Jericho Brown

When a hurricane sends Winds far enough north To put our power out, We only think of winning The war bodies wage To prove the border Between them isn’t real. An act of God, so sweet. No TV. No novel. No Recreation but one Another, and neither of us Willing to kill. I don’t care That I don’t love my lover. Knowing where to stroke In little light, knowing what Will happen to me and how Soon, these rank higher Than a clear view Of the face I’d otherwise Flay had I some training In combat, a blade, a few Matches. Candles are Romantic because We understand shadows. We recognize the shape Of what once made us Come, so we come Thinking of approach In ways that forgo Substance. I’m breathing — Heaving now — In my own skin, and I Know it. Romance is An act. The perimeter Stays intact. We make out So little that I can’t help But imagine my safety. I get to tell the truth About what kind Of a person lives and who Dies. Barefoot survivors. Damned heroes, each Corpse lit on a pyre. Patroclus died because He could not see What he really was inside His lover’s armor.

The woman with the microphone sings to hurt you, To see you shake your head. The mic may as well Be a leather belt. You drive to the center of town To be whipped by a woman's voice. You can't tell The difference between a leather belt and a lover's Tongue. A lover's tongue might call you bitch, A term of endearment where you come from, a kind Of compliment preceded by the word sing In certain nightclubs. A lush little tongue You have: you can yell, Sing bitch, and, I love you, With a shot of Patrón at the end of each phrase From the same barstool every Saturday night, but you can't Remember your father's leather belt without shaking Your head. That's what satisfies her, the woman With the microphone. She does not mean to entertain You, and neither do I. Speak to me in a lover's tongue— Call me your bitch, and I'll sing the whole night long.

Some folks fool themselves into believing, But I know what I know once, at the height Of hopeless touching, my man and I hold Our breaths, certain we can stop time or maybe Eliminate it from our lives, which are shorter Since we learned to make love for each other Rather than doing it to each other. As for praise And worship, I prefer the latter. Only memory Makes us kneel, silent and still. Hear me? Thunder scares. Lightning lets us see. Then, Heads covered, we wait for rain. Dear Lord, Let me watch for his arrival and hang my head And shake it like a man who's lost and lived. Something keeps trying, but I'm not killed yet.

They lie like stones and dare not shift. Even asleep, everyone hears in prison. Dwayne Betts deserves more than this dry ink for his teenage years in prison. In the film we keep watching, Nina takes Darius to a steppers ball. Lovers hustle, slide, and dip as if none of them has a brother in prison. I eat with humans who think any book full of black characters is about race. A book full of white characters examines insanity—but never in prison. His whole family made a barricade of their bodies at the door to room 403. He died without the man he wanted. What use is love at home or in prison? We saw police pull sharks out of the water just to watch them not breathe. A brother meets members of his family as he passes the mirrors in prison. Sundays, I washed and dried her clothes after he threw them into the yard. In the novel I love, Brownfield kills his wife, gets only seven years in prison. I don't want to point my own sinful finger, so let's use your clean one instead. Some bright citizen reading this never considered a son's short hair in prison. In our house lived three men with one name, and all three fought or ran. I left Nelson Demery III for Jericho Brown, a name I earned in prison.

I didn't tell you that, in the end, he begged For the end.  Death like the bed after The bedtime story.  Death like a widening Crack of light beneath the door. He begged them to let him Go so he could go.  Said I want To die.  Then said kill me.  Please. You and I endure that first pain. We just want to die.  People with that Other ultimately physical agony say Kill me and know they won't discuss it In therapy.  Kill me.  I’m thinking Of him today because I want to die And I am ashamed to say it.  My thinking Is red and sticky.  Rather than kill me, I'd like you to listen as I live In a perpetual whine.  Can’t I still be Somebody’s baby?  Say yes for yourself. Call me some time.  Every day I wish to die, Remind me how he insisted. Kill me.  And I’ll live again.

If it had become a competition in which we, Like children desperate for the blue ribbon, Pulled knotted hemp, gripping until certain Of calluses, if our contest awarded the strongest, The boy who could best inflict pain yet not Flinch when injured, then you won, for I must Imagine the brown of your back to reach my Peak, a short thread of breaths, a tug of war With the heaviest child grunting at the end Of the rope until jerked and dragged over The line. That fat kid flounders through muck The way I splash your relentless name In shivers about me. Watch him wallow. If he tastes mud as bitter as this poem Of mine, then I win – and you love me.

I, too, know the science of building men Out of fragments in little light Where I'll be damned if lightning don't Strike as I forget one May have a thief's thumb, Another, a murderer's arm, And watch the men I've made leave Like an idea I meant to write down, Like a vehicle stuck In reverse, like the monster God came to know the moment Adam named animals and claimed Eve, turning from heaven to her As if she was his To run. No word he said could be tamed. No science. No design. Nothing taken Gently into his hand or your hand or mine, Nothing we erect is our own.

Stop playing. You do remember the card tables, Slick stick figures like men with low-cut fades, Short but standing straight Because we bent them into weak display. What didn’t we want? What wouldn’t we claim? How perfectly each surface was made For throwing or dropping or slamming a necessary Portion of our pay. And how could any of us get by With one in the way? Didn’t that bare square ask to be played On, beaten in the head, then folded, then put away, All so we could call ourselves safe Now that there was more room, a little more space?

This is what our dying looks like. You believe in the sun. I believe I can't love you. Always be closing, Said our favorite professor before He let the gun go off in his mouth. I turned 29 the way any man turns In his sleep, unaware of the earth Moving beneath him, its plates in Their places, a dated disagreement. Let's fight it out, baby. You have Only so long left—a man turning In his sleep—so I take a picture. I won't look at it, of course. It's His bad side, his Mr. Hyde, the hole In a husband's head, the O Of his wife's mouth. Every night, I take a pill. Miss one, and I'm gone. Miss two, and we're through. Hotels Bore me, unless I get a mountain view, A room in which my cell won't work, And there's nothing to do but see The sun go down into the ground That cradles us as any coffin can.