June 5, 2020 Mailing

A Request from Inside

Reply with the titles of a song or two that help you get through rough times.

Poem for Today

My wife says it’s a good thing humans don’t hold fear – by Hanif Abdurraqib

in their skin the way dogs do

which I guess is easy to say while driving at

night through a neighborhood where the houses got

more rooms than the bodies inside them could

ever fill even after they have chewed the skin off of

another old black church & built a shopping

mall over its bones

but on the eastside of Columbus the

police ain’t been around since that new

year’s party where I learned

that you can tell the difference between

gunshots & fireworks by how fast your

mama pulls you back from the window

& begins to say another one of those

hushed prayers & on the eastside of Columbus

them boys flash headlights twice on

saturday nights to let the

women know to get the babies inside cuz

another one of the homies bled out behind

greenbrier on friday & now someone else’s son ain’t

gonna make it to church in the morning

& maybe their younger brothers will praise

the empty space in the bed

after all of the mourning has

peeled itself off of the project walls

& maybe boys will begin to

praise the bigger portions served

at the dinner table after

a body leaves & never returns

we from the hood after all

so maybe distance is a currency

when boys pile themselves on top

of their families & that is how a bed is

made for the night

it must be nice to have enough rooms

in a home to store things

so that you never have to make a rupture

of your own stomach & fill it with

all of the times you could have been

dragged through the glass-ridden

street choking on the name of

someone who could maybe save

you but will never come & there are

so many moments like these writhing

under the skin of black boys

you would think that we would

always be full & never hunger

for anything

& yet