When a Black Girl is Killed
BY AKHIM YUSEFF CABEY
a runner cheats several paces off the bag
at second base, his intent to steal third
as fast as he can. once as a boy he’d gouged
his chest against a nail at a construction site—
white meat flesh popcorned past the surface
of brown skin. and he saw inside himself,
what he was made of, for the first time. he ran
home shirtless, and she laid him down
on the pavement in front of the tenement
building. the blood had dried beverage-straw wide
from the gash to navel. she licked her palm
wet enough to erase the line of red along
his stomach then adhered gauze to the wound
with grease from her baby-hair edges. he stood up
and she gave him a piece of bubble gum
and a baseball autographed with a forged
signature of his favorite player. penmanship
she’d been practicing in that place we are born
before we are born. just as the ball leaves
the pitcher’s hand, he takes off, cleat teeth
chewing up dirt, and slides in head first,
safely ahead of the throw. theft like theirs
is egotistical—a measured act of greed—
but it’s the only way he knows how to speed
up time so he can get back to fingering
the smooth, half-penny-shaped scar
above his right nipple, and how she spat
in her hand then took the needful from her scalp
to mend him. he desires to steal home—
knows he will have to plow through the catcher
guarding the base—so sets his lungs on fire
with breath he no longer possesses,
breath escaped already aboard the thought
of her frozen body face down in the river.
Get Funky
BY AKHIM YUSEFF CABEY
previously published in Kweli
we are terribly cliché: singing in the shower
ancient cantatas of well-crafted Caucasian angst—
melancholic prurient angelically inept—
back when our lungs soared with swollen wings
feigned durable enough to heal with specificity
all their human pain. for you it was the Nirvana tattoo
etched along your upper-arm in courier new
that dazzled the spiky-haired bassist who’d chirped
you into submission with, girl, you is the highest
yellow thing I ever did see. for me? Julie Impellizzeri
of Glastonbury, Connecticut—my mouth stuffed
feather full of her roaring northeastern curls—
our comically violent sex like slapstick pie in the face
ending with a breakup mixtape wept to so often
a tarred heart-still-panics in the caliginous distance
of faraway stars no one will ever hear again.
there is reason we bathe, baby: to hit that hook
and high-note-pipe hard—one final humping drag
of widespread limpid plumage—and rest heads
beneath the plangent pressure of wet pasts
that mark their descent along the paths of our
collarbones breasts abdomens
and once alacritous genitals. and with bare feet
we get down and grind that kind of fervor
into the snaking drain of hell’s tone-deaf inner ear
until songs of this nature have flown far and high
and away from the bellowed name of a land
whose anthem has forever seduced with fluttering
hot rifts that scald our tongues bowed-in-prayer
for fresh flesh and wetter retribution.
