Nate Marshall

it's your 1st year of college & you should be missing home by now but mostly you don't. you read the Chicago newspapers & call family on Sundays. you pick up going to church at a place adjacent to the projects. you're not from the projects & the ones in Chicago seem worse but there's comfort in being around plainspoken folk. the church folk feed you & also cook you food. you take African American studies classes & sleep through Spanish & write poems at night. you read the newspaper. you consider pledging a fraternity. you go to parties to watch people. you don't miss home. you call your ex girl a lot. you imagine her face across the phone line. you stare at the scar on her chin. it is shiny & smooth. you read the newspaper. you text new girls mostly. you invite them to play cards & bet clothes or take them to dinner on your birthday so you don't spend it alone or you share their extra-long twin beds or you just text them. it's your 1st year of college & your nephew is tiny & your niece is young enough to be happy & the world is new & you are not going home for Thanksgiving. you are in the South at a new friend's house. you go to church with his family & to his old high school's basketball game & to his malls & to his grandmother's house. you did not make your team past 9th grade & never went to malls much. your grandmother had been dead for 2 years now. you read the newspaper. his family are nice people. you do not miss home. you go back to school. you stop talking to your ex girl. she has a new guy. you do not miss home. you write poems. you read the newspaper. there are still more kids dying. your 1st year of college & you should be missing but you're still here. you write papers about black people & voting & violence & families & that is the same paper. you don't read the newspaper. you have finals to finish. you go to church on Sunday with your new friend & you talk to new girls & consider pledging. you have heard the fraternities will haze you. you have heard about beating but you are not from the projects & you are not in Chicago. you stop reading the newspaper. you decide to kiss a girl & mean it. you decide to pledge a fraternity. you should have more information about the newspaper. & the girl. & the fraternity. you should call home more. you don't read the newspapers or call. you are not from the projects or Chicago. you do not miss home. or your ex girl. or your newspaper. there are still more kids dying. you convince your new friend to pledge the fraternity. he worries about the hazing, the beatings. you tell him this is an opportunity. don't miss it.

praise the Hennessy, the brown shine, the dull burn. praise the dare, the take it, the no face you’re supposed to make. praise the house, its many rooms, hardwood and butter leather couches; its richness. praise the rich, their friendship. praise the friends: the child of the well off, the child of the well off, the child of  well, the child of welfare, the child of welfare. praise the diversity but praise the Hennessy, and again,           and again.           praise the new year upon us. praise my stumble, the shaky eye, the fluid arm, but the steady hand. praise my hand, the burning it has. praise the dive into the gut of a friend; the dousing of my hand in his ribs. praise the softness of skin, the way it always gives. praise the pulling, the calming down. praise the fuck that, the jump back into all five of my friends fist first. praise all five of my friends pinning me into the thick carpet, knees in my back. praise my back, how it hurts and raises anyway, how it flips, how it’s the best friend of my fists. praise the swinging pool cue, how it whips air like a disobedient child, praise the disobedient and all the chilling           i won’t do. praise the child smile on my face, the fun plunging a knee into a cheek of my best friend. praise his blood, the brightness of it, a sun i bask in. praise my blood, the nose flowing wild with effort, the mess and taste of it, praise the swallowing, salt and its sweetness. praise the morning, the impossible blue, Midwestern  January above us. praise the blues dulled in my denim by all the brown. praise the brown shine, the dull burn. praise all six in my jeans, our salt and life sitting dry on my thighs mixing, refusing to wash away.

after Lisel Mueller on her profile i see she has 2 kids, now 1 she had in high school, now none at all. she unaborts 1. she is unpregnant in 8th grade. she unresembles her favorite pop singer Pink. she uncuts her hair, it pulls into her scalp from clumps on the floor. her new boyfriend forgets the weight of her. she leaves her new boyfriend. he's forgetting her phone number. she becomes my girlfriend she picks up the phone & i am on the line ungiving a goodbye. her best friend trades letters between us. we each open lettters from ourselves with hearts on the outside. she transfers to our magnet school. she moves to a neighborhood close by. we separate at the lips. we have never kissed behind the school. she unchecks the yes box on the note & i take away my middle school love letter. i unmeet her cop father & her Chicano moms. we walk backwards into Baskin-Robbins throwing up gold medal ribbon ice cream into cups. it rounds into scoops, flattens into gallon drums of sugar & cream & coldness. we are six years old. maybe we can go back to then. i unlearn her name, the way it is spelled the same backward. how it flips on a page, or in my mouth. i never knew words could do that until 5 minutes from now.

For my great aunt & Jonathan Hicks my first venture west was in Windows 98 or Independence, Missouri. class in the computer lab & we were supposed to be playing some typing game or another. the one i remember had a haunted theme. ghosts instructing us on the finer points of where to put our fingers. these were the last days before keyboards as appendage, when typing was not nature. i should’ve been letting an apparition coach me through QWERTY but rather i was at the general store deciding between ammo & axles, considering the merits of being a banker or carpenter. too young to know what profession would get me to the Willamette Valley in the space of a 40-minute period. i aimed my rifle with the arrow keys, tapped the space bar with a prayer for meat to haul back to the wagon. this game came difficult as breathing underwater after trying to ford a river. i was no good at survival. somebody always fell ill or out into the river. each new day scurvy or a raid was the fate of a character named for my crush or my baby sister. this loss i know, how to measure what it means to die premature before a school period ends. i can’t understand the game coming to a late end. an elderly daughter grieving her elderly mother. reading the expansive obit in a suburban Detroit church is a confusing newness. when the old do the thing the world expects i retreat into my former self. focus on beating video games I’ve always sucked at, brush up on Chicago Bulls history, re-memorize the Backstreet Boys catalog, push away whatever woman is foolhardy enough to be on any road with me. i pioneer my way away from all the known world. i look at homicide rates & wish we all expired the way i know best. i pray for a senseless, poetic departure. i pray for my family to not be around to miss me while i’m still here. i want a short obituary, a life brief & unfulfilled, the introductory melody before a beat’s crescendo into song, the game over somewhere in the Great Plains. i want to spare my descendants the confusion of watching a flame flicker slow. keep them from being at a funeral thumbing the faded family pictures like worn keys, observing the journey done, the game won, the west conquered.

After Suji Kwock Kim 1 decorating the dead is among the most basic human instincts, to return the borrowed body & acknowledge Earth as maker & home. Neanderthals used antlers & flowers. Egyptians had pyramids with peasants buried in the walls they built. some niggas just get a pine box. hopefully you get a hole or a flame. some only get a cold cabinet in the morgue until somebody or nobody claims them as a loss. 2 a permanent fixture on my to-do list is research life insurance plans. pick a good one with a fair rate & enough money to buy a nice box. 3 everything gonna be all right this morning

we’re trying to eliminate the shack. — Kristen Pierce, Harold’s CEO & daughter of founder Harold Pierce when i went to summer camp the white kids had a tendency to shorten names of important institutions. make Northwestern University into NU. international relations into IR. everybody started calling me Nate. before this i imagined myself Nathaniel A. maybe even N. Armstead to big up my granddad. i wrote my whole name on everything. eventually i started unintentionally introducing myself as Nate. it never occurred to me that they could escape the knowing of my name’s real length. as a shorty most the kids in my neighborhood couldn’t say my name. Mick-daniel, Nick-thaniel, MacDonnel shot across the courts like wild heaves toward the basket. the subconscious visual of a chicken shack seems a poor fit for national expansion. Harold’s Chicken is easier, sounds like Columbus’s flag stuck into a cup of cole slaw. shack sounds too much like home of poor people, like haven for weary like building our own.

i was born by a lake, chicken shack, & a church — Common, “The Morning” 1st defense against food deserts. when the whitefolk wouldn't sling us burgers you gave no fuck. stuck your golden-ringed hand into the flour & fixed the bird. you 1st example of black flight. original innovation of deep fry. you beef tallow, city slick & down home migration taste. of course your sauce sweet & burn at the same time. of course you call it mild so whitefolk won't know to fear until it's too late. you no corporate structure, just black business model. they earn the recipe & go make it their own. every cut of crow you throw in the grease is dark meat. the whole shack: shaking, drenched in mild sauce, sweet spirit, baptized.

i be but i don’t is. i been & i am one who be on my own biz. i love not a b____. but see know i been loved. i’m one who been that & then not deserved much cuz i been on my own dirt. i don’t know love. i been a lie but don’t be a lie i be fly sometimes but don’t be a fly sometimes i be addict-like but not high like an addict’s like. just scratching low stones like an addict might. stop? not an option. i be getting mine. been getting over. been over this but be caught in a cycle. but you be what you be & it be good. & i be moved & making new habits.

we cut down 115th street for a quicker stroll past the pastor's house, vacant lot, liquor store. buses pointing out the hood & back. the route every morning goes by the liquor store. the loose Philly blunts and hard & dry. the sour mouth washed away by a dull gulp of liquor. store a honey bun in your fat back pocket. pray nobody notices your awkward walk. this liquor store sees stumbling often. out front the garish stickers fluoresce on the wire windows like winos with liquor store bottles. a small weapon sits behind the counter hidden by the cigarettes & candy small enough to steal. when the liquor store is locked up the rolling metals make the window a pastoral, part of our natural habitat. behold the liquor store: the sugar waters, the Ziploc bag of coins & Nate's tongue the color of loose pennies in the liquor store.

if i said baby you might think a certain thing but nah. that’s only maybe what i mean, perhaps i’ll say ma & your mind says Cam’ron, women creeping up but i’m a changed man, & that’s not game ma. it’s practice in high school & THOT isn’t out yet. we’re classic Chicago & bustdowns bloom in our mouths. my Ma spits Too $hort & the line i catch the first time is b*tch b*tch b*tch make me rich but Ma puts me on punishment when i whisper Ludacris & tells me sex shouldn’t hurt. i say nothing & Ma lets it go until a few years later when i get becky or brain or top or dome by a white girl & Ma tells me everything i’ve risked for this escapade. i can’t fix my mouth to say but Ma what i got i didn’t ask for