Harmony Holiday

And that other time after we got carjacked in L.A. on the way home from Spago. Like a scene outta that movie I don’t like about those hoes I don’t love. It is hard out there for a pimp. A white woman and her brown babies /brown babies in a fancy car with unlocked doors. Most everything is semi-automatic. Two black men hopped into the front row seats and started waving guns like pom-poms.We made it! We made it! Right against the rim of her porcelain brain. All they wanted was the car and the color. The car was white like her. She saved our lives. Then the penguins came over with a book full of photos of black men, so serious like kings in their mugging, and they asked us to pick which two it was. I was five but I could feel the shrugged evil of it so true and impossible to touch as I pretended to recognize us. We closed our eyes and pointed at you, and said,I don’t know that man. Je ne connais pas cet homme. We saved our lives. We tugged at the flashlight looking for bruises and found you awake, and found a way.

In the constant lutte to not become that bougie housewife of an athlete taking too much oxy while the help cooks ethical fried chicken for my family and I’m also the help and the television sighs and wags in the back     some Wendy Williams   rerun and     this is acceptable and celebrating neon israel and soul     is so radio :     I walk alone.   I know myself. Or so I chant in the mirror right around discovering that trap music is all the new negro spiritual / righteous delirium try to defund the clown in the en   in negro       say it a little   less     enter the New Yorker in Desdemona’s     scarf     and be this generative   productive whistle     blower for the radicals / coal at the root of slow kill and not scream     at the Salvadorian man with the leaf blower   in my landscape     and hide him and his hoes       when the ICE raid follows and swallow mister PCs   pcp    ,   in this constant     creaseless / as in iron willed / as in   willow weep for me /     effort to love my enemy I became him       The body of me. Its erotic     disbelief temporarily suspended .    alongside the American eagle     : temptation to define freedom     as   consumerism, justice as my right to an object in a special whites only window : see that seedless eagle run the heavens so : suspended and     hovering over my own safe house and spraying it with liquid hog manure     literally. Check WikiLeaks.     Assange looks like a creep but he saves everybody but himself     so   he must be.         Negro do you wanna be that     creepy?

What will you be like when the daylight comes? I’m glad you’re Diana Ross, today. What is she scraping off her face? Two strobing flashlights at the apex of the cheekbones, one on the tip of the nose. I’m so glad you’re Dorothy. Nineties depression chic nirvana flannel and hobo overalls accented with stilettos are back falling through lawn chairs as Rodney King. Your dog ran away in the night and I’m celebrating. Caleb caught a case and I’m running through the streets like there’s a bouquet of swords in one fist and balloons in the other, dissembling my distress. In high school we read Camus’s Rebel but stayed up till midnight to catch the second airing of Jerry Springer on three way. I mostly remember the brawls and such earnest DNA testing, such universal are you my daddy tales. We’d stay on the phone and wait for the results. The audience hated reconciliation and everyone was someone’s mom outrunning the weightless claymation noonnight. Praying for patient doom. Tasting like Cool Ranch Doritos and a room of one’s own. Sullen minstrel cuddling the spotlight won’t you put down your phone and tell me what’s really the matter. Why won’t they call security before she hurls another chair. Their spectacle protects them from sorrow and all sorts of water rots in Chicago and no one seems outraged when the mother’s boyfriend is her daughter’s babyfather     no one turns down the complimentary coffee and hamburgers     or stabs him in the groin.     By default, by heroic shamelessness.     Did you spend at least eight and a half minutes in daylight.     Did you radiate like starch in the Paleolithic age, get so thin it aches. Is the rebel wanted dead or alive? I had asked Diana. She had gone into hiding by then.

Ruby, please. A night shift nurse fell asleep at the wheel. The whole earth had a fever and the heated pulse beats faster ’til everything picturesque has her reeling. Just tryna make it real baby, like it is. He condescends. Twitching a trio of flax seeds between the thumb and forefinger in a dirty spiral, these are full of phytoestrogens that turn the gender    ...    generic    ...    generous. Hey, girl! Crease in her hey the size of turning. Is that mean? I live in place where it’s mean to be honest but I come from a place where it’s generous. Freetown is hedged on a slum. The ghetto, everybody’s vigilante. Cut to the footage of a young boy swimming in floodwater made of mud and feces. Constructed. Like shelter, the safest destination the excess has. You see a fugitive, I see my daughter’s future husband, Ma quips, full sunned and sweet, a nigga who can swim, can hunt her free. Glad silk bending his teeth into a Sunday hotel. And the kind of silt that reachers for shatter. All the land is water. You come forth through the cosmic slop by drowning. The sun is a gang of murders. You come through on the new acquittal looking for chicken strips and bourbon with Netflix on in the background and I’ll kill you myself. Back on the Las Vegas strip, the sun is a bouquet of drones chasing promoters through a circus. Stand there and look indignant in a bandana and stop calling the Loa out their names before they answer. You’re on the guest list for lil yachty and one oak and it’s a mouthpiece the boxer’s choking on when the nurse wakes up, a double suicide, American, pie and guns and obscene convenience, proud mascots for an army with no one left to defend