Mitchell L. H. Douglas

Poem that Begins w/a Tweet About Gwendolyn Brooks

 

Gwendolyn Brooks was a Jeopardy question no one could answer tonight.

That’s a metaphor too painful to wrap my head around.

 

 

& I said, “The poem is about Love

because all poems are about Love,”

 

& you rolled your eyes so hard

I thought they would snap back to center

 

w/cherries & diamonds. The flit

of your lashes renders me nameless & I fall

 

blank for what feels like a block. Falling

is a metaphor for my life: unsettled,

 

unmoored. I capitalize Love

because it is bigger than what we are

 

or what we give credit for: oaken,                                                

open. For that, you have no answer,

 

your breath in kitchenettes:

hal/ved, qu/art/er/ed—cut again. 

 

 

Seer

for Devonte Hart

 

You can’t have this body; there is no blue

that can soak my weight, sink

my heart. I want to be free. See me flying

 

on a distant wave, hat blown to the wind

in the sheer force of now. I don’t want to be

somebody, I am somebody—I’m just waiting

 

for you to notice. There was a time

when I smiled, the curl of my lips a bow

pulled tight for flight. Things are different now:

 

there are two faces, two mothers, a whole

lot of empty. I wasn’t crying for the reason

you think I was crying & why couldn’t anyone

 

who ever loved a child see? If you never find me

brown & buoyant against the current, know that I move

like the dreams of boys held under water, in other words

 

I move like the dreams of boys held under. I move

like the dreams of boys held. I move like the dreams

of boys. I move like the dreams. I move like

 

 

 

It’s a Demo

You don’t know this, but Steady B was the only one

who took the time. Terminator X looked @ me

 

like his fist should be connected to my jaw

when I slipped him a TDK & told him the name

 

of my crew was R²PE (Radically Raged

Posse in Effect). The ’80s were cruel

 

to slang & fashion, so was Reagan,

but he’s not allowed here. Steady B, on tour

 

w/MC Lyte, took the chalice of plastic,

sat down on his bed—his ear

 

to a boom box—while Tat Money talked to girls

who wouldn’t look @ us twice.      Two times the fire

 

years later in the North of Death, a PNC,

the officer (mother) vs. Cool C on the trigger—

 

not as cool as we thought. B @ the wheel

going nowhere. Who cares if we weren’t stars.

Mitchell L. H. Douglas is the author of dying in the scarecrow’s arms, \blak\ \al-fə bet\, winner of the Persea Books Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award, and Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem, an NAACP Image Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominee. His poetry has appeared in Callaloo, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia Press), The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books), Crab Orchard Review, and Ninth Letter, among others. He is a cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets, a Cave Canem graduate, and Associate Professor of English at IUPUI.