THE WAY I HOLD MY HANDS

I can’t imagine my father wishing he would rather be
anything. Once upon a time, he was a watermelon
growing from a box. His mother died. His father beat
the blood out of him, and teardrops dripped black
from his face into his food. My father’s father made him eat
his dinner through himself, the Miracle Whip salad spangled
like dew in the garden. This isn’t a figure of speech: my father ate
his blood. It’s hard to think he must have been young. He made me stop
all my life. He told me to not to be a girl. Whatever I was doing,
of course I stopped. He kissed me on the top of the head
before I went to bed each night. He was always there. He read
to my brother, he read to me from a book of animals. This is a fox’s paw.
This is a bear’s. He told me, I’ll give you something
to cry about. He never touched me. Bear claw, I said. Winters are easier
for bears. I spread my fingers over his. No, my father said.

---

 

FIELDNOTES

 

1

 

in physics dark matter isn’t “made”
of anything. it’s a free citizen

 

that passes
unburdened through the field, through itself,

 

through you—

 

2

 

it helps to observe from a distance:
the field, for instance,

 

as a statement

 

the south has chosen to make,
the way whiteness too
is often rhetorical, as when an older student remarks

 

in those beginning days that only he observed mlk’s holiday
while his black friends, working, did not

 

3

 

sometimes love is a black dot
in a field

 

sometimes, suddenly
it is not.

 

4

 

or how can black be

 

the absence
of all color? take this cruiser. see the light strike blue off the car like copper
through a fountain

 

5

 

there is a difference between what is fair and what is just,
for instance,

 

it is fair
that I try
to love your skin even when it is not touching my own

 

6

 

whiteness is an alibi, the way the officer was like a steam-
liner

 

only I could see

7

 

inside where nothing shows I am of course not black
but that does not matter

 

to the field

 

8

 

some colors are indistinguishable
at night. put your hands behind your back

 

a different cop once asked me.
it was so sincere. he was so

 

polite

 

9

 

as a boy you learn to know the inside
without being required to feel it

 

as when, now, I understand a bucket
or a hood

 

10

 

he asks my girlfriend not if she is white
since even in this light

 

what we are is obvious

 

but instead he speaks philosophically:

 

ma’am he asks
are you here of your own free will

 

11

 

sometimes whiteness is a form itself
of hyperbole. try this:

 

sit in a field. then try reading

 

andrew jackson’s quotes on liberty
only
pretend they are being written by his slaves

 

12

 

look at the word black
on the paper
& you will see a definite black,a kind,

 

a certainty,

 

or if you see nothing at all that of course
is a kind of black too

 

13

 

by the road
my father showed me cotton
once

 

look at that
he said

 

---

A SHORT LIST OF GRIEVANCES

 

First, you are invisible,
which is another word for Jesus

 

she’s gone. Second, the medulla oblongata makes you
automatic, so even when I am not thinking
of your hips, I am

 

thinking of your hips (the dreams I have dreamed
of being loosed like a sparrow would pronounce themselves

 

into wilder dreams if I were a bird already.
I would have to eat nothing until I was thin as the air

 

and I’d baffle the moon, my simple machines turning
the sky like a mobile. I could be

 

ready. Heave and release.
Only the nothing of a bird).

 

Third,
You are right. I am cabinetry.
I’m a man that needs to know conclusively

 

that he’s empty. Your name,
you know, is a midnight call. I am talking too much

 

about air and hardly about breath—
who do you think, really,

 

makes me lift my chest? This should be simple
but never is. Consider the wing,

 

to whom the burden of air
becomes the burden of flight.

 

 

 

Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize Finalist, 2017

Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest Runner-up, 2017

Best of the Net Winner,  2016

Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize Runner Up, 2016

Gordon Fund Grant, 2016

Baltic KY Writers Prize, 2016

The Blueshift JournalEditor’s Choice

Founder’s Day Runner Up, 2015

Chicago State University Travel Grant to Czech Republic,2013

University of Chicago Minority Student Enrichment Grant, 2013