her skin sweet. She was slight, brown-faced,

in every wide way the opposite of the raw, screeching thing

loss made use of. Now, folded so small, she tires of the

sorries, the Lawd have mercies. Grief's damnable tint

is everywhere, darkening days she is no longer aware of.

She is wrong-worshipped, repeatedly emptied of light, pulled

and caressed, cooed at by strangers, offered pork and taffy.

Boys stare hard at her, then snatch back their glares, as if she

killed them too, shipped them to the clutches of South. She sits,

her chair balanced on a grave's edge, and strains for sanity in

kisses upon the imagined cheek of her son. Beginning with A,

she recites (angry, away) the alphabet of a world gone red.

Coffee sears her throat as church ladies drift about her room,

black garb soaking their hips. They fill cups with water, drinking,

drinking in glimpses of her undoing. The absence of a black

roomful of boy is measured, again. Under the sway of coffee,

red-eyed Mamie knows their well-meaning murmur: She

a mama, still. You got a chile, you always a mama. Kisses

in multitudes rain from their Baptist mouths, drowning her.

Sit still, she thinks, 'til they remember how your boy was killed.

33

She remembers. Gush and implosion, crush, slippery, not boy.

Taffeta and hymns all these women know, not a son lost and

pulled from the Tallahatchie's wretched slog. Mamie, she

of the hollowed womb, is nobody's mama anymore. She is

tinted barren. Everything about her makes the sound sorry.

The man-hands on her child, that dangled eye, night chaos,

things that she leans on, the only doors that open to let her in.

Faced with days and days of no him, she lets Chicago--windy,

pretty in the ways of the North--console her with boorish grays,

a stream of mourners and platters of meat to pull her through.

Is this how the backhand slap of sorrow changes the shape of a

mother? Every boy she sees now is laughing, drenched in red.

Emmett whispers Mama, I am gold. His bones bless the prairie.

34

No Wound of Exit

My only sin... is in my skin

What did I do... to be so black and blue

--"What Did I Do (To Be So Black and Blue)," recorded by

Louis Armstrong, 1929

The body is secured in a blue body bag with Medical examiner seal 0000517.

Along with him inside the crackling bag are moonlight, shriek and the entitled

groan of vermin. The child was never not secured, but was never secure. He

was not apprised of the dangers inherent in the moving forward, so his traipse

was conjured of averted gaze, perhaps a rapper's lisp and the spit called rain.

The grit of neon sugar works ravage behind his closed mouth. The body is

secured in a blue body bag. The body is secured in a blues body bag. The body

was crafted to absorb the blues.

The body is viewed unclothed. The body is that of a normally developed black male

appearing the stated age of 17 years with a body length of 71 inches and body

weight of 158 pounds. The body presents a medium build with average nutrition,

normal hydration and good preservation.

(Pause for the definition of a normally developed black male. Avoid the words

tomorrow and upright.)

Rigor mortis is complete, and lividity is well developed and fixed on the posterior

surfaces of the body. The body is cold to the touch post refrigeration. Short black hair

covers the scalp. The face is unremarkable.

The black face so easily turns a given name to knives. It gobbles questionable

meat drenched in red heat and hawks the slick black seeds of melons. It has

yawning antebellum pleats and is never ever dark enough for newspapers. Its

35

dance craze is the perp walk, its favorite hangout is above the fold. It squints in

a flashlight's probing shriek and slowly, oh so slowly repeats its name. It chats

in rebellion reverb. It chats in stereotypical. It is not at all dressed correctly for

the job interview. It pants a harried onyx in the bushes behind your duplex.

It was designed specifically to identify and reverse your wife. It can no longer

hurt you. This particular face, markedly unremarkable, is still baby, not yet

terrible with veined big-eye and buck muscle. There's no chance it will fit

around your throat. The tree-lined suburb in your chest is safe for now.

There are no fractures, deformities or amputations. The external genitalia present

descended testicles and an unremarkable penis. The buttocks are atraumatic, and

the anus is intact.

Once, a buyer would gingerly handle the penis of a potential purchase,

foraging for heft, for hints of tree trunk, for a commercial cotton foreskin,

for its ability to spew a slick black seed.

But dead cancels commerce.

Anus intact? Sigh. The ass of the dead boy was rigorously examined after

closing hours. One of the thousands of things gingerly removed from its

depths was the steamy, jack-booted foot of Florida.

The entrance wound is located on the left chest, 17112 inches below the top of the

head, 1 inch to the left of the anterior midline, and 112 inch below the nipple.

Further examination demonstrates the wound track passes directly from front to

back and enters the pleural cavity with perforations of the left anterior fifth

intercostal space, pericardial sac, right ventricle of the heart, and the right lower

lobe of the lung.

There is no wound of exit.

A black boy can fold his whole tired self around a bullet. The cartridge is a

pinpoint of want, a textbook example of the smallest love. Some slugs are

warmer than mothers. The bullet wants the whole of the boy, his snot and

36

insomnia, his crammed pockets and waning current. The bullet strains to

romance the blooded one in a way that grinds with lyric. The bullet swoons

through his collapsing map, then comes to rest and the boy simply ends his

breathing around it. It does not matter if the boy has a mother. It does not

matter if he has a gold mouth.

Injuries associated with the entrance wound: perforations of left anterior fifth

intercostal space, pericardial sac, right ventricle of the heart, right lower lobe of

the lung with approximately 1300 milliliters of blood in the right pleural cavity

and 1000 in the left pleural cavity. The collapse of both lungs.

A black boy's lungs collapsing.

A mother picking up a phone.

The same sound.

37

Incendiary Art: Tulsa, 1921

1

I am a colored boy and you are a white girl. We are in an elevator. Maybe

the elevator goes up, then down, or doesn't. When the doors open you have

already screamed. I am seen running. I do not run, but I am seen running. You

are seen breathy blonde dishevel. I am Dick Rowland and you are Sarah Page.

I am Dick and you are Sarah. I am dick and you are Sarah. I am dick and you

are vessel. You scream and I do not run, but I am seen running. That is the first

end, the fire to everything.

I rub black gleam on white shoes. You run the elevator, hundreds of ups

and downs. Maybe, they say, that's the way you know me, the necessary of up.

The only bathroom for Negroes is on the top floor. I say maybe you know me

another way in those seconds it takes for the rise, my mouth open on the rose

ache of your throat, the dark me spilling on you. Maybe I have entered you,

frantic and upright. Your arms are wrong love, a lucid noose. We crush our

kisses in sync with the elevator's drop and lift. Our shameful clock knows

how little time it takes to spark mayhem in the body. Your scream was that

knowing. My run was that scream.

The definition of love is not this, and all of this anyway. No one believes that

I didn't crack you open and drink. The myriad possible of my black mouth.

A mouth that makes men scurry for twine, religion, torch. A mouth that

made you gasp. And they roar, because they have sniffed my gorgeous neck,

my sweat-crusted neck, my resplendent neck, my impatient neck, my breath

in the ring, and they have dreamed their dream of its length, stretched it all

the way from gasping to the lip of a grave. I hear them beneath me now,

burning their way up, so giddy they almost sing my name. Somewhere, a

branch droops, already weary with me.

38

2

Sarah, speak to them of the black mouth.

Tell them how a scream

is tumult rudely spilling the borders

of body, tell them

it was

a head snapped back

in hysteria. Make sure they know

how painful

it would have been

to stop

3

They are at their hysterical work, their

hot murders. In my window, I am numb

witness to what bullets shuck. Sarah,

all that inane in our bellies. All that

cursory flail and crush. All

that. Now, all that death beneath

the leaden weight of a sky dragged

dumb by fire. I smell the brick's lazed

succumb, I smell money, I smell a town's whole

skin, singed bald and rising.

Bullets smack flat into

bodies seen running. And then

I smell three hundred

silences, all my crime, all that

cadence stunned

in my name.

39

See What Happen When You Don't Be Careful

Mama, I knew you didn't mean maybe when your blunt

nails dug into the shield of my shoulder. I squared, willed

the muscle hard. Стоп, girl! you grunted, reclutching

that shoulder, forcing me, terrified, through the tight knot

of mourning, through the scary squeal of organ, toward that

thing. Стоп here, girl!, your big fist raised behind each word,

you tugged hard, dousing me with peppermint spit, but I

vowed root in the sour carpet. When I lifted my head

to find your eyes, roiling, loopy under half-closed lids,

the whites were thin-threaded with raging. Any second

you would lash out in the Lord's name, and He would give you

permission to whip me into dazed surrender toward

the coffin, balanced on its altar in a filtered

blast of stained glass. Just as long as I didn't reach it,

didn't let you wrench or knock me forward that far, it

could be empty. There didn't need to be a reason

for Tony, who everybody called that sissy, to

get all of a sudden touched, all sizzle and divine

on that organ, oil-sopped curls flung back, skinny fingers

blaze dragging the keys, pushing dangerous deep into

some sneaky ol' resurrection groove. Old hands flap-clapped

,

Good Books flew and the funky gut of a hymn bumped blood

thin. I'm so sorry I fought you like a man, Mama,

twisting from you again, my whimpered I don't wanna

40

turning into the grunted Mama, I ain't gonna,

and you treated that ain't just like I figured you would,

teeth clenched tight, bullet eye, the hauling, three dull dry roads

on the back of my hand where you fought against loosing.

Mama, sorry I made you make a fool of yourself

in front of your God and Rev Thomas and the dry

ancient deacons, I'm sorry you had to slap me hard

on the back of my head to make me open my eyes

until I was face to face with that thing, that thing I

used to call Willie, that sneaky boy who wooed me once

with all of his tongue, who flung little stones to sting my

ankles, who couldn't keep burrs out of his nappy head.

You hustled me right up on all that bright horrible,

that thing now black-bluish chill, put to his last bed on

puffed silk already stinking like shred, both lips blown big

and mistaken rose, my very first dead boy, and you,

Mama, staccato Look at him, look at him, look at

him, hurtful with no love and all the love in the words,

in the sound, Look at him, go on, look!, the swelling song

of you and the church and Tony, his sissy soul all

knotted and driven, I'm sorry I didn't feel your

frightened heart quivering in your palm on my shoulder

or see the word mother setting fire to every day

beyond the day we were standing in, fighting in, in.

41

Mammy Two-Shoes, Rightful Owner of Tom, Addresses the Lady of the House

Mammy Two Shoes, a character in MGM's "Tom and Jerry"

cartoons, was a corpulent, achingly stereotypical black woman

seen only from the knees down.

I am double negative charm, carrying the syrupy burden

of your love in my yawning breaches of body. When I laugh,

the sound is a knotted oil on each breath I draw, my lips

spread wide so you can see that my canines are obediently

filed flat--without an evident engine, my bite is no threat

to you or the lily-spiced skin of your throat. I stammer, spurt

submission and rewind, suppressing venom beneath what I'm

sure you have forgotten is an African tongue. I am master

of the google eye, manage vex and fluster when confronted

with your chirping wisdoms. I throw up my buttered

hands in surprise and joy whenever you choose to say my

given name. For the godsend of shelter and food you barely

remember not to throw away, you expect me to be a sexless

stovetop stinking of cinnamon and fat. You don't tell anyone

how inconveniently black I can be, how you have to bolt my

ghost to the kitchen floor so you can find me in the morning.

I'm only simpleminded

on cue. I have hidden in the dry dark of the pantry, weeping,

twisting the light from my fist to keep from striking you. I have

plunged chunks of bread into leaping grease and crammed

my mouth away from exploding. You believe that yes is the all

of my language, that I am conjured entirely of bulbous glare

42

and the head sag, forever on the verge of a grand gospel weep.

You want to believe that I believe that a merciful God laid me

at your feet. But there are days I feel my heart from my knees

to the tile, thudding through calves as thick as the trunks of trees,

calves kissed by the scalloped hem of a daisied apron. My chapped

heels overflow my shoes so I walk as if I was being dragged--

so, so much easier on the sole. And how many times should I

bless you for blessing me, missus, with that tomcat, scheming,

skanked and feral, flea-munched, out of his mind with motivation

and mange, how many ways can I thank you for pushing

a cat into the space where any other woman's child would be?

You gave me that look-down, a feisty relationship with the floor,

permission to wag my flabby finger at something, a little push-pull

oh no you didn't kingdom to rule, an official reason to flap my

gums and call and call on Jesus. I say Tom, you'se in dat icebox...

you best start to prayinl I screech Lawd, lawd, Thomas, is dat

a mouse? And just like that, I'm up on a quivery dinette chair,

a chair bound to collapse with my overload, everything about

me a'jiggle, my eyes stunned like they been slapped from behind.

In twenty years, you've given me pussy and vermin, the same way

you gave me your squirming, babbling cornsilk-crowned boys, who

started their lives by scarring my breast with their blunt new teeth,

who climbed my body and rode every weary surface that

would hold them. Their stubby fingers gloppy with jelly and snot,

they pried beneath my headrag for the mystery of my hair,

scraped my forearm and cheek raw and looked for black

to be that something alive beneath their nails, and yes, they've slowly

gone stupid with the sugar, lard and mouse droppings I shovel into

their bowls, then into their mouths. And I smile. I slip a tiny razor

into the space between my teeth and the wall of my cheek, and I

smile. At night, after I loudly thank God for the each of you, I never

43

sleep. I shamble along the floorboards, the nosy cat licking my heels,

that mouse skittering blue beneath the stove. Sleep threatens, but I'm

careful not to swallow. Just outside your door, I listen to the capture

and unlatch of your breath. I move the blade to my resting tongue.

Again, I moan Yes and

God says

Don't

44

Incendiary Art: Ferguson, 2014

they should have

left him there

to be the center

of his own altar,

shat upon, he would have flowered,

his empty hands tucked, ass upended

like a newborn

the lengthy streak of browning

blood could be a sanctified walkway

for the church ladies

for the pokers with their sticks

for the lawbreakers and abiders

for that new kinda worship

they should have

taken advantage of those

fourteen thousand

four hundred seconds and thought

it over for fourteen thousand

more

how sobering it would be

breathless icon as traffic circle

every day

Chevys and livery cabs inching

around the stain

of him shriekers on the school bus

tasting his blossoming funk

in their clothes

having long ago given up

counting

flies

45

they should have

left his body

steaming on the asphalt

while passenger-side doors

wrenched from '80s sedans,

flaming barrels of garbage,

charred shards of drugstore,

and bare-chested boys, beautiful

and bulls-eyed,

blurred past in tribute

black lives

matter

most when they are in

motion, the hurtle and reverb

matter the rushed melody of fist

the shuddering's of a scorched

throat matter

the engine that moves us

toward

each damnable dawn

matters

they should have

left him there as

proof

eventually the embers would

have died

in his hair

46

XXXL

We've lost them all beneath those swaddling clothes.

Cavernous sweats and denims droop with air

and hide our loves inside. They strike the pose,

they cue the swagger, everybody knows

they think they're men. And yet they're wrapped with care.

We've lost them all beneath those swaddling clothes.

Inside, their bodies shudder, come to blows

with time. Their fractured lives can't reach them there.

Love hides inside. They coil, they strike. The pose,

if it is done just right, wards off the blows

that real men can see coming. Say a prayer.

We've lost them all beneath their swaddling clothes.

They've chosen this dull way to drown. That shows

it really doesn't matter that we care,

they must hide love inside. They strike the pose

of men because, as we have come to know,

no babies strut these streets--they wouldn't dare.

We've lost them all beneath their swaddling clothes.

They hide our love inside, then strike the pose.

47

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure

Turn to page 48 if Emmett Tills body is never found.

Our chubby grinner, just another child

who ambled into mist, no tip or trace,

no signs that he was hunted or reviled

before he turned into a jagged space

that wasn't there, then was. Nobody saw

that city boy whose swagger marked him first

as clueless, then as fool. Into the maw

of Mississippi at its very worst,

he disappeared without a single sound--

no screech or mannish giggle, wounded cry

or whistle. Mama Mamie, counting down

to zero, grasped the hands of passersby--

the white ones muttered Girl, leave us alone.

The Negroes said You should have left him home.

48

How to Bust into a Black Man's House and Take a Boy Out

Do not be frightened

of the threshold. Do not

be withered by the fact

that the black man's

mama named him Moses.

Jesus is no willing witness

to this. The boy will be

asleep.

49

[BLANK PAGE]

II WHEN BLACK MEN DROWN THEIR DAUGHTERS

Nobody wanted your dance,

Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering

Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,

Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,

Looking for something to give.

--Ted Hughes, "God Help the Wolf after Whom

the Dogs Do Not Bark"

51

[BLANK PAGE]

In February 2010, 21-year-old student Shamshiddin Abdur-

Raheem abducted his 3-month-old daughter Zara. He placed her

in a knapsack, drove to a bridge on the Garden State Parkway in

New Jersey and threw her out of the passenger-side window of his

car. She drowned in the Raritan River, more than 100 feet below.

In November 2011, also in New Jersey, Arthur Morgan III picked

up his 2-year-old daughter Tierra for a trip to the movies. Later,

Tierra was found facedown in a frigid stream beneath a park over

pass, strapped into a car seat which had been weighed down with a

car jack. It was unclear whether she was thrown from the overpass

or carried into the park and placed in the water.

1 The Five Stages of Drowning

Surprise

There is no drunk like the drunk of milk sleep.

A drizzled white floods the body and weighs down

everywhere we think we know about awake.

Zara's new clockwork staggers with it while Daddy,

grizzle and wild-eye, lobs her like trash over

the rusting rail. Inside the sack, the wriggling child

cannot translate fly, plummet, descend. She doesn't

realize the hard questions she poses for pigeons

or how, so dull and stupid with dairy, she is all

the fall the sky can language. Babies accept what

they are given. They never question the morning's

flood of sun, a kitchen's blaring stink, or the wide

hovering faces of fathers. After a swollen breeze

53

pries her eyes open in the few seconds it takes for

the fevered discarding of daughter, baby doesn't

ask the sun, needling light into the sack, to offer

rule or direction. Zara Malani-Lin Abdur-Raheem,

little not-bird, has been jettisoned, ditched, unloaded.

Her snared arms can find no rhyme for wing.

The river's glittering trash smacks her blunt,

but not before her tiny O fails its role as mouth,

not before language breaks its promise to wait

for her. If Zara can conjure no word for word, can

find no way to bellow Up, Daddy, up as she tumbles,

stuffed inside a downdowndown reeking so oddly

of him, how would she voice panic born of the day's

quick fist? Slapped awake, she breathes in the close

cloth and feels the little ruckus of a new heart.

The startled river opens, then closes over her, the way

a new mother would.

Involuntary Breath Holding

Imagine filling your whole body with everything you are

and then holding it there. Imagine the smallness of that body.

You are nothing but the easy of blue, red and green, food

you have smashed with your fingers, and the stumbling

possibilities of walk. Imagine not knowing that the ability

to contain all of you in tiny ballooned cheeks decides whether

you continue. Imagine not knowing the word continue.

Quick wisps of fish nip warily at those fat cheeks, fall into

irreparable love and decide to make a new religion of you.

Hallelujah, you are now a religion, a church of slither and slide

54

while Daddy roars his glee into noontime traffic, not thinking

about you, but thinking about your mother, and screeching Oh, she

got another man now, huh? Well, fuck that ho, I got sumthin

for her ass! Bet this gon'fix her bitch ass now, and you, Tierra,

are the fix for her ass now, you are the fix for Mama's ass now,

you are the pawn in a payback that cannot be unplayed. And

your daddy, now miles away from your slow plunging, does a lousy

parking job and stumbles into a smoky, red-walled gin mill

populated by other men without daughters. Hoisting a fat gold

shot, he toasts his one accomplishment--the uncomplicated

removal of a complication--while your cheeks deflate and the door

to your next minute closes. You were alive when the stream first

lapped its way 'round you, and the d sound comes so sweet to

the mouth of a baby who wants it. You laughed D-Daddy until

the giddy fish reexamined their worship of you, you coughed

Daddy Daddy until Daddy Daddy was nothing but sound,

then you spat dddinto the mud until you couldn't. The fickle

fish, back in love, kissed the place where your breath had been.

Hypoxic Convulsions

Daddy is the architect of a baby girl's roll and rock.

He teaches her to manage slink, schools her in a woman's

wet engine. If Zara lives--which she most definitely

will not--

somebody else's daddy will teach her all the one way

there is not to get lured into a sack, how to lay quietly

55

in the wrong skirt while her muscles argue,

how one well-timed convulsion

usually clears the dance floor. Like good drowning,

good dancing hits the backside like an annoyance

that must be watusied loose. But how to respond

to a sudden wet that's out to rearrange? Of course--

drums are injected--

and Tierra, all thrash and snapdragon,

shimmies for her giggle back. Baby is the battery

black women build their bodies around

until they're old enough to be officially romanced

by yet another revision of Jesus. But right now

they're too little to feel the full hand

of the Jesus voice, the caress of proverb and psalm.

They're flirting with that Big Daddy for all their

little worth--look at that itty jerk and boogaloo,

that pop swirling of hips they can't find, that runaway

rimshot in unfinished chests. They're rearing back,

opening wide,

rearing back, opening

wide, rearing

back, both throats

opening and slamming

shut with river.

Cue the skanky music. Brackish water snags

the rhythm, controls their arms and ankles,

gleefully involves their necks, it says

Baby,

save the last dance for me.

56

Unconsciousness

The river, tho. Sluggish and cagey and habitually a bitch,

she has not decided to accept Zara, this vexation in her mouth.

She is dazzled by choke, flopped blossoms and the occasional

seduced diver, but repulsed by all frailties of skin. The river

is seldom in a mood to have her swerve scrutinized or interrupted.

Now what is this damned hindrance, keeling over in the current?

Prying the sack wide with gush, she prods the puckered contents,

is not entertained. Intending to add the ugly pudge to her baubles,

she finds that she cannot rouse it, is so not entertained. The little

blue not-fish thing is flaccid, so unfun, snazzed up in its sopping

petal pink, the eyes slit and rolling, nappy crown trapping living

things that desperately need to breathe. The hide skids and burps.

The river's most devoted feeders, so jazzed at first, have already

had a go at it. And the thing won't give the river its props, won't

beg for refuge in the water's arms, it won't say anything. The river

flicks a bored blue finger at it, then flicks it away. She is so over

this drama. Hell, the end of anything is only a kick to watch once.

Clinical Death

The final stage in the drowning process is death. Clinical death

occurs when both breathing and circulation stop. The victim

is in cardiac arrest. The heart stops pumping blood. The vital

organs are no longer receiving oxygen-rich blood. The lack of

oxygen causes the skin to turn blue.

There are 52 shades of blue--or a million and 52, depending upon which river

you ask.

3: Cornflower.

57

17: Cerulean.

21: Blunt force.

28: Turquoise.

34: Navy.

37: fix for her bitch ass now.

41: Sky.

47: Goodbye--but the way the river says it: "Bye"--all dismissal and shade.

52: Goodbye--but the way a daddy says it--over his shoulder, thrilling

the done of the deed, already mad at the traffic.

58

2 Sentencing

In November 2012, Shamsiddin Abdur-Raheem, 24, was

sentenced to life in state prison for murdering Zara, plus an

additional 30 years to be served consecutively for kidnapping

her. He told the judge that he often wondered what his daughter

would have looked like, and what she could have done.

She would have wept her life to its outer edges,

after misunderstanding so much:

The first time a man soft-swept the underside

of her chin with just the right verb.

The yawning vessels of blood, linked hard

to the tides, controlling the conceits of her body.

How she sang incessantly of fathers,

their pinprick beards. Their wide cars.

She would have looked like: A wound beginning to close.

What she could have done:

59

In May 2014, Arthur Morgan III, 29, charged with the murder

of his 2-year-old daughter Tierra, was sentenced to life in prison

without the possibility of parole. Before sentencing, he bemoaned

the end of his relationship with the child's mother, but never

apologized for murdering Tierra.

In those first giddy, rampaging stages of fool-for-love,

it's impossible to see that untethering in the eye.

Even as she vowed before multitudes in her glass dress,

she couldn't know how keenly he would define devotion.

Soon they tangled hard. A whole white kitchen shattered,

and he screeched that he would die before he let another

man open his mouth upon her braids or bite good into

the roped muscle of her bare shoulder. Once he renamed her,

she clawed through her half-life, steady fixed on a horizon

that wobbled and strayed. Giggling whenever a door slammed,

the baby couldn't help sporting the nose of her father.

She cooed contentedly through her doomed days, spelling Daddy

with plump, jelly-glopped fingers, and that's how he knew

she'd be the utterly perfect fix for her mother's ass now

.

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Why the Verdict Just Don't Sound Right; or, The Bobbing Baby Blues

Every song has a finish, a twanged coda siphoned

of every tint but blue. Organ is woefully underused.

An Alabama woman plucks a shining revolver from

a box in her chest. Or moral is slammed home by

a stooped, colicky elder with a one-syllable sickness

for a name. By the time the lights come up, the stage

is noxious with sweat. All night long, no one could

carry the tune because it was just so damned heavy.

A man, whose flat American name was long ago pushed

aside by the snarling melodies of Allah, lobbed his baby

over the rail of a bridge into the arms of a pissed river

where she eddied and sank. Another man, lewd-laughing

with his wide mouth, strapped iron across his daughter's

twitching chest and rejoiced as she fought for air with her

arms. On separate days, years apart, their gaping sin was

recounted while a childless woman wailed in backdrop.

And although they both bowed their heads on cue (only

one at the explicit angle of shame), although each had

diligently schooled his left eye in the staccato jerk

of the unhinged, although they'd donned crisp suits

and shiny whiteboy loafers, they were found guilty.

Even court-scrubbed and cuffed, their hands stank

of flung daughters. The last thing both men heard

was one blue note, dangerously off-key, as it unreeled

up, cracking and saturnine from the river's throat.

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Outwardly divine, the river's skin is a tricky meld

of crystal and trash. Just beneath it, miserable legions

of rickety crooners teach her how to mourn. They snivel

and wail, blasting their hearts through their harps, steady

threatening Baby, if you don't do right to end it all.

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3 This is no movie

This is no movie.

In cinematic oceans, white people flail,

pray upward,

shop for late-breaking religions.

Their histories trail listlessly

behind them as credits roll. But here

in Jersey, we go hard.

No otherworldly light,

no storyline beyond this.

63

4 On every inch of me, there are rumors of fathers

On every inch of me, there are rumors of fathers

all of them stifling snarls

behind the grinning death mask

of the one who gave me name.

Stubbled and siren, they have scrubbed me

seriously clean of hair,

pummeled my weight,

wrenched my adoring breath

from its moorings.

Slyly, they measure the shrinking distance

between me

and the water.

64

5 Meanwhile, the Mother

wrangles the instance over and over, the moment when

her man (she has no other way of naming him, even after)

reached out for their baby daughter 'til her fingers fell from

the baby's arm and all that wild, wriggling weight was his.

She still smells the honeyed talcum and sweet oil flowering

the child's skin, the soured underline of that morning's belched milk.

The high-tops, tersely bowed, were thick-swiped with chalky polish,

and that damned plait had snaked loose again, popping the knot

in the striped ribbon. The baby, noting the coos on edge, did

her wide-eyed glisten weep through a stupefied smile. Daddy's

teeth were bared as he asked for his daughter's scalloped-hem coat

to keep her cozy against the wind, warm for the wet kill.

While the mother watched him fold a tiny arm and push it

into a sleeve, she wanted to say to the child Sometimes

a love is like this but before she could, a door flew wide

and the sun surged, blasting the man and his burden into

shade. The daughter flapped fingers goodbye and burbled one last

glee the mother needed to hear as a word. It wasn't.

65

When Black Men Drown Their Daughters

When black, men drown. They spend their whole lifetimes

justifying the gall of springing the trap, the inconvenience

of slouched denim, of coupling beyond romance or aim.

All the while, the rising murk edges toward their chins.

Hurriedly, someone crafts another scientific tome, a giddy

exploration of the curious dysfunction identifying black

men first as possible, then as necessary. Elegant equations

succumb to a river that blurs quotient and theory, rendering

them unreadable, and the overwhelm easily disappears

the men, their wiry heads glistening, then gulped. All that's

left is the fathers' last wisdom, soaked wreckage on silver:

Girl, that water ain't nothing but wet. I'm gon' be alright.

When black men drown, their daughters turn to their mothers

and ask What should I do with this misnamed shiver in my

left shoulder? How should I dress in public? They are weary

of standing at the shore, hands shading their eyes, trying

to make out their own fathers among the thousands bobbing

in the current. The mothers mumble and point to any flailing

that seems familiar. Mostly, they're wrong. Buoyed by church

moans and comfort food of meat and cream, the daughters

try on other names that sound oddly broken when pressed

against the dank syllables of the fathers'. Drained, with just

forward in mind, they walk using the hip of only one parent.

They scratch in their sleep. Black water wells up in the wound.

When black men drown, their daughters are fascinated with

the politics of water, how gorgeously a surface breaks

to receive, how it weeps so sanely shut. And the thrashing

of hands, shrieking of names: I was Otis, I was Willie Earl,

they called me Catfish. Obsessed by the waltzing of tides,

66

the daughters remember their fathers--the scorch of beard

electrifying the once-in-a-while kiss, the welts in thick arms,

eyes wearied with so many of the same days wedged behind

them. When black men drown, their daughters memorize all

the steps involved in the deluge. They know how long it takes

for a weakened man to dissolve. A muted light, in the shape

of a little girl, used to be enough to light a daddy's way home

.

When black men drown, their daughters drag the water's floor

with rotting nets, pull in whatever still breathes. They insist their

still-dripping daddies sit down for cups of insanely sweetened

tea, sniffs of rotgut, tangled dinners based on improbable swine.

The girls hope to reacquaint their drowned fathers with the concept

of body, but outlines slosh in drift and retreat. The men can't get

dry. Parched, they scrub flooded hollows and weep for water

to give them name and measure as mere blood once did. Knocking

over those spindly-legged dinette chairs, they interrupt the failed

feast and mutter Baby girl, gotta go, baby gotta go, their eyes

misted with their own murders. Grabbing their girls, they spit

out love in reverse and stumble toward the banks of some river.

When black men drown their daughters, the rash act is the only

plausible response to the brain's tenacious mouth and its dare: Yes,

yes, open your ashed hands and release that wingless child. Note

the arc of the sun-drenched nosedive, the first syllable of the child's

name unwilling from the man's mouth, the melody of billow that

begins as blessed clutch. Someone crouching inside the father waits

impatiently for the shutting, the lethargic envelop, and wonders if

the daughter's wide and realizing eye will ever close to loose him.

It never will, and the man and his child and the daughter and her

father gaze calmly into the wrecked science of each other's lives.

The sun struggles to spit a perfect gold upon the quieting splash.

The river pulses stylish circles of its filth around the swallow.

67

Blurred Quotient and Theory

My mother and father fought like there was one

breath in the room and only one throat could have

it. They fought like Crisco and a scarlet skillet,

like cold hose-spray fights with cats coupling

in a night alley. All day they walked gingerly on

their raised fists, all night she played 'bama pure

until Otis Redding lit their hips and nasty flecks

of old tobacco flowed from his gold tooth to hers.

They spat backwood, each one craving all the South

in the other. One of them regretted me. And it was

that one who fixed her mouth to say Get on outta

here, Otis, and after that my father lived in one place

and me in another. All my friends who were girls

had a father living in one place while they lived

in another, and if you were a girl, that was alright.

Girls needed their mamas. There my daddy go right

there was the chime, with a fingerpoint at the corner

store, at a passenger-side rider in a passing Buick,

at a smoky figure slipping into some other door,

at a worker swinging his lunch bucket, at a hooter

in sharkskin whistling at somebody else's mama,

at a man getting his face slapped with cologne after

a haircut, at a dice game winner in Garfield Park,

and sometimes this sadness: Well, I think that's him.

Sometimes a daughter is simply what the middle

of a crib does. Later, she becomes the opener

of doors. She warms that plate of neckbones,

and pirouettes for his gaze. Sometimes she is the spit

68

of the mother, the irritant prancing the outer edge

of rooms, the cheek roughly pinched, the handful

of dimes and Go on, get yourself some Red Hots,

the math problem one person in class keeps getting

wrong, the Sit on in here and be still while your mama

and I--Sometimes she is sometimes. She is an oddity,

or she is air. What Tierra was was shatter to anyone

doomed enough to love her. What Zara was was not a son.

69

[BLANK PAGE]

III ACCIDENTAL

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves

as we are, we must know our mothers' names.

--Alice Walker, O: The Oprah Magazine, May 2003

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[BLANK PAGE]

Sagas of the Accidental Saint

For the mothers of the lost

I don't expect you'll recognize my voice.

I don't believe this saga I've suppressed

will ever sound familiar. I am just

a stooped and accidental saint, no choice

except to strain the limits of my throat.

I am the mama weep beneath the fold,

that paragraph you skip, the wink of gold

inside a rotted mouth, that shredding note

of grief. Excuse what's inexcusable

in me--the shifting wildfire-tinted weave,

my ankles blue with fluid, how I grieve

in gospel you can't clutch--a fusible

display of doubled negatives I spew

whenever someone says my child is gone

and then goes on to pile the blame upon

my child for being gone. Or maybe you

believe the wretched mess is rightly traced

right back to me, whose body housed the crime--

my daughter out of dollars, out of time,

my son just seeking ways to be erased.

So many ways they stride into the line

73

of gunfire, tease the trigger, crave the shot,

just living through their days as if they're not

about to die. He totes a paper bag of wine,

or tussles, laughing, with his kid or rolls

a joint or asks his boo to braid his hair

while lazing on the stoop, or dares to glare

when someone shoves. She fights against the holds

around her throat or somehow looks the same

as someone else or sits inside her car

or someone else's car, or leaves ajar

a door she should have closed. He plays a game

of hoops to clear his head, or doesn't raise

his hands, or raises them, or doesn't stop

or does, or, when commanded, fails to drop

his wallet, keys or phone. He sets ablaze

a heap of trash, somebody's car or store,

while shouting slogans meant to make you care

that he's alive. She's killed if she's not there

although she said she'd be, or there before

she should have been, or on her way to work,

or coming home not walking like she should,

not walking down the street she normally would.

He walks too close behind, you have to jerk

your purse out of the way, you palm the mace,

he passes, spitting lyric vile and blue,

not giving damns that he's offending you.

All you can remember is his race.

74

You ask him to succumb, he dares decline,

the situation quickly falls apart.

A weapon's raised to line up with his heart

because he feels entitled to his spine.

She fumbles in her pocket for some change

or jumps the A train turnstile on a dare.

She mumbles like her mind is not all there,

or titters in a way you think is strange.

He wrecks his Chevy, waves for help, he calls

the 9 the 1, the 1. He's waiting wrong,

the folks around him said he didn't belong.

He coughs or sneezes, looks away, he brawls

with brothers, sisters, father, wife. He waves

a Walmart toy, or he can't find his place

in line, he laughs too loud, he can't retrace

his steps, he droops his pants, he misbehaves.

She turns her back or whirls around or could

be packin', could be wanted, could be strong

enough to snap your neck. She moves all wrong.

He wanders into someone else's hood

in colors that he struggles to explain.

He prances, strides, he's plotting an escape,

he stops and spins on you, he's here to rape

your daughter. Or he scoffs when you complain

about his smell, he crafts a sign, he parks

behind your Chevy, thrusts his massive fist

into or through the air, he wakes up pissed

75

but right on time, then smokes a blunt or arcs

his brow when someone asks You good? He waits

his turn or takes a break, he takes a leak,

he frightens everyone with his physique,

the situation's bound to escalate.

So many ways they're asking not to be.

She's wearing out her welcome, being black

when no one's asked her to, you've seen her lack

of grace, the space she occupies, her glee

when chicken, weed or welfare checks roll in.

He goes to class, he graduates, he takes

the seat right next to you, his shoulder makes

you quake inside. You simply don't know when

he'll blow. She shops beneath the winking eye

of video, but then pays with a card

that cant be hers. His chest and arms are scarred

with scrape and blood tattoos--so why untie

the noose shaped like his neck? His clothes are blue

or red, he wants your job, he's scoped your wife,

he craves your home, your cash, your perfect life,

that textbook in his hand's not fooling you.

She hawks and spits, she begs for change, she blows

a harp, she blows through blow, she blows her chance,

a victim, yet again, of circumstance.

He's fighting back, but everybody knows

that he's too coarse, too dumb, too street, too black,

too dense, too doomed, too thick, too much of those,

76

too vicious pose, too quick to come to blows,

too likely he could spark your heart attack.

He flares his nostrils, hides his hands, he flees

without explaining why. She lifts, she steals,

she swipes, she grabs, she snatches, cuts a deal.

He stumbles, trips, he trips a wire, he sees

too much, she needs too much, he feels too much,

her skin's too mud, his skin's too light, he fights

too dirty, fights for breath, the savage nights

are huge with him, the voodoo in his touch--

he shoots himself while handcuffed to a pole,

or hangs himself while hanging from a tree,

or wrings his neck although his hands aren't free.

He always seems to fail at self-control.

He's monster, ogre, he's the looming threat,

insisting he didn't do that thing he did,

denying that she'd hidden what she hid,

confusing you by getting so upset.

He claims he's innocent, he files a case,

he lives too large, too long, he must believe

that he is white or free. He's so naive--

with every step he takes, he falls from grace.

He steps inside or out, or through or down,

she bellows, jumps or hisses, struts or spins,

he stalks a street, steps off a curb. His sins

should be enough to drive him out of town,

where he'd be out of sight and out of mind

77

and out of bounds but thankfully not out

of range. And if you think he's all about

the kill, the drops, the guns and gangster grind,

you know for sure as soon as you see me--

his mama, grieving ugly, wailing 'bout

my chile, my chile, and plucking Jesus out

of every bag. You just can't see why he

deserves such stupid love--my wailing thrusts,

each Lord have mercy on my baby's soul,

my sad theatrics as my child goes cold.

And then the hungry cameras readjust

my howls--until it's not my child who's dead,

but something feral, edged in leak, a threat

to shrubbery and Sundays. While he's wet

and seeping into street, they frame his head

and mine inside a single shot and ask

my nappy hair and bulging eyes just what

I think. I keen, implode on cue. They cut

the camera back to frame the blooded mask

and splay. You don't remember what I say,

or hear his name, but you are borderline

obsessed with my collapse, my crumpled whine

and holy-ghosted flail, the matinee

of mama. You are entertained until

you aren't. And then I'm just an open maw,

a blur and tongue. You shouldn't waste your awe

on my unleashed display of overkill.

78

Ignore the blackish bruiser, dripping bile,

the spittle-spewing me, still bellowing

my Lord my Lord why would you let this thing

disrupt your day? I disappear. And while

I'm relegated to an anecdote

on way to nothing, all you can recall

is sputtered gospel woe and caterwaul,

that corpse the tightened wire around my throat.

that's my son collapsed there my son

crumpled there my son lying there

my son positioned there my daughter

repositioned there my daughter as

exhibit A there my daughter dumped

over there my son hidden away there

my son blue there my son dangling

there my son caged there my daughter

on the gurney there on the slab there

in the drawer there my daughter splayed

there my son locked down there my

son hanging there my son bleeding

out there my son growing frigid there

my daughter deposited there my son

inside the chalk there my daughter

being bagged there my son on the slab

there my son crushed there my son

rearranged there my son crumpled

in the door there my daughter's neck

shrinking in the noose there my son's

left eye over there my son as exhibit B

there my son behind the wheel there

my son under the wheels there my son

slumped over the wheel there my son

79

my daughter blooded and not moving

in the doorway on the stoop down

the block in front of her kids just inside

the barbershop facedown in the street

outside the bodega inside the bodega

in the black alley behind the bodega

on the videotape a block from home

leaving home hanging out at home

in the schoolyard on the blacktop

in his bed in her kitchen in my arms

in my arms in my arms that's my son

shot to look thug that's my daughter

shot to look more animal shot as kill

shot as prey shot as conquest shot as

solution shot as lesson shot as warning

shot as comeback shot as payback shot

for sport shot for history that's my son

not being alive any more there that's my

child coming to rest one layer below

the surface of the

rest

of my life

there

80

August 19, 2014, St. Louis, MO- Kajieme Powell, 25, was

accused of shoplifting donuts and energy drinks. Police

said the mentally disturbed man approached with a knife "in

an overhand grip"--they shot him dead 15 seconds after they

arrived. Video shows that Powell's hands were at his side.

I am the mother of that darkest magician. His thousand

limbs thrash in and out of your practiced sightline.

He is always behind, beside and in front of you.

He lunges for your neck while whistling on a side street

three blocks away. Firepower throbs in every finger

of his bound or idle hands. No matter where he is,

he is the leading man in the stuttering convenience store video

.

If he is not there,

he will be.

If he hasn't,

he is about to.

If a blade's not in his hand, it's

in his hand.

If his hands are up,

they're clawing through his pockets

for

something.

If he's screeching Don't shoot!

he's clearly saying

Please. I'm tired. Help me fall down.

81

December 2, 2014, Phoenix AZ--Rumain Brisbon, 34, an unarmed

father of four, was shot to death when a police officer

mistook a bottle of pills for a gun.

The son of the mother of mistake, he was

clearly saying

Please.

I'm tired.

Help me fall down.

Nothing in that bottle could end his

hurting quicker than that one stormy

lyric turning final in his chest.

His hundred fingers were stumblers,

dark and probably My children

are blasted daily out of their own

names, paying with breath for the sin

of pockets. And wallets. And bottles.

And phones. And toys. Choking on

the iron stench of blood, he reached

for the day after the one he was falling in.

Nothing good was there. Nothing good

ever reached back.

82

March 3, 2014, Iberia Parish, LA--Police say that Victor

White III, 22, shot himself while handcuffed in the back

of a police cruiser.

November 19, 2013, Durham, NC--Police say that Jesus Huerta

17, shot himself while handcuffed in the back of a police

cruiser.

July 29, 2012, Jonesboro, AR--Police say that Chavis Carter

21,shot himself while handcuffed in the back of a police

cruiser.

He reached back and found

his own hands with his own

hands, worked his bound

fingers to set his free fingers

loose, then used that shackled

hand to free the other shackled

hand, and the freed shackled

hand, still shackled, was still

bound to the other hand once

both were freed. Once free

in the shackles, the shackled

hands turned to the matter

of the gun, which couldn't

be there because they'd searched

my baby twice and a gun is

a pretty big thing unless it isn't,

unless it is dreamed alive by

hands that believe they are no

longer shackled. Stunned in

cuffs, but free and searching,

the left and right hands found

a gun with a stink like voodoo,

83

a gun that couldn't have been

there, wasn't there, but was.

The left-handed him used

a cuffed hand, which could

have been either left or right

(since both were free), to root

around for a trigger and fire

a bullet right into his left-

handed head, impossible but

not really, since the preferred

killing hand may have preferred

its shackles. The policemen,

who had searched my baby

twice and cuffed both his free

and unfree hands behind his

back before his hands found

his own hands and pulled,

heard no human sound at all

during all that frantic magic,

no Fuck! as my boy struggled

to get his left shackled hand

to do what his right shackled

hand wouldn't do, no frenzied

pound of one bracing foot

against the door, no grunt

or whoop of glee to mark all

all those times he slipped out

of custody and in again. But

they did hear the bang

of the gun that wasn't there

(but was) just when it sent

that bullet into the right side

of his left-handed head. Sounds

like sacrifice, they thought.

84

Slumped, eyes cocked and

undone, my child was amazed

at the sweet hoodoo he had

managed. Both left and right

hands were shackled and free

behind him, there was an eerie

perfect circle of smoke in his

hair. Suicide, they both said at

the very same time, and since

it was odd how they had reached

the same conclusion, they smiled

and shook their heads. Noting

the shackles, they praised their

God in the light of miracle while

the boy who couldn't have done

what he did, but did, bled down

to zero. Guess he couldn't take it,

one of the alive said to the other.

He didn't mean wearing the shackles.

He meant not wearing them.

85

March 15, 2012, Queens, NY--Shereese Francis, 30, a schizophrenic,

had stopped taking her medications and needed an

ambulance. Police arrived, handcuffed an agitated Shereese,

and held her facedown on a mattress until she went into

cardiac arrest and stopped breathing.

She couldn't get out from under the venom

flooding the muscle across the span of her back,

the command that she Breathe! from a growler

with both knees on her breath. She couldn't

summon the spit she needed to call out for me

or debate the hammers taking flower behind

her eyes. With flecks of his spit in her perm

and a prickly pressure suppressing her spine,

maybe she thought that the abrupt theft of beat

was how Jesus ended mayhem in the body--

with all the mayhem at once and then none.

Her life, relived at its end, unreeled as brash

cinema. It was lucid, as bright as backhand:

A pair of patent leather Mary Janes with taps

and gilded buckles. A walk through a hundred

songs with half her heart, all the swerve, all

sugar intact. A laugh with an open mouth. Even

when her mind careened and fled for tumbling

lights, she was my child. She hurtled forward

from my body, and her living was a struggle

to clutch. I loved her beauty. I loved her unkilled.

86

June 22, 2007, West Memphis, AR--DeAunta Terrell Farrow, 12,

was gunned down by police officer Erik Sammis, who claimed t

hat only after he shot Farrow did he realize that the gun

the child was carrying was a toy.

Even mamas were 12 once, screeching

glee and unkilled. I skipped in All Stars.

Even girls who became mamas once had

silver toy pistols that spat sparks to startle

the church ladies. We hung plastic handcuffs

from our belts and hurled rock-hard balls

at each other's bellies and heads. There

were knots, sometimes blood, on our lips.

We made our mouths make sounds like

bullets, we dodged fun that was out to break

us. Drunk on that little glee, we murdered

and murdered and murdered each other.

Like Tom, that cartoon cat, we collapsed,

unblooded, our skulls turned completely

around, bulged eyes on the ground by our

heads, our ears blown off. But we got up,

ready to be killed again. Again. We had all

seen Tom shotgunned, knifed, beheaded,

bitten, poisoned, exploded. Once, he was

misled by a cooing puss in a snug skirt,

and his heart broke out right through his

chest. A little surprised every time he died,

but unfazed by his resurrections, he'd brush

it off, reattach his head, lick his paw, smooth

87

his fur like That's all you got? So, like him,

I made a game out of losing and finding my

life. I fell and fell and got back up, corduroys

stiff, knees throbbing with scrape. I sprang

right up, swinging swears, already running

through a lengthy laundry list of vengeance,

every sweet payback ending with You dead!

Lay down! Yes, I fell down dead, but I

always popped right back up, maybe a little

closer to dying, but still 12, as certain as

black cats, and, in the end, utterly alive.

That's why I arched over his body, willing

his leaks to seal, praying him into a wacky

and improbable cartoon resurrection,

into Get up, get up, get up, please get

up, but then the credits rolled, which meant

the day was fresh out of his brand of breath--

even his color

began to leave.

88

November 19, 2011, White Plains, NY--The LifeAid medical

alert bracelet of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr., 68, was

triggered by mistake. When the police responded, he refused

to open the door to his apartment, saying he did not need

help. A LifeAid recording captured officer Steven Hart

calling him a "nigger." After working for an hour to

force open the door, the police broke it down, tasered

Chamberlain and shot him dead.

My son was hunched vintage, a nighttime.

You need our help, boy, you need our help.

He placed a finger on his slow-throbbing

neck, knew for a fact that his heart still

knew its right place beneath his shirt.

You just don't know you need our help, let

us in, let us in. He couldn't say no enough,

hating the old Negro waver in the word.

Let us into your gas stove, your couch, your

nasty tousled bed, your rat skittering blue

note behind the trash. That damned rat, all

the music he had. Your heart's not right,

you're running a fever, nigger. Where was he,

Mississippi? Was he a boy, barefoot again,

running wild for no reason, pounding

all that red dust dizzy? Was he on fire

again? You feel hot through this wood.

We're here to help

his heart clenched

we're here to fall you down

and the fire walked a road

to fall you down

through my child's body

to stop your worry

89

and straight up to

nigger, to fix your life

that moon

to make it right

he always watched

to give you rest

and wanted

90

March 12, 2012, Pasadena, CA- Kendrec McDade, 19, was

chased and shot seven times by two police officers after

a 911 caller falsely reported being robbed at gunpoint

by two black men. McDade's final words were "Why did they

shoot me?"

As the moon tangled its beams and grew

monstrous huge over his body, he wanted

that answer. As usual, I arrived too late--

he had already dispersed, and become an

awkward hour. Son of the mother of mistake,

his timing and root were askew. But

because walk because upright because Africa because decision because Tuesday

because loaded gun because running because two black because identified because

uniform because breathless because unable because America because yo mama

because Mississippi because uniform because Obama because the chase because

unarmed because convenient because mistaken because threatened because ritual

because no one will miss you because beast because innocent because they could

because they could because they could because they could because they--

I usually give my boys names anybody can remember.

Scapegoat. Target. PerpWalk. HeDidlt. Oversight.

The name Kendrec so quashed his potential. He should

have been Victim. Identify. Bullseye. NotAgain.

Miracle. 2BlackMenWithAGun. How about--

Accident.

Perfect.

I never had children.

I just had accidents.

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September 14, 2013, Bradfield Farms, NC- After being

involved in a traffic accident, Jonathan Ferrell, 24,

knocked on the door of a nearby house for help. The

woman inside called the police. They arrived and shot

him ten times.

My son said: I just had an accident. I need to use a phone.

She said: You're black.

My son said: It'll only take a minute. I need to call the police.

She heard: Call the police.

My son said: I know it's late, but--I just had an accident.

She said: 911.

He said: OK, then. You'll call 911?

She said: You're black.

The police said: Is he black?

She said: He's black.

When the gun arrived, it said I just had an accident.

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The gun said: I just had an accident.

93

The gun said: I just had an accident.

94

gun said: I just had an accident.

95

The gun said: I just had an accident.

96

The gun said: I just had an accident.

97

The gun said: I just had an accident.

98

The gun said: I just had an accident.

99

The gun said: I just had an accident.

100

The gun said: I just had an accident.

101

March 21, 2012, Chicago, IL- Rekia Boyd, 22, was killed

by off-duty police detective Dante Servin. Saying he saw

someone pull a gun and point it at him, Servin fired five

rounds over his left shoulder, through his car window, into

a crowd. Boyd was struck in the back of the head. The gun

Servin saw was actually a cell phone.

He just had an accident. Every shuffled air

is stumbling and probably. And there was

Rekia, knotted in a black flow that conjured

the idea of army. He smelled them at his back

and knew he would never have survived their

intent with only the thin wall of a car around him.

If they haven't,

they are about to. The glint.

If a gun's not in his hand,

it's in his hand.

The slow

menace of how they meant his end.

If a bullet's not in the barrel

The fierce

it's in the air

whipping

to nape of neck

to her slow unloosing box braid

to jaw muscle to the snap of

his New Era fitted,

102

to Indian Remy

to the spine's sweet tip

to a turned back

you know

sometimes they don't find

the whole head

once it is mist,

it drips from chainlink

seeps into asphalt

clogs storm drains

becomes

too fluid

for me

to mourn

103

February 28, 2003, Las Vegas, NV- Orlando Barlow, 28, was

surrendering on his knees in front of four police officers

when one of them shot him with an assault rifle from 50 feet

away. Barlow was unarmed. The officer said he was afraid

that Barlow was faking surrender. Federal investigators

later discovered that the same officers had printed T-shirts

labeled "bdrt," for "Baby Daddy Removal Team."

He obediently folded to his knees, slow-stuttering

Yes sir yes sir yes sir yes sir like I taught him,

sinking deep, kingmaker, his eyes locked on all

of them and every single one of them at the same

time. Stifling muscle, he made himself small,

suppressed the red of crushing their Adam's apples

with the chapped heel of his hand. He could have

stood wide up and become their worst wall. Instead

he succumbed. He was safe until they began circling,

slow like blaze's first lap at wood, and one of them

zoned in on that sweet spot, that deep blue dip

in his chest that so loud and plainly uttered

Animal.

I also became the mother of the sons and daughters

of my daughters and sons. I am their silvering

nana, plucking sweaty wads of ones from my

bra to pay for rattles and Enfamil and bags

of fluorescent cheese curls because getting drunk

on the orange dust is the only thing that will

calm them. I am the grandmother who becomes

the mother of the flails, squeals and belching

my darling corpses leave behind, I get up, get

up, without words replacing what has been

removed. I am a saint quite accidentally, a tired

woman piecing together soldiers who were once

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pieced together by the soldiers who were born

to me. My arms are thinned by their pull. I can

only hold on until they find the door I've so

willfully locked, and they burst through. And Lord,

they're armed with what they think are the rules.

105

July 18, 2011, Denver, CO- Alonzo Ashley, 29, who may

have been suffering from mental illness, refused to stop

splashing his face at a Denver Zoo drinking fountain on a

blistering hot day, then made irrational comments and threw

a trash can. Admitting that he was unarmed, officers killed

him with a taser, citing his "extraordinary strength."

Lord, what are the rules? On the devil's day,

can't a black man stop and scrub off some

season? Can't he talk his core down without

officially explaining? It's not like anyone but

his mama would understand the flow of sweat

beneath his sweat, the outright music his head

told him it's time to and damned alright to sing.

But his corded forearms, the muscle pushing

forward the fix in his eyes, the flared snort

and snot and brick of him. The clenched ass,

the impatient neck, the resplendent neck,

the sweat-crusted neck, the gorgeous neck,

the mad you made him as the heat blew hard

on his tangle, his terrible vast, his towering.

His breath blasting flat and meat like my pot

liquor, his thighs telling the stories of trees.

His thread spiraling too fast aloose. Is what

you saw. Is what you saw. Even though my

boy was light enough to be lifted by a notion,

you punched him with holes so everything

that said man aloud would gush out. Murder

helps you sleep at night. Murder

keeps me up at night, thinking of you

asleep at night.

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February 3, 2015, Fairfax County, VA--Suffering from

mental illness, Natasha McKenna died after being shocked

four times with a stun gun while her hands were cuffed

and her legs shackled.

I am the mother of the dark magicians,

but sometimes the magic loses its holy

clutch. Natasha should have been able

to slip those shackles long enough to

fire a bullet into the wrong side of her

hair, which would have simplified

the paperwork and left me with a body

unburned to bless. How could she forget

the hoodoo that she knew so well,

breaking loose to be the agent of her

own recapture, hanging herself with

hands that are both free and shackled?

It pains me to think of how she drowned

so utterly in spitted light. If only she

weren't so my accident, I could have

been the hands at her sides. But they

had already chalked her up to fireworks,

and my prayer, the flinging of expletives

into her waning smoke, had nowhere

to go. She wouldn't have recognized my voice.

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Once I put this baby in the ground, I'm ready.... This means war.

--Geneva Reed-Veal, mother of Sandra Bland, addressing

the congregation at Johnson-Phillip All Faiths Church,

Prairie View, Texas

I don't expect you'll recognize my voice,

no matter that I populate your world

with demons and obstructions, dangerous

assumptions. I'm the mother of the hung,

the misted head, the pistol-whipped, the hands

that found the hands, the tasered crazy girl

and all the magic real that you can stand.

I thought perhaps I'd let you'd see that I

am flesh and bone and pulse, that in the night

I wail with want of them. And yes, I know

I entertain you, digitized, my break

and fall rewound replayed and tabbed. But

now, I fight my own collapse, that ugly twist

that grief brings to my face to make you laugh.

I'm here to say their bodies weren't at war

with you. I'm here to say their bodies weren't

at war with you. I'm here to say their wars

were in their bodies. And the battlefield

was always yours, was always yours, was all.

108

The Mother Dares Make Love Again, After

I wake with dawn yawning an unbridled itch across the span of

my chest, as if there is a lie that will die if it is not sung. I begin

inarguably alone, raveled in unwashed sheets and cloaked in funk

so slantly rhymed I suspect its drift is what forces my eyes open.

Unnerved by my own lazy arithmetic, I stink this way to stay

lonely, to explain why old fingers won't remember the scarlet art

of turning a man into moan and spectacular dust. I stink to stay

vital, to bless my lumped body with a structure while I wallow

in the want of a flap-mouthed kiss or a dime-store card crammed

with plastic music, mailed by someone who knew me before my

plummet utter and south. Fall into my collapsing circle of arms

because this Tuesday has spiraled wildly and led you here. Fuck

me in the general direction of history. I will teach you to mourn

with your whole damned face, to unreel a keening as crave becomes

remember. The horrid moon splatters glow on these dirty sheets

that still know me as saint, and commands you to weep my life

.

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[BLANK PAGE]

IV SHOOTING INTO THE MIRROR

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Sometimes

Sometimes he shoots into the mirror

and someone, wearing his face, falls.

A mother grieves, but no one hears her

prayer, collapse and caterwauls.

And someone wearing his face falls.

A mama screeches out his name,

then prays, collapses. Caterwauls

are soundtrack as revenge take aim.

His mama screeches out his name,

but payback's on the daddy's mind.

The soundtrack, as revenge take aim,

morphs into dirge. There's not much time,

but payback's on the daddy's mind.

He grabs a gun, he dies. His night

morphs into dirge, there's not much time

to waste. His boys gon' make it right.

They grab their guns. They die. This night

a mama grieves but no one hears her

waste away. Her boy--he gon make it, right?

Sometimes he shoots into the mirror.

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Elegy

For my father, Otis Douglas Smith

Splayed, blood-dazzled, lost in an Oriental rug's wry repetition

of roses, you were hours gone. When you were lifted, your light

sifted from shattered seams and the jagged portal in your side

where the bullets nosed for your heat and found it. Your hands,

calloused and shit-hued with nicotine, must have risen to break

the blast. Their tiny bones were everywhere. You etched a mark

on the rug like a riotous running, as if you were hightailing away

even after the thud and crooking groan, one arm straining hard

for a promise north of you. You figured on a bluesman's end--

a scorned, earth-hipped gal screeching Fool, I told you if I ever,

your laugh, a thin spry blade easing into you like a sliver of ice

into a dirty jelly glass of JB. But oh, not this. When your time

came, it came with you squared in a fool's shuddering gunline,

you with your incessant Doublemint smack, red-threaded eyes,

rolled wads of ones. Your killer bolted, bragging to the block

that he'd just shot a man and stolen everything he could hold.

Spooked, he tossed the keys to your Lincoln on the car's hood,

caught a bus, couldn't sit for shouting I just took a man down.

Like a soldier whose chest begs a star: Just took a man down,

took him all the way out. Lowering their eyes, riders shunned

him and his untied sneaks, blotched a browning scarlet. Hood

rat, they hissed, ignoring his tale of you, siphoned of last light,

all the way out, your right arm stunned just short of threshold.

As the bus smoked past taverns, sheds of idle worship and side

streets weighted with white men's names, a ragged roadblock

waited to snag your chatty killer. He froze, raised both hands,

the boast of Took a man down, took a man fading as his eyes

turned toward his fellow passengers with the old heartbreak

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of betrayal. And during the swift rolling of credits, that line

dividing the two of you wasn't there. You both bore the mark

of murder. You were just two of the disappeared, out of time

at the exact same time, edges misting, then vanishing the way

B-sides go unwailed in the crevices of a jukebox, the way ice

gets gone when it's doused with hooch. Dead is such a hard

lesson across the shoulders. I remember you said not to ever

mean goodbye. You said A story stops breathing when it ends.

My mama, your wife, loved God so hard that she put an end

to Saturday nights, wearing pants, liquor that went down

the scarring way. She was a blank for the Lord. She had never

dared that part of downtown, where her slow, twisted diction,

fraying A-line skirt, Sears cinnamon-tinged hose, and hard

pressed curl labeled her westside, native of the neighborhood

no one saw. But that day she rode the Madison bus, in service

to her faith and her child, with news that would slap my light

shut. Somebody shot your daddy, he dead, that was the way

she said it, out in a scramble like it truly pained her to hold

that graceless weight, like she just couldn't wait for the time

to pass the morning from her burden to mine. Planted beside

me, wide-eyed, she looked like she'd just made a check mark

on her sad to-do list: I. Tell Patsy 'bout her daddy. I blocked

out the blur of her, her hair sparkling with sweat, the skyline

regular as death and death behind us. If she'd held her hand

out to me at all, succumbing to some unannounced outbreak

of mother, I might have been able to look into her eyes.

Even after my mother, buoyed by churchfolk, glamorized

baptism to coax me into a chilly ritual dunking, in the end

she had to admit that you were my only god. Unable to break

us, she sighed and conceded, wrangled skillets, settled down

to her role as bad cop, enforcer, crackerjack of the backhand.

My whole childhood, I dodged her justice--Girl, don't ever

sass me, hear? Grabbing ironing cord, branch, clothesline,

she'd crisscross my legs with lashes, snorting an explanation--

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Better to get beat in here than kilt out there. I tried to block

the over and over raw engine of her hands, struggling hard

to loose myself, which only made things worse. Chile, mark

my words, you leavin here with a lesson. The neighborhood

pooled beneath our window for the squalling--but the upside

came the next day, after remedies of rubbing alcohol and ice,

when I dared the daylight to show off my welts, taking time

to limp the boulevard, working my wounds 'til the streetlights

came on. Then she'd call me in, reach out like she might hold

me, say instead You got to mind me. I don't know no other way.

How did you two stutter into love? I just can't see any way

one of you saw a chance in the other, nothing that justifies

your tie to Annie Pearl, gangly 'bama gal, who broke the hold

the clammy Delta had on her once she hit Chicago--the end

of the line for those hooked by the north star's conjured light.

You, an orphan raised by pitying Arkansas kin, plotted a break

of your own--stuffing your hard valise at dawn, biding time

as the bus poked toward your craving. Two fools from down

south, comin' up after prayin' on it, gluing together a paradise

that just had to be bigger than your hard string of third-hand

days, all filled with white folk sidling up to you with the side-

eye. How long did it take you to know that all you were ever

gonna be was what you already were? Southern childhoods

led to other ways to be born, one-way treks on the pipeline

to the city's swallow. Steered to tenements already marked

with the chalk outlines of your bodies, your fresh addictions

prepped and waiting, you travelers didn't know just how hard

every dawn would become, how hard it would be to block

the old dogged hiss of home in your bones--whole city blocks

kept on pointing south. Chicago's dirty sun hissed that way

too, searing your necks. Up-north alone and lonely, gals hard-

ironed greased hair into sizzling strings, plumped their eyes

with overloads of Maybelline. They forgot their vows to shun

the bad boys--and Daddy, you were scoundrel. Grabbing hold

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of saddidy city ways like you'd been born to them, you marked

turf with an Old Spice-scented, dip-hipped stroll from one end

of Warren Street to the other, then down Madison, past lines

of tsk-tsk-tsking church ladies and country girls bathed in light

leaking from crooked storefronts. Where in all that womanhood

was my mother? Did she lift those sleepy eyes and cue a break

in your stride, knock you fiat with a new language whenever

she giggled behind her hand? Did that smile conjure the time

when she barreled barefoot through the red dust of countryside

to her mama's squeaking screen door? Somewhere on down

the line, you spied her, sugar countrified in Alabama hand-

me-downs, grinning with enough gold to make you notice.

In the Murphy bed, maybe your woman was sallow and ice,

a moan, pretending steel, not knowing whether she should block

your man ways. You'd been in the city so long--your hands had

learned everything. And Annie Pearl needed to find a way

to love you past the new beings you were, so weighed down

in store layaway and stilted grammar, miles from the hard

twang of your backdrop. In the end, you were both blindsided,

still wanting what you thought you'd left behind, your eyes

shocked by the familiar body's lesson. Daddy, not much time

passed before you gave in to ritual, shelving your addiction

to the siren drone of the street. You take this woman forever?

and you did, entering a church just that once to vow your hold

on a woman set to be cook and comfort. But each daybreak

changed her in the way of omen. She was vexed by the mark

of tenement, factory and blistering snow. The neighborhood

that opened its arms to her now blocked her breath. In the end,

you heard honor, you heard obey--locking on to the gilt light

in the eyes of God's best girl, you smiled, signed the dotted line.

Laughing, you told me how she hated being pregnant. Her line:

It'll be a blessing to drop this chile. You fed her chipped ice

to cool her core, warmed stews, tended to her from first light

til last. She ate pigs' feet, salt pork, shaded her eyes to block

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the sun wilting the blinds--It's just too much day. Pretending

not to be monster, ashamed of her hollering and swollen hands,

she ate, slept deep and snored razors through what motherhood

does. You rehearsed the word husband and looked for a way

to tune out your boys, hooting outside, calling out the mark

of bitch in you. Your woman rampaged while working down

a list of everything God said you shoulda been, her heartbreak

wide enough for just the whole world to hear. It was that hard

to be both her sky and root. Everybody knew you couldn't hold

on too long while jukeboxes blared and fine gals strode side

streets, asking, asking--You seen Otis? If your wife was ever

blessed to drop that chile, you could dream of laying your eyes

on that rumble 'neath her skirt again--but the assumption

of her rollicking belly meant you were running out of time

to start starting over. And the days were June steam by the time

I came, ripping a way toward air, insisting on your bloodline.

You'd never seen such violence. I clamored, wailed, stunned

you by not being you or her, but something other, my raw voice

chronic, not thrilled with the rules of my arrival. Your eyes,

threaded with old spirit, were my first damns given, their light

so wholly tangled with mine. Hours old, I already had our fever.

As soon as I sensed you wanting to flee the birth room, I blocked

out the carping of my mother, drained and bled low on the side

lines, and focused on winning you over. You couldn't even pretend

that the beginning of my story was end of yours--my death-hold

on your finger was a vow. Your wife wailed. I filled your hands.

While she crafted my new, functional name--one we'd find it hard

to live down to--you blankly nodded, succumbing to a parenthood

that was nothing like the one you'd pictured. My lock on you broke

every rule--fast co-conspirators, we were already hatching a way

out of where my birthday found us. My mother was one down,

none to go while you and I began a sloppy, blatant love, marked

by my wet gaze and your sweet inability to put me down, marked

by your whisper--Jimi Savannah, Jimi Savannah--each time

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a new christening, the name you heard when you looked down

at me, slick and gasping in her arms. But Mama went hardline

with the citified Patricia Ann--Jimis sassy music became a way

for us to communicate under the radar of her roaring, a fiction

that rooted us in our real. As soon as I was, she vowed to break

our tie so that she could master and suppress us singly--a device

she picked up from the Do Right By God manual of parenthood.

She would never stop trying. Even before the moment our eyes

met, Daddy, our woe-be-them script was already written--hard

road ahead, the odds stacked to teeter, our meager guiding lights

flickering dim, born under a bad sign. You wrapped your hands

around my wild squirm and we changed the ending. You'd never

forget the feeling of my new, my barely a day, the feel of holding

the whole promise of north in your grasp. You strutted the block

trumpeting news of baby, but not wife, as if your marriage ended

when I began. Without a history, I was so simple to love. Side

stepped and mad about it, my mama grew fat and functional. Inside

our tiny three-room, she wiped and scoured, scrubbing every mark

with bleach or Lysol, pressed bedsheets, decided it best to depend

on Jesus for all and everything. She trained an evil eye on the time

whenever you left home, reckoning you were headed for the block

of JB, gutbucket music, red-lipped women who pulled you down

to their open mouths. You ran to spades and brown liquor, holding

on to a thin wad that probably wouldn't last the night. Your timeline

for being right-minded and getting home at a Christian hour never

worked. Instead, you and toddler me devised a plan, a sneaky way

to get you in after curfew once your pissed wife threw up her hands

and chain-locked the only way in. Fighting sleep, I was stationed

in my bed in the front room, drooped eyes trained on the line of light

beneath the door. After a Morse code of coughs and taps at daybreak,

I'd tip to the door, flip open locks, let you in. She came down hard

on us once she woke up to find you inside, popping me once or twice

with the business end of a belt, weeping wide, searching your eyes

for clues to your night. Your answering gaze, measured and hooded,

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fueled the flames. I loved our wicked alliance, my falsehoods--

You must have left the latch off, Mama--the hastily plotted inside

job, the you and me always against the her. I loved how her eyes

bulged with our betrayal, her pleas to Jesus gone wide of the mark

while you and I schemed and cheered, proud of our dual sacrifice.

We were definitely an inspired pairing, Patsy and Otis D, the end

and opening curtain of so many dramas. It must have been hard

for her, plopped in front of Bonanzas drone, afraid more time

would only make us stronger. Maybe she considered heartbreak--

but that was a frailty. God say no. It was time for Lucy. Blocking

out our whispers, she concentrated on the gray flickering light

of the TV, mesmerized by crisp hilarious white people in downy

garb living the life she was promised. She just wanted a fraction

of it--a real husband home in time for dinner, a husband holding

flowers, toting a briefcase, spewing city words. But your hands

stank of smoke and sugar from where you both worked the line,

and her chile was--well, devilish. I know she prayed for a way

past the two of us, Daddy, because I heard her. Kneeling, never

behind a closed door, she wondered aloud if the Lord would ever

enter our souls, click the righteous switch, gingerly lift the hood

that cloaked us in sin. While she spent every day in church, away

from our godless chaos, we played race music, mingled outside

with the pimps and double-dutchers. Or wed get in the long line

snaking into the corner butcher shop. I couldn't take my eyes

off the real pig's head in the window or the flying pink hands

of the butcher. We dragged our feet in bloody sawdust, marked

our nicknames on the shop's wood beams. You loved to hold

up fistfuls of bargain entrails until I squealed, then dig into ice

for bulge-eyed perch so we could stage mock battles, a tradition

distressing those who eyed our soldiers for supper. We'd offend

everyone, defiantly being us, only vaguely fearing the meltdown

she was sure to have when the grapevine buzzed tales of our hard-

headedness. We were her kin, edging the Buick through stoplights

with the horn blaring, pairing up like street gangers for fun times

120

with all the busy anyones and anythings that made our block

hum. Soon she was the stranger in the room. So when the break

finally came, I was left all alone. It was a slow-motion break,

with our Annie Pearl's raw preachy screech as backdrop, never

ceasing: Y'all are headedfor so much hell. We couldn't block

out all the ways she grew melancholy, faced with the likelihood

she needed God more than we needed her. Our lives were time

passing, faster than she could fix us. She couldn't scream away

our trespasses. When you realized it was finally over, the light

I'd given you streamed from your bodies. I watched. Blindsided

by the end, Annie didn't see that her take on love was a hard

slow kill you put up with just long enough to meet your deadline

as father. You hugged my grieving breath thin, then put me down

whispering Baby girl, it's not you I'm leaving. I romanticized

the moment, heard violins swelling over the words THE END

as you and I skipped giddily into a cowboy sunset, our hands

clasped. We would grieve her, of course. Eventual celebrations

would be muted and tasteful. But instead of joining me to mark

the end of your marriage as the real beginning of us, your advice

to me was Stay here with your mama. I'll be back. My hold

on you, the clutch that merely defined me, just couldn't hold

on past the wrath of the woman who long ago vowed to break

us away from each other. And toward some God. I paid the price

for your walking away--a gangly ten-year-old who had never

given real weight to the word alone, I suddenly decided to mark

my days by disappearing. Words went first. Teachers blocked

out time for meetings with my harried mother once I shunned

speech and slammed silent. Ms. Pearl referred all parenthood

matters to her God the Father, who I'm sure threw up His hands

once my hair began to fall out in clumps and my nighttime

were spent snot-weeping, praying to my daddy, my god. Depend

on THIS Father she'd say, pointing to a plastic crucifix, her way

of making me see you as Him, as both gone and there. Her eyes

121

were wild all the time. Every morning, when a damnable light

fell upon my face--a face just like yours--she'd break down

and whip me in your name, conjuring sins, turning my backside

to flame. I'd phone you in secret, pouring broken into the line,

begging for you back. Until you decided that no matter how hard

it was to stand tall between her and a deity, no matter how hard

it was to say to her You can't make me not be her father, I could hold

you to the wounding pledge It's not you I'm leaving, that old line

I wished on while holding my own hair in my hand. You broke

down, came back through our door, and every night you sat beside

me and we traded tales, whispering beneath her wrath. Your voice

was all the yes in the room while a mute Annie Pearl, nailed down

with rage, stayed glued to the Philco and her Lucy Ball. You never

left until I was asleep. You were left alone with her. Then the light

of the boulevard bellowed, and you'd set out to make your mark

on the moon. With a harrump and a deadly edition of the side-eye,

my mother would accuse you of seeing other women on our block

(of course you were--how long ago had she picked her wary way

around your body's eager landscape?). She gamely auditioned

for a role as the wounded, righteous God-fearing ex, a sly blend

of monster and martyr, and you were undisputed hero of the 'hood,

the romancer, card sharp, devoted daddy. I remember the time

she boldly called you on your rep after I'd been caught red-handed

lifting earrings from Woolworth's: So YOU spank her. Your hands

rose and fell with pained hesitation, just twice, your crying hard-

mingling with my pained theatrics. Daddy, how did you make time

for that kind of love? How did you become the someone who holds

on when a southern gal says let go, someone who blesses childhood

with the sharp magic of made-up songs and giddy minutes in line

to gape at the circus of a dead pig's head? So many had to fend

for themselves, alone with bone-lonely mothers. Love let me break

you, daddy, it brought you back, back to me while the loud fiction

of fathers crushed everything around us. Love welled up inside

you like a city, replaced your dreams with what you had, a way

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for you write your name aloud. You were my bad daddy, vice

winkling right up front like that gold tooth. You ran every block

with the bittiest rep, five feet of swagger and spice gettin down

with a sweet hip swerve to anything blue from the juke, your eyes

absolutely glinting with just enough bad juice. Daddy, whatever

possessed you to teach me to drink, vowing no man would mark

me as victim? You spoon-fed me shots of JB 'til my warning light

blasted, dimmed again. I was 16. There you were arched in the light

above me, rapid-firing: What time is it? Now can you see the hands

on your watch? Tell me what song just played on the jukebox. Mark

or Marvin, what's the bartender's name? OK now, think hard now--

how do you get home from here? I didn't know a damn thing, never

having been drunk before, but I got better. Now there's not a time

I can't drink a hopeful man under the table with my midnight eyes

wide open. Schooling me in slow dance, you were careful to hold

me at a daddy distance while my whitewashed PF Flyers came down

on your toes again and again. We were the talk of the neighborhood,

crazy Otis knocking at his door like a stranger every day, blocking

out a stream of spiteful screams from his still-wife, making a beeline

to that baby gal so she could have some kinda daddy. Your sacrifice

was born of love that breaks and breaks and rearranges. In the end

it taught me just what a man looks like when he never goes away.

Somebody shot your daddy, he dead were just words alongside

other words, a way for some stranger to finally get my attention.

Your funky apparition sidles up, riding its blue rail, and blasts a light

that makes me laugh out loud. Eerily still at your side, your hands

hold something I can't see. It's daybreak when you make your mark

on my waking dream, a way for us to be together before the hard

business of pretending a life begins. This is something I'd never

practiced, this halfways ghosting, like a sweaty runner making time

with the silliness of a single leg. You're a chalk outline, your eyes

reaching. I quick-slap your hand, unblock the view of what you hold.

Your dead eyes hooded, you lay down the gift. It's Jimi, my real name.

123

The First 23 Minutes of the First Day Without

1. The weather is writ large through the appearance of symptoms:

2. an orange chill, the taxi driver grimacing

3. when he hears your nasty address, muttering

4. That place is badXovs mother absent-

5. mindedly rubbing your leg, wondering when

6. you'll get snotty and wobble-eyed whether you'll

7. hog the limelight by flaunting your ugly blossom

8. of grief a sin for the daughter to wear the wool

9. of widow

10. Her mantra, He in heaven now He in heaven now, synced

11. perfectly to the ruts in the street The cab blares

12. black cardamom and onion, and the driver's

13. eyes widen as he enters the riotous fringe of

14. the bad place barred

15. Baptist lean-tos glint

16. snarlers arching toward the windshield stores

17. selling wax lips and 45s he

18. stops

19. and there is a sidewalk that still bears the slight

20. weight of your father there is a row

21. of open mouths nonono there is a trumpeting sun

22. one whole damn day

23. behind the news

124

Requiem

It is Tuesday, the wailing church has emptied, and the earth is packed hard over

him. She pours a stout tumbler of boundaries and warnings, sips, then opens

the heavy volume to page 67: How to Build An Altar. She reads the directions

aloud.

"Begin with a spine of funked silver--pull it screeching from your body, staple

the writhing thing to a board to keep it still. Add a necessary food--Pixy Stix,

the inward workings of pig, a fistful of Lemonheads, slippery salt pork collards,

a peppermint stick shoved into the core of a thick sour pickle. And damn, don't

you be ashamed of chicken--pebbled and spice, sluggish pink blood lovingly

preserved in sinkside jars. Sprinkle everything with the stubborn rusted dust

from some southern road.

"Decorate the walls of the altar with frescoes of thick-thighed mothers..."

She yearns to skip this part, but doesn't.

"... mothers with hard insisting bellies, double negative mothers, rust-dusted

mamas, mamas with no clue, mamas with no husbands or fresh food, mothers

with their crowns oiled and pressed hard.

"Add something from the get-pretty room, but not the hot comb--how about

the smell of burning and the sizzling suggestion of yourself growing smaller?

How about that scar behind your ear, your neck, how about a precious clip

from your napped edges?

"Find a place for your hips, a place large enough to hold them as they become

engines. String the room with double-dutch clothesline and curled-corner

Polaroids of the wounds you still carry because of that rough and roundabout

rhythm--abbreviated toes, whip songs on your calves, ankles huge with triple-

time and the sidewalk stomp.

125

"Now ask God what you should do next."

She doesn't ask. She already has a cross, black velvet headshots of Him and

him, a hymnal, a funeral home fan. She sips again. She keeps reading.

"Right about now, the devil, all come hither and cosmic slop, will claim his

corner. He'll flash his chest muscles and grunt your entire Christian name in

a way you ain't never heard before. Ignore him, but keep an eye trained in his direction."

She locks gaze with the chuckling bogey until the page asks: "Chile, did you

forget your daddy?"

No. She couldn't.

"Spritz the altar with the Old-Spice-Lucky-Strike-sexed stench of him, the

ritual repeating air of factory, the necessary milk of gin and tabasco, the smell

of tobacco spittle and an open-mouthed blues groan.

"Did you forget your daddy? Fill a crystal cup with flakes of ash scraped from

his forearms, with impossibly thick toenail clippings that drop and make music

on hardwood floors. Finish with the sound of the way he said daughter--even

if he screamed it. Even if he whispered it in his sleep."

She closes the book. It is Tuesday, the church has emptied. She strains to hear

his voice. Nothing. The dirt is packed hard over him. Over his open mouth.

126

And He Stays Dead

You can convince your young body to slide on the cloak of savage--

bare your teeth towards the clock and pretend you don't feel the hollow.

Or you can slap your own face, winding back time, beating yourself

witless until years blur and you convince yourself it isn't real. The hollow

is not menaced by your trilling. It decides to take your body inside it.

You pile on layers of woolens and fiction, trying to appeal to the hollow

as it owns you. Everyone asks Why is your voice so drained, so moon?

It's because you are feverishly slipping on mantras that should heal the hollow,

but it just grows larger, and you flail around inside it. It is shaped so

stupidly like a father. You can't find your knees to kneel. The hollow

will be damned if it gives you a chance to pray your way out, so you

will yourself limp and succumb to damage. Passing days seal the hollow.

Daughter, wear your father like a cloak. Flaunt the blue, the gone

stink of him. Those woes are yours, crafted to reveal. You're hollow.

127

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure

Turn to page 128 if Emmett Till never set foot in the damned

store.

So our Chicago kid runs by the store

instead of being wooed by chewing gum

and peppermints. The steamy shop's a bore '

cause they've got better suckers where he's from.

He's sworn to be remembered in this town,

and so his raucous cousins egg him on

to escapades much sweeter than those found

in candy--live and buzzing skins upon

the water, fruit to yank from every tree.

He hurtles past without a second thought,

without acknowledging her silent plea

behind the screen, her gaze so clearly fraught

with crave. Hey nigger, welcome to the South--

come slip my sugar deep into your mouth.

128

Incendiary Art: The Body

I've nightmared your writhe, glum

fists punching their way out of your

own body, the blind stumble through

the buckled vein of your throat as

your nerve endings sputtered and blew.

I've dipped my finger into a vaporous

pool of your skin. The heat blessed

your whole new self with horizon,

square-jawed boy. With such potent

intent, you blared illicit and just enough

saint. Now, with so many northern

days between us, you are much easier

to God. But they are looking for you.

They are wildly sloshing fuel across

the landscape and they are screeching

your name. Today, one said I sure would

like to burn a black man alive. So, yep,

you left us here with undulating acres

of fools and that particular stank leg

of gospel. You left us all this snuff,

hawk and proud little bowleg, you left

their brains stunned by dairy and fat

meat. You left us not much path, even

after your body was that brief beauteous

torch. They seem to remember you

fondly. And there are unstruck matches

everywhere.

129

[BLANK PAGE]

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following anthologies

and print and online journals in which these poems first appeared:

Arroyo: "The Then Where"

Asheville Poetry Review: "Reemergence of the Noose"

The Baffler: "Incendiary Art: The Body"

Boston Review: "Shot Himself While Handcuffed" (excerpted from "Sagas of

the Accidental Saint")

Buzzfeed: "The Five Stages of Drowning"

Eleven Eleven: "Incendiary Art: Tulsa, 1921"; "Blurred Quotient and Theory"

Epiphany: "Incendiary Art: Birmingham, 1963"; "Requiem"

Golden Shovel: "Black, Poured Directly into the Wound"

Hunger Mountain: "And He Stays Dead"; "Mammy Two-Shoes, Rightful

Owner of Tom, Addresses the Lady of the House"

Interim: "When Black Men Drown Their Daughters"

Normal School: "Sagas of the Accidental Saint" (excerpt); "EmmettTill: Choose

Your Own Adventure" sonnets; "Incendiary Art: Ferguson, 2014"

Of Poetry and Protest: "No Wound of Exit"

Plume: "10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She's Fine"; "BlessBlessed"; "

Incendiary Art: Chicago, 1968"; "Incendiary Art: Los Angeles, 1992"; "

Incendiary Art: MOVE, Philadelphia, 1985"; "See What Happen When

You Don't Be Careful"

Poetry Daily: "Incendiary Art"

131

Prairie Schooner: "Runaway"

Rattle: "Elegy"; "ReBirthday"

Redivider: "The Mother Dares Make Love Again, After"

Tidal Basin Review: "Hey, who you got in here?"

Vilanelles: "XXXL"

Waterstone Review: "That Chile Emmett in That Casket"; "Enigma of the

Shadowbox Swine"

I am eternally grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for the generous

support that permitted me to carve out the time and mental space for this and

other projects, and to the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo for providing the

invaluable shelter, serenity, and sustenance I needed to create.

Kudos yet again to my patient, persistent, and phenomenal first reader, the indefatigable Kwame Dawes; to my dependable third eye, Roger Bonair-Agard;

and to the ultimate editor, my insanely supportive husband, Bruce DeSilva.

Thanks to the communities where I teach and learn--the City University of

New York, Sierra Nevada College, VONA, Cave Canem, and the Vermont

College of Fine Arts--where many of these poems were reimagined, revised, discussed, and debated, and where they first reached air.

Every word is for Bruce, Mikaila, and Damon, who love and are loved

relentlessly.

And for every woman who began her morning with a son and ended the day

without one.

132

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Contents

INCENDIARY ART

I INCENDIARY

That Chile Emmett in That Casket

Enigma of the Shadowbox Swine

Incendiary Art

BlessBlessed

Incendiary Art: MOVE, Philadelphia, 1985

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure

The Then Where

Incendiary Art: Chicago, 1968

Reemergence of the Noose

Emmen Till: Choose Your Own Adventure

ReBirthday

Incendiary Art: Birmingham, 1963

Runaway

10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She's Fine

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure

Hey, who you got in here?

Incendiary Art: Los Angeles, 1992

Black, Poured Directly into the Wound

No Wound of Exit

Incendiary Art: Tulsa, 1921

See What Happen When You Don't Be Careful

Mammy Two-Shoes, Rightful Owner of Tom, Addresses the Lady of the House

Incendiary Art: Ferguson, 2014

XXXL

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure

How to Bust into a Black Man's House and Take a Boy Out

II WHEN BLACK MEN DROWN THEIR DAUGHTERS

In February 2010, 21-year-old student Shamshiddin Abdur-

1 The Five Stages of Drowning

2 Sentencing

Why the Verdict Just Don't Sound Right; or, The Bobbing Baby Blues

3 This is no movie

4 On every inch of me, there are rumors of fathers

5 Meanwhile, the Mother

When Black Men Drown Their Daughters

Blurred Quotient and Theory

III ACCIDENTAL

Sagas of the Accidental Saint

The Mother Dares Make Love Again, After

IV SHOOTING INTO THE MIRROR

Sometimes

Elegy

The First 23 Minutes of the First Day Without

Requiem

And He Stays Dead

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure

Incendiary Art: The Body

Acknowledgments