Cortney Lamar Charleston

is surely a peculiar answer for any teacher to receive when asking a kindergartner, but on second take, what word best describes me, crossbreed of butterfly and Super Fly aesthetics, other than peculiar? I suppose calling me a keen kid would also suffice in explaining my avidity for the kind of death that progresses the narrative of a gentling history, because that’s the only frame for greatness I seem to find for boys my shade and age to aspire to, short of having the height and hops to touch the rim, or the bulk and burst to break through the defensive line like a bullet. And, no, I haven’t given up on the prospect of Bulls starting shooting guard yet, but the God-fearer impressed upon me begs the mythology of goodness delivered to the multitudes like loaves and fish; how King is talked about in a black Christian tradition still in mourning over his lost rays of light, the way mentioning the name of Malcolm makes mice of shady white men some thirty years after the shotgun and he’s sung of as a prince: I want to evoke that level of pride in American democracy’s dark downtrodden because I know what it invokes in me, young and impressionable, watching Denzel’s mimicry for the one millionth time in my abbreviated existence — drawing an X on my undeveloped chest, pushing it out into the unknown-ahead hoping a Mecca for melanin rises from the man-shaped hole I’d left in my loved ones’ lives. I bet my parents would be so proud of me. I bet post offices would close on my birthday. I bet God would dap me up when I got up there and Jesus — dying on a cross to meet me.

Muscular as a stallion in fact — but I have no horse in this race of people against people. It was made certain I wouldn’t, that I’d inherit nothing except a whipping of my hindquarters as a form of correction, in the cadence of I love you, tar baby, I love you. This is not unlike how my parents were raised, to comply, and their parents before them, and theirs before them and so forth as far back as anyone cared to speak of what they lived through, the preposterous preposition of it all. Therefore and thereafter, whenever I hear the word pedigree, I think of the blank check I don’t have behind my name, and then I think of saddles and stirrups, and then the soreness of my lower back, and then the source of that. How a boss can ride you: of this I am personally familiar, plus know by blood drawn from two lines of family men forced to cut out their own tongues to keep food on the table they could no longer taste or even stand to. Their tongues grew back, yes, after some time and with sharpness I’m told, needing to cut against something, anything, to be purposeful given their new forms. Woe! Woe! Woe! How a man rides his wife, his children, how he’d ride a horse he’ll never have, could never give them unless said horse is immaterial, hence not a horse at all — just muscular, as a stallion is, as a word is that’s denied striving families horsepower, any engine beyond their fragile bodies to propel them forward; the whole race: forward, even if it pits people against a people, even if it means rearing a rear end tender and raw. I love you, tar baby, I love you something strong.

Tell me how you entered this poem, how you even got in here. Where my parentals come from is where I’m coming from and where where I’m coming from is from we lock the front door and the back and the side and can’t spare a single extra key. Where where I’m coming from is from we shut all the windows tight like our eyes to an ugly view: a jail if I ever saw one, and maybe I did, and maybe that was enough for me. Maybe you made the mistake, by coming here. Unannounced. Uninvited. It takes a lot of talent to step in someone’s crib and be welcomed without any alarms going off, so shake your ass something dangerous if you can, sing me a song real sexy-like or be suck out of luck if I feel like shooting strangers today. If home is where the heart is then four red bullet wounds across the chest of the city’s flag say everything there is about my feelings toward you and the whole damn world right now. Because it was my own blood this time and yet I’m still here, and the funny thing about that town and this one is that they both burned down once. And down the hall they’re burning bud and I want some kinda sorta but without the friends. Which makes you foe, I suppose, as if you are the presence of all colors and I am the absence of said colors. But maybe I got it backwards, twisted it all up. It just hurts to have my hair pulled even if it’s by my own hand. My mind is spinning blanks inside every chamber; everywhere I turn on the TV they’re shooting boys like what I used to be before I wasn’t anymore and when did that happen? And what am I now? Are you the phantom or me, me or none of the above? The last shadow I cast on a sunny Sunday stole my wallet and bought this gun and all the rounds and all the rounds at the bar, too. Where I’m coming from, when in love: squeeze. When lonely, loan yourself some time and don’t pay it back. Beware, because I’m both lonely and in love like the living embodiment of the code switch. I’m polluted air and poisoned water and whatever else they say except when I say I’m not and I’m not one to play for a fool for the record. Fear me. I’m godly and I’m just and just get the hell out demon and do come again. Come again: it’s my igneous ire toward you that keeps me a live wire, and alive.

By way of my mother, the deacon with the slick gray hair and money clip in his pocket can claim a percentage of my body like tithe rights. And on this Sunday, as with every other Sunday, he is a slender ebony panel in the fence of faith, one man in the company of men standing shoulder to shoulder in suits, tapping their toes, clapping their hands, putting muscle to work in the making of praise music. We Baptists call this devotion, my working definition of which is faithfulness to the light. To the extent that God is as white as the clouds of heaven, this theory holds. To the extent these particular men are dark, I must consider other possibilities: that God remade himself in my image so that we could be closer or that devotion means the commitment of black men to stand with one another