This Has Never Been My america
I could talk about every
video clip of bodies rolling on pavement, skin-smeared sidewalks, the hopscotch
of our bones. But what would it do, other than incite a riot in my stomach? I do
believe in abolition, yet have never been a fan of sticking my own hands in the
mud. Does this make me a bad Black, the type soft white lips have not warned
their children about? All of my (white) partners’ parents loved me, some even
far after our parting. They used to say it’s so sad what happened to that
boy, but do you all have to keep looting? and all I could offer was a concerned
grin, minstrel-toothed and tame. I don’t know what I am waiting for. A free,
borderless land? A space for all my niggas to be niggas? I’m sure on top of a
mountain somewhere there are collections of us made god, allowed to crack in
peace, crack into the hands of their own loved ones and gust into a darkening
red sky. The living, the dead, their names all never etched on a baton of
tongues. I am optimistic about what it could look like if we didn’t know
anything but the dark. I am waiting to forget why we reach for the light.
Set in three sections of poems—“Departure,” “Arrival” and “Home”—as well as opening poem, “When we finally get there——,” crawford works through lyric, prose and visual accumulations, allowing text to fade, overlap and extend in an expansive, joyful sequence of poem structures. There is a joyful range of structural consideration, amid a text rife with anxiety and grief. “and if we can pause for / a second to talk about Black / bodies close enough to pass heat,” begins “Ode to Beat Milk,” “between their furred chests; a furnace of boys / warming each other through an already too hot / summer evening; [.]” The perpetual question throughout crawford’s depictions, their insistence upon presence, upon witness, is the inevitable: Why? Why must anyone be treated like this, and how has it gone on for as long as it has? Citing and responding to works by such as Douglas Kearney, George Abraham, Xan Phillips, Hanif Abdurraqib, Dorothy Chan and Italo Calvino, this collection is akin to a work on voice, on voices. As the sixth of an assembled nine different poems titled “essay on YEET!” sprinkled throughout the collection begins: “Today, I am relearning / tenderness—its porosity. The weight / of the past folds safely in my / palms, its playful blades rest / upon the nape of my neck; I know/ this is love, this cutting. Deep / down, I know it wants / what is best for me.” crawford explores the effects in a deeply personal way, writing slant across a broken heart, attempting to push through as much witness, as much simultaneous beauty, in response as possible. To counter hate with love, as crawford knows, is the only way. As they write to close the wonderfully propulsive poem “Gettin’ Religious, 1948,” a poem subtitled “after Archibald John Motley Jr”: “saying alive here or anywhere / we survive; call it taboo to be alive or aware of being anywhere—we want / to bask in that dusk-sound them children make—what night done gave us, music. / what i mean here is that we want that music to catch us by our tongues.”
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