Copyright © 2014 by Nate Marshall
Published by Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press, Minneapolis, MN 55408
http://buttonpoetry.com
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cover Art: Anjo Bolarda || anjo.bolarda@gmail.com
Cover Design: Doug Paul Case || dougpaulcase@gmail.com
ISBN 978-0-9896415-5-5
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the editors and staffs of the following journals and anthologies in which the following poems in various versions have appeared:
Anti-: “prelude”
AREA Magazine: “mama says”
Chicago Literati: “in the event of my demise”
Beloit Poetry Journal: “Chicago high school love letters”
Heavy Feather Review: “landing,” “indian summer,” “in the land where whitefolks jog,”
pluck! Journal: “Ragtown prayer”
POETRY Magazine: “praise song”
Side B Magazine: “postlude: the day _____ died”
Southern Indiana Review: “when it comes back”
Uncommon Core: Contemporary Poems for Learning and Living: “when the officer caught me”
The poem “mama says” won the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award and was published on the website of The Guild Complex.
Many of these poems were included in a winning manuscript for a 2013 Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award from the University of Michigan.
These poems are a product of a loving community of colleagues, family, and friends. The creative and emotional support of so many folks made this work possible. That list of people is long and never-ending and includes Mama, Daddy, Grandma (RIP), Granny (RIP), Jamesa, Jonquinae, Natasha, Justin, Juanita, José Olivarez, Blue Bellinger, H. Melt, Raymond McDaniel, francine j. harris, Ben Alfaro, Angel Nafis, Isaac Miller, Brittany Bennett, A. Van Jordan, Linda Gregerson, Laura Kasischke, Khaled Mattawa, Keith Taylor, Lamar J. Smith (JusLove), Shaun Peace, Dominic Giafagleone, Demi Amparan, Adam Levin, Diamond Sharp, Eve Ewing, John F. Buckley, Marcelo C. Hernandez, Bruce Lack, Airea Dee Matthews, Joshua Bennett, Alysia Harris, Aziza Barnes, Camonghne Felix, Marcus Wicker, Stevie Edwards, Kevin Coval, Idris Goodwin, Robbie Q. Telfer, Avery R. Young, Krista Franklin, Kristiana Colón, Ekua Davis, Keisha Hooks, Chinaka Hodge, Brittany Floyd, Carlina Duan, Alex Pan, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Lyndsey Bradley, Richard McCarty, Jeremy Williams, Bryson Whitney, Chris Marve, Christian Nuñez, Tarfia Faizullah, Adrian Matejka, Don Share and Phillip B. Williams.
Thanks to the organizations and crews that have held me down and stay holding me down: Young Chicago Authors, InsideOut Literary Arts Project (DSA CityWide Poets), Neutral Zone Literary Arts, The Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, The Poetry Foundation, The Guild Complex, Louder Than A Bomb Tulsa, The University of Michigan Poetry Slam Team, Vandy Spoken Word, the editors and staff of Muzzle Magazine, and the editors and staff of Kinfolks Quarterly.
The crew Dark Noise. Aaron Samuels, Danez Smith, Jamila Woods, Fatimah Asghar, and Franny Choi. We stay rolling in the work together.
My editor Michael Mlekoday and the Button Poetry team for believing in the work.
The whole hood. West Pullman, Wild Hundreds, Maple Park, Ragtown, Carpenter to Halsted, P Street, Sang Gang, Little Horseshoe to Big Horseshoe, 115th to 119th. We exist and we exist and we exist.
These poems are dedicated to the young people living in communities where violence is not a sad poem; the young people for whom violence is the walk home, or what they do with their friends, or how they love their girlfriends and boyfriends. These poems are for The Hundreds, the beautiful neighborhoods and people that hold me down always. These poems are for the names and the bodies that have been collected in Chicago and for the hope that there will be no more.
Table of Contents
Introduction
prelude
Chicago high school love letters
when the officer caught me
Mama says
dare
Chicago high school love letters
landing
indian summer
Chicago high school love letters
Ragtown prayer
in the land where whitefolk jog
Chicago high school love letters
praise song
when it comes back
Chicago high school love letters
in the event of my demise
postlude: the day _____ died
Chicago high school love letter
Introduction
As a kid I had little concept of my neighborhood or what it meant. I knew I lived in Chicago and I knew I lived on the South Side. My neighborhood felt indistinct, non-specific, maybe just generically black and South Side and Chicago. Beverly, a neighborhood a few miles northwest of my house seemed to have such an incredible identity. It was where white people lived and where the South Side Irish Parade happened every year. It was beautiful with tree lined streets and a rolling main thoroughfare called Longwood Drive bisecting its two east and west halves. The houses in Beverly were larger, grander, and more beautiful than the smaller mid 20th century construction that populated my blocks of birth. I was bussed to a magnet school just west of Beverly and every day from 6 to 14 I rode through and stared out of the window at the place. Many of my friends from school lived in Beverly and once I got old enough to ride my bike out of the neighborhood I spent most of the free time I could muster in Beverly. I loved Beverly with my whole self. I wanted it to be mine. I wanted everything that it meant with its coffee shops and walkable streets and big houses and white people and rolling tree-lined thoroughfares. I would find out years later that Gwendolyn Brooks observed the same streets with a similar envy in her poem “Beverly Hills, Chicago.”
When I started to learn about my neighborhood I found what it meant mostly through other people’s fear. Sometimes it was my friend’s parents suggesting that I visit their houses instead of vice versa or insisting on their kids having strict door-to-door service for a visit rather than taking public transit or riding their bike. These things were never malicious but they did teach me that a benign fear of where I came from was natural and even wise. This is something many young people growing up have to wrestle with if they don’t live in the “right” city or town or neighborhood.
I’ve spent the last 6 years as a “Chicagoan-in-exile.” I’ve been away at college and graduate school. I’ve traveled the country and the world. I’ve escaped back home for some Harold’s Chicken and to vote in a local election whenever possible. I’ve seen the city change and shift and become the center of a national conversation about urban violence and safety. When I see that conversation play out I can’t help but remember the way I learned to fear myself (and people who look like me). Of course the issues of life and death in Chicago are more complicated than one little boy feeling bad because he lives too east or too south for his friend’s parents to feel safe but I still believe that there is an important lesson to learn from that little boy. Often in these conversations about violence, communities, guns, and gangs we give into a pundit mentality of talking. We speak about neighborhoods like they are inanimate objects ready for the “right” answer and not ecosystems where real people live and real little kids learn.
I submit this chapbook not as some kind of policy directive or political agenda. I don’t assume to have any answers to these difficult issues faced by my city and many other places. I hope that these poems can simply be a part of the conversation. I see too many political leaders and well-intentioned activists argue about the fate of neighborhoods in a way that erases the feelings and realities of the people who live there.
When I was 11 or 12 I
first heard the song “Walk With Me” by Chicago rapper DA Smart. The song is a dark, dystopic picture of the city’s South and West Sides. It made me happier than any other song I’d ever heard. In that song he offers the line “…get in the car, let’s take a trip to that Wild Wild Hundreds.” This was the first time I had ever heard my hood articulated on any piece of art. Even though DA’s portrait of Chicago was a dangerous one it filled me with hope. There was a kind of power in DA telling the world on record that I existed, however flawed, and that I could not be erased or ignored. I offer these poems in that spirit and with the hope that some young person somewhere will see these poems and feel like their world is being announced and seen.
Nate Marshall
West Pullman, Chicago, Il
June 2014
prelude
he must’ve moved out
the neighborhood when i was little.
i bet he could ball,
probably could dunk.
maybe he rap now.
maybe he is the boy on every wall.
we ain’t got graffiti over here
like for real art stuff but maybe
in the 80s he was optimistic. this was his all
city attempt all over the hood.
maybe he ain’t a he.
in the time before the Folks
Nation ran everything over here
maybe the presiding clique was RIP.
i see it everywhere:
RIP Bird
RIP D
RIP Man Man
maybe RIP is a girl.
i see her name next to all
the bad boys. all the big boys
my mama told me not to fool with.
maybe she’s all they girlfriends
at once. but they all
gone. no wonder
she keep finding new boys
to kiss.
Chicago high school love letters
first day of school
1.
i’ll take the bus
to you, walk through
your neighborhood
& navigate the colors.
3.
take my student ID.
it’s clipped
in the corner for
free lunch.
when the officer caught me
what is the age when a black boy learns he’s scary?
—Jonathan Lethem, “Fortress of Solitude”
me & darnell crossed
at the stop sign
in front of a car ready
for getaway, like every car
in our neighborhood.
the voice shot out, a stray bullet
of accusation. stop, police.
our jog became sprint.
how could you blame us?
we were terrified
at the potential
of older versions
of us hopping out of the car
ready for the come up.
when the officer caught me
my legs crumpled
like the stubborn plastic wrapper
of a rap CD, finally ripped open & free
when the officer caught me
my grape pop tumbled to the crabgrass,
spilled like piss. my fear
or the fear i now evoked
when the officer caught me
i cried. i gulped
answers to his questions
i endured the slip of hand
into pocket. the groping
of birthday money
& the accusation of drugs
this was the first time i used
my magnet school namedrop
to subdue my scary
it was not the last time.
when the officer caught me
i fell hard into the reality
of being 13 & black
& wild hundreds.
darnell in his 3 year older wisdom,
a witness to my new manhood.
my answers to interrogation
a reading of torah.
the cop a rabbi at this bar mitzvah
this is how black boys are baptized
into black manhood while they are still
boys & scared & going
to get their backpack from grandma’s
& learning how to steel a sobbing face
into a scary one.
Mama says
1.
you gotta go to the head dr.
says all this brooding is gonna kill
you or her or somebody. all this kill
in you & your temper short & you
ready to firecracker at the slightest.
this ain’t healthy she say. you fight
her wish. you fine you say. fine
as everybody else. you just 16 & man
in progress & in the process of
hardening into survivor. but she pull
rank on you. talk to the doc or quit
the basketball team. & man ain’t
man in Chi with no ball so you bend.
at the shrink there’s a head test.
it ask you about fire & fantasizing
about burning or murder or hearing
voices or rape & other synonyms.
& you know the right answers have
to be the ones that ain’t crazy.
& that is crazy because a sick
person wouldn’t be able to decipher
sickness on the scantron. & you
talk to the shrink & he’s a nice
old white guy & you’re not
really talking about much but he’s
okay so you don’t feel as bad
going back the second time.
2.
when Michelle Obama was
asked about her fear of racists
killing her husband now that he
was running for president
she said he’s a black man
on the South Side. he can die
any day. at the gas station
or grocery store.
the shrink suspects you are
learning the same lesson.
3.
you quit basketball that year
because tryouts is the same day
Granny dies from cancer.
at the funeral you don’t cry.
you’re clear. you’re fine.
there’s nothingwrong.
4.
he diagnoses you with fear
‘cause your boy down the block
just got smacked baseball bat
to temple & the homie
you used to play ball with at
the park got shot the year before
etc. etc…
& that’s something you gotta
adjust to. get used to: this body
dropping rhythm, blood percussion,
heart beats hitting b-boy freeze.
the shrink is nice about it & says
you’re clear & don’t have to come
back.
dare
ay folk you got change
fo’ the five?
nah.
you don’t got change
fo’ the five?
nah.
what you got change
fo’ then?
so you saying if i run
yo pockets right now
there won’t be nothing?
you ain’t finna
run nothing right
here. there’s no change
on me. i’m not the one
you wanna try. i ain’t got
no change.
Chicago high school love letters
homecoming weekend
46.
come to the dance.
my hands wand
around your frame
searching for danger.
58.
you can wear my letterman jacket
home. if it’s the wrong shade
of blue just imagine it around
you while it sits in your locker.
landing
surprise escapes your lips as you soar
into the sinking of having your shins
kicked from under you. if you’re lucky
the full nelson that folds arms origami
will keep your knees from crashing
into the concrete. your flight will be
brief. pray you have enough time
to kick back into the kneecap
of the third assailant. if the fourth member
of the crew sees your retaliation,
it’s a toss up. he might be merciful,
dock his Nikes into your stomach,
ribs, knees & not face, head, spine. he might
not be merciful. hopefully the other three guys
will only tap dance on your hands, break
something that might heal. if a car stops
you’ll make it. the driver isn’t on their side
this time. this time, you’ll only miss one day
of school for the emergency room visit,
the negative x-rays, the scratched retina,
the doctor’s orders, the protective eyewear.
this time five years from now you will miss
all of this. the beauty of soaring,
or being sore.
Indian summer
heat is a cruel mother,
pushes us out into the neighborhood
to play & burn. the sun sit up top
like an OG on a tall stoop
fresh out from Stateville,
nervous around four walls.
the clouds circle vulture
or blunt session or after school fight
above. we out here
playing with one ear
gaping, both eyes low. summertime
& dying is easier. june is jazz
or a funeral dirge. july, thick thump
of a rap record or dull thud
of hood cliché. the weatherman says
forecast is clear, beautiful &
sunny. that’s a cloud in our sky.
your play cousin got good hair,
Indian in her family. maybe
she can pray for rain.
Chicago high school love letters
winter break
131.