The Tradition

by Jericho Brown

I will bring you a whole person and you will bring me a whole person and we will have us twice as much of love and everything. Mari Evans

When we look at myth This way, nobody bothers saying Rape. I mean, don’t you want God To want you? Don’t you dream Of someone with wings taking you Up?

The people of my country believe We can’t be hurt if we can be bought.

There is the happiness you have And the happiness you deserve.

No matter how sore the injury Has left you, you sit understanding Yourself as a human being finally Free now that nobody’s got to love you.

Black boy Keeps singing.

Class where I learned what little difference God saw if God saw me.

Where the world ends, everything cut down. John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.

Gratitude is black— Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death. Thank God. It can’t get much darker than that.

They remind Me of black people who see the movie About slaves and exit saying how they would Have fought to whip Legree with his own whip And walked away from the plantation, Their eyes raised to the sun, without going blind.

She told me I could have whatever I worked for. That means she was an American. But she’d say it was because she believed In God. I am ashamed of America And confounded by God.

will not shoot myself In the head, and I will not shoot myself In the back, and I will not hang myself With a trashbag, and if I do, I promise you, I will not do it In a police car while handcuffed Or in the jail cell of a town I only know the name of Because I have to drive through it To get home. Yes,

winters we keep Calling worst. I promise if you hear Of me dead anywhere near A cop, then that cop killed me.

A poem is a gesture toward home. It makes dark demands I call my own.

None of the beaten end up how we began. A poem is a gesture toward home.

It’s not that I love them Every day. It’s that I love them anyway.

You come with a little Black string tied Around your tongue, Knotted to remind Where you came from And why you left

In your plot Of the country, class Means school, this room Where we practice Words that undo your Tongue when you tell A lie or start a promise Or unravel like a story.

Slavery is a bad idea. The more you look like me, the more we Agree. Sometimes you is everybody.

I am not a narrative Form, but dammit if I don’t tell a story.

All land owned is land once stolen. So the blues people of the world walk On water. We will not die. Blk music. Blk rage. Blk city of the soul In a very cold town. Blk ice is ice you can’t see.

My daughter; my son swaggers about her. He won’t have to heal a girl he won’t let free. They are so small.

In him lives my black anger made red. They play. He is not yet incarcerated.

We have Never heard a mother wailing. We do not know the history Of this nation in ourselves. We Do not know the history of our- Selves on this planet because We do not have to know what We believe we own. We believe We own your bodies but have no Use for your tears. We destroy The body that refuses use. We use Maps we did not draw. We see A sea so cross it. We see a moon So land there. We love land so Long as we can take

We sell what cannot be Bought. We buy silence. Let us Help you. How

All is stained. She was ugly. I’m ugly. You’re ugly too. No such thing as good white people.

I am writing to you from the other side Of my body where I have never been Shot and no one’s ever cut me. I had to go back this far in order To present myself as a whole being You’d heed and believe in.

You can trust me When I am young. You can know more When you move your hands over a child, Swift and without the interruptions We associate with penetration. The young are hard for you To kill.

Candles are Romantic because We understand shadows.

And I sing, again, those songs because I know The value of sweet music when we need to pass The time without wondering what rots beneath our feet.

He raped women Who weren’t yet women. I imagine the wealth he left When you turn red. I imagine you as a baby Bouncing on a rapist’s knee.

I don’t have kids Cuz I’d have to send them to school Ain’t that safe as any Plan for parenthood Mass shooting blues

I begin with love, hoping to end there. I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.

In the dream where I am an island, I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there.

I love a man I know could die And not by way of illness And not by his own hand But because of the color of that hand and all His flawless skin.

It was restful, learning nothing necessary. Gwendolyn Brooks

Each wounds you badly, but no boy hurts Like the first one

am tired Of claiming beauty where There is only truth:

I want to dye My hair purple and never notice You notice.

Let me be Another invisible, Used and forgotten and left To whatever narrow miseries I make for myself

Concern for my soul offends me, so I live in the city, the very shape of it Winding like the mazes of the adult-video outlets I roamed in my twenties:

Sometimes what I love Shows up at three In the morning and Rushes in to turn me Upside down. Some- Times what I love just Doesn’t show up at all. It can hurt me if it Means to… because That’s what in love Means. What I love Understands itself As properly scarce. It knows I can’t need What I don’t go without. Some nights I hold My breath. I turn as in Go bad.

I’m more than a conqueror, bigger Than bravery. I don’t march. I’m the one who leaps.

When black vocabulary heralds home- Made belief: For any kind of havoc, there is Deliverance!

I am not a saint Because I keep trying to be a sound, something You will remember Once you’ve lived enough not to believe in heaven.