The Sobbing School Read online

  the bleeding. This many black bodies deep,

  the synonymy between ropes & gunfire is lost

  on no one, you assume. You assumed, brother,

  that this was your solitary cross, the only anguish

  your daughter might actually be spared: the bull’s-eye,

  its glare, this hunt you know better than any other algorithm:

  subtraction by bullet, our daily negation, how ageless it is,

  the laughter too, yes, the grisly surprise

  of every birthday past the age of 18,

  the music we have yet to invent

  for mourning this specific.

  Detroit wails in the wake of a shotgun blast

  & you do not know how to write

  what you can’t imagine the end of.

  Why don’t we grieve for women,

  for girls, the same way we do

  our men, our vanishing boys?

  Perhaps it is this body, ever mutable

  in its danger, always shifting between target

  & terror that demands too much

  recognition, this history of sons swinging

  & drowned & cut up & caged

  that elides revision, leaves no space

  for other grief. Genuflected by disbelief,

  you spend entire nights alone,

  folded into the shape of a mouth,

  cursing the limits of strength.

  RUN

  My mother claims that I began to run

  long before I walked or spoke

  or wore shoes & she too

  is not a man that she should lie.

  Thus, if we are willing

  to count this creation myth

  as admissible evidence, what

  conclusions can be drawn

  about my own penchant

  for leaving, all this slow heat

  in my blood, propelling me

  like a denouement toward the door?

  In seventh grade, Anthony tells me to “run” my pockets & I am only vaguely familiar with the term. His fists, like this new word for truancy, are intruders, thieves come to break the world in half. Final inventory: three dimes & a pack of Winterfresh I bought that morning, my mint-condition, holographic Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card now the property of another boy, his smile a firing squad I will face every day for the next nine weeks. I hate Anthony. Not only for the theft itself, his crime against civility, but for the shame I will wear like a brother’s shirt for years to come, replaying this scene over & over. In the final edits, I surprise the brigand with a left hook to the jaw for good measure, hands still empty apart from a righteous rage at the helm of each wrist, as if Ahab in the storm, praying the bolt strike true & make him holy.

  So I have this dream, right? Where it’s the first few minutes before whichever apocalypse option is first to leap off the shelf—

  Option A: The boys in blue kill every sick, sad one of us sans myself in a mad dash for department honors.

  Option B: The sky cracks open like a green bottle in the freezer, which lays the groundwork for God’s volcanic rage to turn the entire grid to cinders, & I’m just standing there, right, surveying the scene like some bizarre homage to Lewis & Clark, & look up, full of mourning, ignoring every cockroach in earshot singing Motown with scraps of human bone in their mouths, belt out, “Well dammit fellas the fall was hard & swift as wrath, but great while it lasted, yeah? We had a nice little run there, didn’t we?”

  STILL LIFE WITH FIRST BEST FRIEND

  after Jericho Brown

  Danny in the scrum

  & his hands are meadowlarks,

  their fulvous ascent. Danny after

  the fact. Danny listening to you weep,

  quiet as this umpteenth L must be

  kept. Danny does what all best

  friends who growth-spurt first must do.

  Danny defends. Danny deflects

  classroom heat, the jokes that land like lash

  & linger. Danny suspended like twice.

  Danny can’t safeguard in absentia. Danny talks

  about his daddy same way you do yours

  when yours goes phantom. Danny ethics.

  Danny don’t go missing. Danny forged in flame.

  Danny igneous. Danny obsidian. Danny covert

  nerd on black ops mission. Danny Magic cards.

  Danny Charizard. Danny still blacker than you

  depending on that day’s definition.

  Danny Bigger Thomas & Big Bird & Big Pun

  in the same bookcase. Danny all-inclusive

  literary tradition. Danny claims your block,

  its very bricks as kin: you tell him

  duty is a dead idea. Danny won’t listen.

  Danny principles. Early twenties you talk tough

  & Danny gets defensive. You do school, J.

  Someone starts problems out here, you call me.

  That’s my business. Danny stabbed twice & shot once

  & still smooth as a piston. Danny illegible.

  Danny family. Nobody else checks in on Dad

  when you forget to miss him.

  FADE

  My childhood fade was so high and well moisturized

  I would often tell passersby that it was a black box built

  by rogue scientists in case anything in my body

  ever crashed again and they needed access to backup

  recordings of all my best and most important dreams:

  Y’all remember when Wahid fought Jason back

  in 4th grade because Jason kept making

  all those jokes about Wahid’s little brother

  riding the small bus and this man Jason caught

  the FADE in front of our entire school?

  Y’all remember that? How Wahid just

  stood there after, staring at the crater

  Jason left in the grass? Like he forgot something?

  WHENEVER HEMINGWAY HUMS NIGGER

  it feels less like the southpaw cross

  your friends foretold, more like fresh talon

  sailing across the eye’s tundra.

  your neck snaps

  back: a black

  bow in winter, a black boy in summer.

  you register the wound. halfway down the page,

  waist-deep in The Sun Also Rises, you admonish

  your twenty-first-century fragility. gentle theorist,

  your life’s work depends on mastering men

  like this, on surviving

  that which shames the tongue’s lust

  of utterance, demands:

  just look at this

  and try not to hate

  what you can’t make

  bleed.

  TEACHER’S AIDE

  My father showed up to school that day dressed up

  as a man with a son with a rage problem; that is, a boy

  whom violence—as if rumor, fresh from out of town

  —followed everywhere. Ms. Hollinger never mentioned

  the more practical elements of this ongoing conflict,

  that I fought the other students because I liked my blood

  very much & wanted to keep all of it inside of my body

  once the playground went feral, as it was wont to do.

  From his first day on the new job, my father

  would bribe the bullies as only a Casanova of his stature

  could, butterscotches & dirty jokes quelling all prior conflict.

  The shift was immediate. Now baptized in the flame

  of an older man’s beauty, the war on the wise guy

  was no more: a cease-fire forged by sheer esteem,

  the stuff of corner-store science fiction it was,r />
  this lovely Marine standing watch, half smile

  drawing both teachers & seventh-grade girls

  to him like lightning to a god of gold.

  PRAISE SONG FOR THE TABLE IN THE CAFETERIA WHERE ALL THE BLACK BOYS SAT TOGETHER DURING A BLOCK, LAUGHING TOO LOUDLY

  What is this nonpower at the heart of power?

  —JACQUES DERRIDA

  Thomas was a riot. By which I mean funny

  to the point you thought he practiced the same

  set of jokes on the bus each morning

  with the sole intention of ruining AP Bio,

  but also as a gesture toward the chaos

  he brought with him when he entered

  the room, what his presence stole free in us.

  When he walked by, white girls would flicker

  their eyes at him like golden apertures, as if

  they were trying to copyright his splendor,

  or keep his swagger as an exhibit in a museum.

  Quiet as it’s kept, the combination of me & Thomas

  & Jeremy & Devin & Eddie was the most color

  our school had ever let through its doors

  in a single year, our collective body both

  a kind of shame & a pretty sweet school record

  all by itself. All we had was A Block’s release:

  Thomas clowning everyone’s clearance-rack running

  shoes & lack of game; Devin’s impromptu raps;

  Eddie’s impressions; & Jeremy, silent as a marble,

  speaking only when he had a gem of a dagger

  to drop like a dead bird in the desert, like the day

  he called Thomas a corny-ass rich boy

  & how from then on I could think of nothing

  but the force of the slur as it sailed across

  our plates, how selfish it was of Jeremy

  to kill the vibe that way. I mean, really,

  what’s a biography worth

  if your boys won’t let it stretch?

  Who in their right mind would want us,

  our threadbare lives, without a little legend

  to sweeten the frame?

  What mattered the miles

  between The Hood, its protean

  borders, & our actual homes, or the first times

  that never happened, or the nicknames

  no one called us in real life,

  when such warm fiction was shared

  among this huddle of strangers

  made lifelong friends

  by a Scantron’s omniscience,

  by our careful parents & their justifiable

  fear of the world?

  IN DEFENSE OF PASSING

  Most of us call it cloaking,

  though the academic

  term for the practice slides

  just as smoothly off

  a teenager’s tongue:

  holographic deracination.

  Within days of wide-scale release,

  the Times will hail this device, its

  attendant social phenomena

  as triumphs of modern technology,

  inevitable advance given the speed

  of post-racial desire,

  how expensive it is

  to purge the murk

  from an infant’s skin

  by most other means.

  The machine’s inventor

  will make no such claims.

  A plainspoken woman, she was.

  Stanford grad, white as a lab coat.

  Cited her time overseas

  as primary inspiration;

  all the suffering she’d seen

  caste cause. The device came

  to her in a lucid dream, this silver ellipse

  small enough to wear on the wrist

  or lapel. With just one touch

  any future you choose could be

  yours. Soft, false flesh, draped

  like a new lover over your body

  & just as clumsily until you work out

  the rhythm of it, the slang,

  how to maneuver this

  cold glass suit, light as it is.

  Protest faded in days.

  Sky-high pricing kept the cloaks

  an upper-class concern for months, years

  before poor folks got ahold

  of any prototype worth the worry.

  Once they did, you would think

  they had stolen something worth more

  than a date with the quarterback,

  or a job interview. You would think

  they had killed someone important,

  or blown up the moon, the way cops

  flooded the slums, clubs in hand,

  beating the color off of them.

  FLY

  Trust, it was not so much that I thought the icon of Michael Jordan’s smooth, triangular flight on the back of my first cousin’s new shoes a proof of God, but rather that I likewise yearned for glory & honor. And so, after thirteen years of living at the lower end of the freshness spectrum, I figured there was no better way to spend a first check: white and red Retro III’s with a triple-XL tall tee to match. Ecko jeans. Size 7⅝ Oakland A’s fitted cap, New Era sticker above the brim shining like a Spanish doubloon. So fly, later that night I would stroll into the party slow as water shifting phase, bathed in strobe light, unfazed as every yet-uncoupled senior-class girl swooned without hesitation or shame, their glances cast like fishermen’s nets through the air above the dance floor, giving musculature to the darkness.

  ◆

  The first time I saw a black patent leather shoe fly across the living room, I knew Mama was nothing to be fooled with, though the lesson did not last long. Up to my senior year at the prep school she spent all the extra cash she hid from Dad on, I was wild as any brown boy with half a head of sense could be, slamming doors and sneaking through windows once the streetlights were already warm. It would be another year before I found the Beretta, or the spare bullets—which, back then, I took to be little more than the broken steel fingers of an elaborate necklace strewn, as if rock salt, throughout the dresser drawer. Let me try this again. Once, my mother gave her life to three great loves: Jehovah, travel, geraniums by the porch. These are not arranged in any meaningful order, depending on what your last great claim would be given the grace of a window in which to speak before it all goes dim. It is only a list. Hear me. My mother, South Bronx–born, state-sponsored gun for hire, threw a shoe across a packed room and hit no one. Not even the boy she bore and taught to walk, now a foot taller than the man she named him after, yelling for minutes on end at no one but her, whom he loves, whom he would give all the blood in his body for.

  12 ABSOLUTELY TRUE FACTS ABOUT RICHARD WRIGHT

  after e.e.

  When Richard Wright was five years old he torched

  his mama’s living room curtains just to see cinder blacken

  his father’s hands like the insides of a loganberry pie.

  Richard Wright was a steel-driving man. Richard Wright

  could fly. Richard Wright wrote his last book about lice

  & magnolia blossoms & it went viral in Mississippi.

  Richard Wright had a zoologist twin sister named Giovanna.

  Sadly, her work did not outlive her. Richard Wright outlived

  every talking horse he ever met. Richard Wright loved

  to hoop. Reputable sources swear he was trash with his left.

  Richard Wright was born in a hornet’s nest. In 1975,

  he beat Earl “The Pearl” Monroe in a game of H-O-R-S-E.

  Took him for seven large that night on a bad bet.

  Richard Wright was a code word & a mountain range

 
& a treble clef. I tell you, Richard Wright could fly!

  Old heads say they saw him soar in circa late summer

  of ’59, sitting cross-legged & singing gospel

  from the saddled back of an inner-city tortoise.

  Richard Wright taught us how to forfeit.

  Richard Wright was a steel-driving man.

  Richard Wright outlived everything he ever built.

  Richard Wright built the White House.

  Hammered each nail into place

  with his unadorned hands.

  Richard Wright was a monument

  all by himself. Richard Wright

  was a soda can.

  CLENCH

  Retire whom? I am the unrestrained fleet

  of bone that cancels your shame.

  The deadliest squadron of five.

  Every time this cannonball dives

  into airborne thrust it is always

  all over, playboy,

  & don’t you forget it.

  Before pen or pot handle

  unlearned you the splendor of blood,

  I taught bully’s breath to bow,

  plowed your father’s truancy

  into that punk’s front teeth

  like a rust

  darting through snow.

  C’mon, now.

  Who knows you better

  than the black of your hand?

  Who held you down

  when the whole world went

  spaghetti western & you

  were six bullets short of a coffin’s kiss?

  Exactly.

  Now look at you.

  All emotional,

  as if there was ever a choice.

  As if all this glory

  was up for discussion.

  SELF-PORTRAIT AS PERIPLANETA AMERICANA

  Unnatural nasty.

  Inimitable mirror.

  Latchkey kid lyric

  condition of possibility

  light-years before blocksong

  seep in or creep over crooked

  pew of glass teeth. Both mainstream

  science & neighborhood lore afford me

  life after aftermath is afterthought. I am always