Owed Read online
ALSO BY JOSHUA BENNETT
The Sobbing School
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Copyright © 2020 by Joshua Bennett
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Bennett, Joshua (Poet), author.
Title: Owed / Joshua Bennett.
Description: New York : Penguin, [2020] |
Series: Penguin poets |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020005147 (print) | LCCN 2020005148 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133858 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525505655 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3602.E664483 O94 2020 (print) | LCC PS3602.E664483 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005147
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005148
Cover design: Lynn Buckley
Cover photograph: Carrie Bennett
pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
For the unheralded
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sincerest thanks to the following journals for publishing earlier versions of the work featured in this collection:
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song: “America Will Be”
The American Poetry Review: “Metal Poem,” “Mike Brown Is a Type of Christ,” and “When Thy King Was a Boy”
The Best American Poetry 2019: “America Will Be”
Boston Review: “Elegy for Prison,” “Frederick Douglass Is Dead,” and “Owed to Long Johns”
Catch & Release: “Palimpsestina”
Connotation Press: “Elegy for the Modern School” and “The Open”
The Cortland Review: “Purple City Byrd Gang”
The Journal: “Owed to Ankle Weights” and “Token Sings the Blues”
The Kenyon Review: “Owed to Your Father’s Gold Chain”
The New York Times Magazine: “The Panther Is a Virtual Animal”
PEN America: “Elegy for the Police State”
Poetry: “The Book of Mycah,” “Owed to Pedagogy,” and “Reparation”
Public Pool: “Owed to the Durag”
Smartish Pace: “You Are So Articulate with Your Hands”
Soul Sister Review: A Poetry Compilation: “Barber Song”
Storyscape: “Owed to the High-Top Fade”
Transition: “Owed to the 99 Cent Store”
Wave Composition: “Plural”
wildness: “Summer Job”
World Literature Today: “Still Life with Toy Gun”
Thank you, first and foremost, to my family: my late grandmother, Charlotte Elizabeth Ballard, my mother, my sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews, and my father, with whom I share the cover image adorning this book. Thank you to my editor, Paul Slovak, for agreeing to go on this adventure with me yet again. Thank you to my friends, students, mentors, and collaborators, for the constant reminders that this work is worth doing: Thomas Alston, Jamil Baldwin, Kyle Brooks, Jamall Calloway, Devin Chamberlain, Daniel Claro, Ben Crossan, Aracelis Girmay, Jarvis Givens, Bill Gleason, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Marc Lamont Hill, Elleza Kelley, Carvens Lissaint, Jesse McCarthy, Roshad Meeks, Ernie Mitchell, Wesley Morris, Nicholas Nichols, Imani Perry, Timothy Pantoja, Gregory Pardlo, Samora Pinderhughes, Justin Reilly, Caroline Rothstein, Elaine Scarry, Josef Sorett, Daniella Toosie-Watson, Jachele Velez, Bee Walker, Rog Walker, and L. Lamar Wilson.
Sincerest thanks to Cave Canem for serving as home and harbor for a number of these poems before they were published. Thank you, as well, to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, and the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College for the various forms of institutional support that helped make this manuscript possible.
Finally, I want to thank my beloved, Pam, for being a friend to my mind. And making every day shine.
CONTENTS
I.
TOKEN SINGS THE BLUES
OWED TO PEDAGOGY
THE BOOK OF MYCAH
BARBER SONG
OWED TO THE DURAG
OWED TO THE HIGH-TOP FADE
OWED TO ANKLE WEIGHTS
OWED TO THE CHEESE BUS
PLURAL
PALIMPSESTINA
THE OPEN
AMERICAN ABECEDARIAN
II.
TOKEN PLAYS THE DOZENS
METAL POEM
STILL LIFE WITH TOY GUN
WHEN THY KING WAS A BOY
MIKE BROWN IS A TYPE OF CHRIST
YOU ARE SO ARTICULATE WITH YOUR HANDS
OWED TO THE 99 CENT STORE
OWED TO THE PLASTIC ON YOUR GRANDMOTHER’S COUCH
REPARATION
REPARATION
REPARATION
REPARATION
III.
TOKEN COMES CLEAN
FREDERICK DOUGLASS IS DEAD
OWED TO LONG JOHNS
OWED TO YOUR FATHER’S GOLD CHAIN
SUMMER JOB
ELEGY FOR THE MODERN SCHOOL
ELEGY FOR THE POLICE STATE
PURPLE CITY BYRD GANG
THE PANTHER IS A VIRTUAL ANIMAL
ELEGY FOR PRISON
THE NEXT BLACK NATIONAL ANTHEM
AMERICA WILL BE
We are a nation within a nation, a captive nation within a nation.
—James Baldwin
Their country is a Nation on no map.
—Gwendolyn Brooks
It is not down on any map; true places never are.
—Herman Melville
I
TOKEN SINGS THE BLUES
You always or almost
always only one
in the room
Maybe two
Three is a crowd
Three is a gang
Three is a company
of thieves Three is
wow there’s so many of you
Three will get you confused
with people that look nothing
like you you get called
Devin your name isn’t
Devin you do your best
not to ignore such casual
erasure you know silence
will be received as affirmation
praise even & you always affirmative
You affirmative action action figure
You fantastic first black
friend You first-ballot
quota keeper You almost
cry when your history
professor says you know
in this country the gold standard
used to be people Funny how
no one comes right out
& says things like you people
anymore it’s all code
words like thug or
diversity hire You diversity
all by yourself You contain
multitudes & are yet
contained everywhere you go
someone watching you & isn’t
there & isn’t that the entire point
of this flesh you inherited
this unrepentant stain be
twice as good mama says
as if what they have is worth
your panic worth measuring
your very life against & you always
remember to measure
Your hair, your volume, your tone
over email, you perpetually
sorry You don’t know why
You apologize to no one
in particular just for being around
& in your body at the same time
You know your body
is the real problem
You monster You beast
of burden You beast & burden
You horse but human
You centaur You map
the stars & pull back your bow
to shoot
the moon in its one good white eye
You are everything
your big sister says
& on your best
days above ground you
believe her
OWED TO PEDAGOGY
for 1995
It was the dead center of summer,
& anyone but us would’ve been
outside hours ago, flailing
like a system of larks against
the hydrant’s icy spray. But a girl
had her orders, & to disobey
our mother was, in a sense, to invite
one’s own destruction, cause to pray
that a god of mercy might strike first.
So we lay, still as stars on the living
room floor, poring over formulae:
divisors & dividends, quotient
the first synonym for resolution
I ever learned, & would later
come to love for its sound alone,
how it reminded me, even then,
of words like quantum & quotation
mark, both ways of saying nothing
means what you think it means
all the time. The observable
universe hides behind its smooth
obsidian dress, & all we can
do is grasp at it in myths
& figures, see what sticks,
give all our best language
to the void. What dark irony,
these coy, child philosophers,
theorizing how things break
from the floor of a house
where everything is more
or less in flux, indeterminate
as the color of the blood
in a body. Or the speed
at which I learned
to obliterate the distance
between myself
& any given boy
on the block, the optimal
angle of the swing
most likely to drop
another kid cold
in front of his crew,
to square up, square
off, & this too was a kind
of education, the way
my sister held both fists
semi-adjacent, each an inch
or so from her switch
-blade eyes, showed me
the stance you take
when the math doesn’t
quite shake out, so it’s just
you & the unknowns
& the unknowns
never win.
THE BOOK OF MYCAH
Son of Man. Son of Marvin & Tallulah. Son of Flatbush & roti & dollar vans bolting down the avenue after six. The boy grew like a debt, & beautified every meter of the pockmarked, jet-black asphalt which held him aloft on days he sped from much larger men along its skin. Godfathers & hustlers, Division I scholarship forfeiters, alchemists, liars, lasagna connoisseurs, internet mixtape DJs & baby mama conflict consultants, each one appearing as if from the smoke of our collective imagination, Jordans laced, drawstrings taut, all of them gathered one by one to race the gangly, mop-top prodigy from the front of Superior Market to the block’s endarkened terminus, the same corner where Man Man got jumped so bad at the back end of last summer, neighborhood residents came to regard the place as a kind of memorial & it was like this every other afternoon, you know, from June through the final days leading up to the book drives & raucous cookouts which signaled our school year’s inauspicious return. This was the manner by which Mycah Dudley first gained his fame, dusting grown men without so much as the faintest scintillation of sweat to make the performance ethical. It was damn near unsportsmanlike, his effortlessness, mass cruelty in a New York City dreamscape, the laughter of girls with hip-length, straight-back braids & baby powder Forces making every contest an event worth leaving the perch of your bunk bed, stepping out into the record-breaking swelter that summer held like a trapdoor for kids with broken box fans & no mother home for at least four more hours to fill the quiet with discipline.
* * *
:::
We gathered in swarms to gawk at our boy before takeoff. His flesh maroon-clad from head to foot like an homage to blood, black plastic afro pick with a fist for a handle jutting from the left side of his high-top fade, his high-top Chuck Taylors, size 12, sounding like ox hooves once he entered the groove of a good run & the distinction was basically moot at that point is what I am saying, the line between him & any other mystical creature, any worthwhile myth, any god of prey or waning life.
* * *
:::
The entire block was out that night. Firecrackers packed the blackening air, their fury matched only by the exorbitance of dope boy convertibles turned mobile dancehalls by the moment’s weight. Which might explain why no one quite remembers when, or how, the now-infamous brawl began. Only that Mycah was in rare form earlier that evening, having just embarrassed Mars Patterson—so named, it bears mentioning, for the chocolate bars he loved to steal & trade on the 4 train, not the red rock planet or lord of war—but was now in his everyday mode, seated on the stoop, a seer with so few words for devotees & passersby, each eventually stopped asking for his backstory, for his praise or functional wisdom, & instead were content to let him eat his veggie patty with cheese without interruption, which he did, which he was, when the din that always accompanies someone’s son’s public pummeling rang out, cut through our scene lengthwise, compelled the boy, for the first time on record, to leap from the steps of the brownstone his nana died braiding hair inside of, enter the scrum, thresh the crowd for signs of the conflict’s center.
* * *
:::
General consensus has it he was looking for his little cousin, & found him, even before the initial cop car ran like a living ram through the people. Before the boys in blue sprang, a spray of navy fléchettes, from behind its doors. Before they were caught in the scuffle, released ten to twenty rounds of ammo into the crowd without warning, bullets glancing off of Cutlass doors & corner store glass built for battle, all but three or four of which entered the boy mid-stride, lifted his six-foot frame from the ground, legs still pumping. For a second, you would almost swear he was running through the gunfire, preparing for liftoff or something, little cousin held firmly in his arms, shielded from the onslaught. They never would have caught him if he hadn’t been holding that child, said no one, though we all thought it during the weeks following that moment we each froze, the moment his body collapsed slow as petals upon the unremarkable cement, & we stared at our champion felled by an outcome so common we don’t even have a special name for it. Still. No one standing ran that day. Most of us turned to face his killers, hands at our sides, determined
to make them make it a massacre. But all that was before we heard Man Man let off a scream so full it rent the crowd in two, split the circle we had built around the boy’s corpse, our human wall parting to watch each casing fall from Mycah’s still-wet, dark-red sweatshirt onto the street. Hear me. I heard the gunman’s greeting. Saw hollow points etch apertures into the boy’s clothes. They shot Mycah Dudley, quite legally. He died that night. He rose.
BARBER SONG
Postmodern blackness black
-smith. Straight razor reshaping
self-esteem. You dream
in geometries unreachable
by any other means. Speak,
& entire phrases abandon
Standard American
Etymology; hence, you liberate
waves from the sea, cornrows
from the cornfield, reclaim fade
so I now hear the word & imagine
only abundance, Caesar
never meant anything to me
but a cut so close you could see
the shimmer of a man’s thinking.
You are how we first learn
to bend language built
to unmake us, accept
implausible risk: some
much older man,
shaver in hand
like a baton full of wasps’
gossip, asking with the grain
or against & the question feels
damn near existential
given this is the only
place we can live
in such thoughtless proximity
to another person’s open
hands, be held by the face,
ask outright to be made
glamorous, shaped
by your polymathic
brilliance. You biweekly
psychoanalyst, first stop
before funeral, before
wedding & block party
alike, you soothe
-sayer, cooing children
to calm as they sit
in the chair for the first
time, as still a storm
as one might reasonably
Owed