Douglas Kearney

0. the first line? “blackface is sometimes the truth.” the poet knows this will make fire. ponders performing in some dark room, squinting at the black type— red gel spots like laser sights from a rifle big as a bus. but here, the sniper stirs herbal tea, has a cell phone, the number of a woman the color of thrush wings. for now: the sniper with the cell phone will be he. he misses the next line beneath the spoon clanging in the mug like the clapper in a schooner’s alarm bell. the third line, perhaps: “. . . the smoldering cork testifies . . .” or “. . . the moldy corpse terrifies . . .” he considers each. and wonders about the second line —then about the girl he saw boarding the bus, what her name sounds like whispered in a dim room of red candles, a radio where the poet is. “—ncing and bucking. and the yes and suh . . .”—he misses something else, the new line of little to do with corks or corpses—courts, maybe— and what’s “. . . un a gold coin promise, layaway heaven with teeth and silence . . .”? he is lost between a poem, a cell and a thrush’s wing. so by this time the poet should probably place a refrain as this is going to be a long poem, long enough to make the poet famous. 1. blackface is sometimes the truth but with added emphasis. a boldface where the smoldering cork testifies. [the issue is intent, nahmean? like what is nahmean whenyousee knows its way around the alleys of the tongue? what is nahmean, nahmean? and the intent is the issue, you see?] [nahmean?] blackface is sometimes a lie but with added detail. a bold face where the smoldering cork testifies. 2. but to what? the sawdust packed pockets, the brogan’s salty shadow? to the straps? scraps off the hips of tin platters? the train’s constant is a-comin? the minister’s constant that Someday what is the cork, still smelling of cheap wine, some doe- eyed muscatel, a poor man’s dream-color of velvet, some sap fresh from a cicada tableau to a night club in a Sunday suit, cardboard under his left sock, the bootblack ache slithering out above his ass, the bootblack cash kissed in waxy fingerprints offered up, offered up to the waitress who won’t smile for a “what this get?” the bottle brought back, armpit warm? this cork, tossed to the floor and kicked, a careless jig swung by a white chick, and rolled below a table awaiting some jittering negro, whose gig it is to eyeball these corks, to swoop down, hands a pair of crows, to swoop up the cork, bear it backstage, to pull it from his pocket like a magician’s dove, transform it into smoke and ovation. what does this testify? what is this truth? why speak of the fire, the first kiss of flame to the cork? watch Bamboozled. that’s all I did. what does this testify? 3. what is truth? again reading some magazine, again waiting for the dressing room door to open: fire gleaming off the platter like a breakfast of stars, burning cork from Portugal, and cork doesn’t sink in rough waters, like fine schooners from Portugal, and fire splits the blackness of dark like the fingers of sailors from Portugal, whose tongues teach new tongues to the lips in the darkness of blacks from Africa, and burn the sea into their faces like smoke in a blue lit dressing room. and I close the magazine full of rappers swimming in denim, ism smoke and wait for the door to open. the embers to ignite 4. dancing and bucking spotlight’s prison-break eye and the sweat that lifts from the skull and the pancake sheen allowed for the cameras, the pancake that will not run, and the clothes that cling to the mouths of wetness and the red gels that turn the words into spastic ants holding tiny cue cards!!!!! but the stomach churn of memorization,no no no, the revisions on the other copy in the other notebook in the other room no no no the gimpy music stand tilt, the red eye, the spotlight’s stomach, the prison-break sheen, the ants cling, the pancake mouth, the spastic words, the cameras lift, the clothes’ wetness, the skull tilt, churn turn run no no NO DANCE                BUCK *   *   *   * the yes and sir the room. the books. hands telling what I know to a machine. alone. dreaming, yes, dreaming of pinning myself to journals like a prized butterfly. the ink of my beauty fading on the white pages. 5. a rusty bicycle is a copper skeleton against the mattress. through the chain link, children kneeling on the concrete look lined for butchering. chewed sedans bleed into the street, into sewer bellies. I’ve written these images too many times. DC is my ghetto— every black poet should have one, as every white poet should have a movie-house or a lake. white poets have attractions. black poets should also have grandmothers. I have grandmothers—one living, one not. neither mopped any floor but her own. if I stand on their memories, I am too tall to be jammed into a tenement. black birds peck at my journals. my fingers work grime into Elm Place in LeDroit Park, divine urine from Florida Ave and goad fiends from T Street’s throat. these are not my muses. an adjective. a noun. a simile. “ragged storefronts like beaten wives.” I must imagine what might go on behind bricks, past the railing climbing up the stoops like wrought iron centipedes. the windows are open sometimes at night. it was hot, one black grandmother had a pool. air conditioning. on days without smog, you could see the sea or someone riding a horse past the liquor store. no one needs horses in Altadena. here, horses are diamond necklaces. diamond necklaces that shit in crosswalks. in DC there is a different kind of horse, and I need it for poems as I need ink. it is not my muse, nahmean? one black grandmother didn’t sit in the back of buses. Raleigh lay before her, already mopped. the crows are waiting at the edge of the page. see, the madhouse that seeped out into NE before exploding into panhandlers stranded in phantom ants, drifting mothers birthing flying dutchmen, that man who walked all the way to 6 th Street swinging a golf club like a white woman dancing— these are not my muses. they aren’t even mirrors. they are cork awaiting flame. blackface IS sometimes.

The jolt that comes to bones inside a tumbled streetcar is what the painter considers as she strokes her- self into story. There is less to the jolt that comes as he shuts his eyes before the monitor, save what he imagines—a lightning bolt, a god tapping the shoulder. He imagines the sky swelling with ceiling fans or the guano of extinct birds, a jolt riding from his shoulder blades to his eyelids, dropping with roller coaster clacks to his fingers. Here, he dreams of Frida Kahlo. Here, he says,let me spread my flesh out like a table linen, let my bones be silver that touches, making, again, that clack. My skull will be a glass, set properly, I have class enough.

Picture the upturned millipede, dead, and see the streets of Altadena: palm tree rows against the concrete, stiff to the horizon. There have been no birds big enough, we are comforted, to pluck the chitins from before our yards and vanish into the sun like dog-fighting MiGs. War bears litters of similes. Altadena, smog hugs the foothills like mustard gas where our rich peer through their blinds into ravines, Santa Anas sway the mustard plants, yuccas bob, some man—his cigarette, a full gas-can, an itch. We’ve known the orange alert, fires reaching for helicopters like cartoon cats clawing at panicked birds. Yesterday, fire engines and HAZMAT trucks jostled at Alameda and El Molino like beetles eating a four-legged spider. That morning, radios warned of orange. Neighborhood kids watched officers climb in and out an open manhole, consulting the entrails of the great dead millipede. We watched the ground; the sun hotter than all year. The mountains hid Santa Anas, the smog went orange with dusk, the growing shadows of lingering birds.

pigs prey to piggishnesses. get ate from the rooter to the tooter. I’m a hog for you baby,I can’t get enough go the wolfish crooner. the gust buffeted porker roll in the hay or laid down in twig rapine. let me in, let me in. no drum-gut, Stagger’s stomach a tenement: his deadeye bigger than his brick house. Stagger Lee live by the want and die by the noose, whose greedy void like a whorehouse full of empties getting full. can’t get enough! rumored Stagger would root through pussy to plumb a fat boy. here piggy! what Lee see he seize. manful, ham-fisted. sorry Billy, your name mud and who love dirt like swine? they get in it like a straw house. it’ll be cold out before Lee admit his squeals weren’t howls. he got down. he get dirty.

my mouth a cunt in reverse and my guts, nuts. I nose the dark nursery, belly for my dick spurting ink at shit. Fire. Arrow. Water. Shadow.

there was a remember when the mama was my girl the mama was in my girl biding to turn my girl turn mama when what I got turn to girl in her my girl in my girl make my girl mama they both mine all three I remember a when when I only dreamed dreams but my dreams are remembers now they a when that when was when the girl I made of mama I made a mama with what I got I tell what I tell but I know what I know only a man make his dream a remember and ain’t I a man what’s mine is mine to turn to what I dream what I make mine to make mine I won’t ’bide what won’t turn

o Farrah pharaoh: the feather up and off your shoulder— an absence of pressure. but the weight of the guitar and the bass, the synth and kit— the all that was all you ever wanted to do.  the disco video grain like a leopard skin or baby powder tossed at an afro. someone blowing in your face gently— maybe the 80s you were coursing. you keep changing parts— this one that, mother and sister, too. was it you wanted as easy as making something not you speak you you spoke it —you say—maybe first: if you love you get loved. the spangle in the air shine before the light shine it. the tips of your hair coming back with they own air.

let us go then let us go then I said and the band was I lone every which way way my spit slicked the sax’s brass chitlins. I said such wet would mud dust and soil red rock. I said doors to some room blown out the out blown in. let us go then let us go then. I said check the spit’s phlegm tenements. I said its slow typhoon syrup. it blooms the axe up and loams gypsum I said earths marblebaster. let us go then let us go then I said. preference of red or white I said my spit. where I was was where to be when I was there and what I made was it since it was where it was wasn’t it I said. but the body mustn’t be there I said. but the shapes are there I said here’s what we’ll do. let us go then let us go then wailing and whaling till one was off the chain I said fuck it. keeping time in a gorilla suit for the mud to come on uh i uh ii uh iii ...    uh cxvii and took it to the bridge to throw down wet wet wet I said. mold on that alabarble a salad a crop gainin on yuh in a gorilla suit I said. gaining on you I said I’ll take my time and yours and the bandstand gardened out let us go then let us go then and then we we we

for Deshawn, Eric, Dallas, Jerome & Lerone We brown boys play stick games, say nicknames like B IG D, E VIL E; and conjure Knievel with jigsawed dirt bikes and sewer curbs for asphalt launch pads. We all sweat to know flight for just a minute. We brown boys, hair all knaps, wear ballcaps’ broken brims. Broken rims from hungry slamdunks, pro-ball pipe dreams over ice cream man’s “Pop Goes the Weasel.” We all hunt change from cords’, Bermudas and mamas. We brown boys— smack talking slap boxing— stay bragging and bagging, drinking summer from hoses and water bomb barrages. We throw rocks at garages making no dents. We all just trying to leave a mark.

After Lauren Halsey and Mike Demps