They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

it is likely true that we only get one livable youth & I wasted mine thinking myself beautiful & throwing rent money into jukes & scrawling my phone number on skin in summer & watching it sweat off outside at goodale park where we just had to dance to the song we all knew & performing self-worship as a survival & giving myself, unkillable, over to a parade of death instruments & racking up just enough sins to make praying worth the time & leaving socks tangled in bedsheets & sneaking out of a room before sunlight ruptured its silence & locking arms with a motley crew of hooligans in the drunken hours & shoving five bodies into the backseats of cabs & opening the doors & sprinting down Livingston when it came time to pay the driver while he cursed the names of our families a small penance for keeping the cash we’d spend on the pills that we’d never be bold enough to take & in the mirror, I would try to smile as wide as my mother who, in the early ’90s, would sing pop music while steam hung over her afro in the kitchen & who would crane her neck backwards to laugh like the jokes were spilling from god’s own pockets & I am telling you all of this to let you know that I, too, want to feel the heat with somebody or, at worst, I want to be a child of the heat’s eager production, the smoke that rises & dances thick in the air, a ghost over those who labor in our names & then become the ghosts themselves & it’s a shame our wings don’t arrive until after we’ve already raced off the...