CM Burroughs

All cousins know the electric slide/ how to spell/despite the stink of it/chitterlings or chitlins/the odor of pig feet or catfish under a steam of vinegar/ believe blood is the most important thing/bring family up for better or worse/better the family or bemoan who just won’t do right/ learn early the power fist/dap/pound/and running man/invent glorious ways to say “brother” with intricacies of hands/we cool/give elders their due/cull histories in quilts/set records/set beats/set rights/set Black Jesus/love our tannin skin/drown yowls in jazz/ watch blocks bristle heat/in the hundreds/it’s past sundown/Mecca’s everywhere now.

rustle plastic bags of outside food in movie theaters/talk out of turn in the swallow-dark light/believe trash should be/as confetti/everywhere in the viaducts’ shadow/souring in gutters’ craw/jaywalk with the urgency of sloth /split verbs meaningfully/do or want to do better/ tattoo so you will never mis- remember our names/name ourselves Precious and Mercedes/must have some Indian in us/search for signifiers in eyes/ bright earlobes/textures of hair/ are color-stuck/are disabused our definitions of love/love and don’t know how to call it/ grieve any number of nouns/mostly people/ pets/preoccupy with memories at the repast/recall that day at the beach that / leads us to days at the beach grilling/meat browning/its purpose/it’s children on the sandbar tossing a ball/the dog biting the surf/finally some mirth/we carry for keeps.

We fix you maternally in the mind, orient you in a case of “tut-tut,” “there there,” and “you’re young yet,” but how many times did you posture yourself for the broad body of him or him and open like home — his hands in your hair, your nerves rising kinetically to the cupola of his palms? Lovers’ propensity for being a keep and your saying (when you mean it), “I am yours.” We fix you in the mind as bright-sighted seminar, dipping from the source all that you know, but how often did your eyes light in flirtation or fight, working from his getting your dander up to his oval mouth there, there, your teasing tut-tut in arousing admonition at what he was after, knowing, as you prepared to keep him, that you were young yet and gleaning, gleaning.

Do I have to dress up or can I wear jeans? Dear Joaquin, casual Sunday is a plus! Can a woman be fully present in heels? Remember the other day at the shops, we saw the T-shirt that read “Blessed” across the front? I know you picked it up for me as a joke, but it made me pause. I think I am blessed in the way I understand people to mean it: having good fortune. But this is where faith messes with my clean concept, because practicing Christians don’t believe blessings come out the clear blue sky. So here’s God again, all up in the Kool-Aid. I’m dating myself, but I mean that He gets in the way of spiritual minimalism. He is at once contained and uncontainable, which, intellectually, is hard to understand. So being blessed must require that one acts in such a way that presses God to bestow blessings, which isn’t the same thing as good fortune, but I want to believe that people are saying, “You have such good fortune, I hope for good fortune, too,” because it means that no one is preaching at me like, “You have good God-God,” “Father God I hope He Gods for us, too,” “You got God?” Et cetera.