Fuck / Trees

Dego / Though we know it isn’t his birth name / Dego he is to us / his scattered swiftness / calling for the dull red orb / It is dusk and behind him / we don’t know their names either / but they line the ball court / claw up through the concrete to hold him to their thin shadows / Dego jumps higher / arms outstretched to suggest a safe pass / be more visible / but is a Christ-shaped silhouette against their darkness / as if nailed to wood / strangled in their grip / the way we’ve been strangled before / strange fruit framed by air / dangling / How many crossed over here / who else shuffled earth / attempted flight / and lost it all among the trees

Fuck / Dante

The day Melissa complained I spent too much time dribbling and I better assess my priorities or else / Dante stepped on the court with a fake left and release so crisp / it looked like a nine o’clock / you could set your watch by it / Dante said he wanted dudes to know what time it is / which was a hip hop reference drawled in his thick Brooklyn accent / which was all we needed to follow him like lemmings / through the estate / up to the roof where he’d look into the middle distance over our listening city / at the few drifting clouds / clumped together like we were around him / and say something stupid like / You can tell what kind of Dad you’ll be by how you play the game / how you screen against danger so your boy can fly / and if you ain’t there his world comes crashing down / Jamie goes quiet like he does after loosing a game / shivering like he badly needs a hug but the sky is just too vast to hold him / like a man / Roger asks suddenly how Dante got so tall / Jamie says / That’s a stupid question / Dante says / Not at all / he just copied Jordan / spent one summer hanging from monkey bars with weights / around his ankles till his bones drew out / Last time I saw Melissa / I had bricks tied around my feet / dangling from the crossbar of a metal swing as she sucked Dante’s bottom lip beneath the street light / which flickered once / twice / then finally guttered out

Fuck / Sunflowers

What I’m trying to say is / Kelechi hates sunflowers / because Tyrone grew obsessed / after his class daytripped to the countryside / That first time he left the hulking concrete of his ends / that afternoon where the sky / enormous as it always is / looked down on him / Tyrone / for the first time / looked back / as if into the face of God / properly studying its swoops and tonalities / the contours of the countries of clouds / and the force that rose in him to match its unblinking vastness / brought him down to his knees where he squelched his fingers into the good and clean earth / drilling his black thumb into the blacker soil / The teacher scolded him all they way home / for his mud-streaked seat and soiled trousers / What she didn’t know is Tyrone had planted saplings of his spirit / among the fields of barley / and seeds of himself among the sunflowers / and these kept calling for him when they returned to the city of bricks / clawing for their kin / Though he filled his room with them / he couldn’t match life out in the fields / the sky’s unencumbered gaze over their choir of black faces / their petals like flattened crowns or ruffled haloes / So Tyrone walked out his fourth floor window to join them / and Tyrone never came home