Abdul Ali

In a dream, a young Baraka slaps five with my father. They ask when I last got some pussy or whooped someone’s ass? On one side of the street are the black poets (their closed memberships, spider-fingered hand-shakes, invitation-only parties) tossing my journal with my father— Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit! I’m soft-spoken. He’s bullhorn. I believe in breaths. We’re both sensitive. I do not deserve to be his son. I didn’t suffer like my father. Don’t fit in any boxes with bars. Never served time (except once at Bellevue for 17 days). I retreat in ambiguity. Live between the lines. Prefer shadow to light. I do girl push-ups. Write on the mirror with my mother’s lipstick. I’m nothing like my father. I spend my recesses reading When the People Could Fly, Black Skin, White Masks, & Metamorphosis. I visit Harlem with my 35mm in search of jazzmen. I’m paranoid. My palms stay moist. Long before I wake from this dream, there’s your voice & Baraka’s, the broken limbs ghosting our family tree, you and Baraka mouthing to me:This life. . . is a . . relay . . race . . . and in a single hand motion—Catch! And that look on your faces. The pause. The lean in. The reveal.

—for Troy Davis 1. There was a light rain on the night of your execution. Wet little pricks exploding on the skin. The gears on my bike jammed so I pedaled crazy-legged, pumping three times harder, making time. I glide past a charter bus emptying in front of the Supreme Court, I double over at the mostly white choir: I am Troy Davis / We are Troy Davis. 2. I am Troy Davis / We Are Troy Davis. My mother calls hours later, crying until her eyes swell into beets. Why are our mothers always crying? Why am I not crying? It’s become so familiar. In my boyhood . . . Rodney King; Billy Clubs; Loose Nooses; L.A. Riots; Abner Louima and his attackers: the police officers shoving a plunger up his rectum; Amadou Diallo: 41 gun shot wounds; Echoes of Emmitt Till: Black mothers unable to recognize their creations. Men strung on trees left for the crows to suck. The way Billie Holiday’s voice wrinkles from horror. The gallant South, the snickering wind. 3. The gallant South, the snickering wind. You were lethally injected: poison entered your veins, stopped your heart, then your breathing. I wake up in a cold sweat hearing you tell the family it wasn’t you. You, Black Socrates. Galileo, Prisoner to this skin. I imagine your transition to the other side with the ancestors. Afro Blue. I imagine this life different— not opposed to life, black life. Not hateful. I imagine this poem—a proper elegy. Can you hear that? America singing. Its trees mock us. Its wind curses us. No praying. God’s ears are filled with cotton. 4. God’s ears are filled with cotton. Death is my pulse. I pray daily that I will live to be old, healthy, but sometimes I despair. I think about my mother almost being thrown on a subway track carrying me in her belly. Hearing the metal train car moving in. Feeling my heart beat. Wanting to save this black boy from an early death. Just one, Lord, spare me one. I want to teach my daughter that black doesn’t equal death; and to love her people, all of them, even the white great-grandmother who got sick from giving birth to half-white, all black babies. And yet, I get quiet each time we walk by Union Station that increasingly resembles Monticello. The homeless: who missed Emancipation those Negro hymns no longer move me. Everything is a countdown to Swing low sweet chariot coming for to carry me home to be a black mass, riding this skin, a bomb ticking, soon to expire. 5. A bomb ticking, soon to expire. What if we didn’t have to die? What would it mean to live? What would it mean to give milk to our own babies? What would it mean to swim to the bottom of the ocean, recovering our bones? What would it mean to visit the African burial that is Wall Street? What does it mean to tell your daughter We were the first blue chip stock? That we do not own our children, their lives. That any motherfucker can point and say kill that nigger. And it happens. Like that. Like that. What does it mean to be free when we’ve been property longer than we’ve been free in this great nation? What does it mean to say Troy Davis, my dear brother, I’m Sorry. A part of me died tonight. I prayed for the mother ship to come take me somewhere else. Do aliens kill each other? Dear black Socrates, Galileo: the planets are spinning.