THE WEATHERMAN GETS TO CURSE IN CHICAGO
BY KYLE DARGAN
After Godfrey and Yeats
Accounting for your particular red pixel pinned on the zoomable map—your precise crucifix of latitude / longitude— profanity may be the most incisive means of discussing today’s clouds and what wet remittance they have hauled upon your head. Every footprint is an exit on the ever- blazing jet streams. Any footprint is now a potential fuck! when freights of drought or heat-voided air sail into all our weather systems’ ports. Aren’t you tired of hearing about Chicago and its taloned wind, its L rails set aflame to stem frostbite in the track switches’ toes, wings, and noses? Let’s take a poll. Raise your middle finger if lately you too have lifted an expletive to the sky—a kite-curse to glide its way around the globe and back to the peoples whose industries fabricated the blizzard you must dig free from or the flooding from which you will not, or the calor which smiles as it strangles you. The globe is gifting us all an opportunity to become climate masochists, to smugly shit! and goddamn! our way towards feeling superior in our intemperate suffering. If, in the end, our one hand cannot halt our other hand—as it extends its thumb, hitching us towards terrestrial dismissal— then, at the least, we all should enjoy the privilege of calling the wind everything but a child of god, of smirking while we scoff at the idea that the weather could possibly hate someone somewhere more than its gyre does seethe for you, or you.
TO THE BLK BOY WEARING A MAGA HAT IN OLNEY, MARYLAND
or
WHEN PEOPLE ASK ME, MY 2020 PREDICTION IS THAT MORE BLK MEN WILL VOTE FOR PRES. TRUMP
BY KYLE DARGAN
An other is anyone who is not me. Anyone who is not me is like me in some ways and unlike me in other ways.
~Harryette Mullen
I do not know if Kanye West is any more real than John Henry. I know their stories, you know, but my eyes have never seen either the way my eyes have seen you pedaling down far Georgia Avenue—weaving in and out of your bicycle-boy triad, joshing with your blond peers. I do not need you to be a racial figment. By all means, be. Blkness I know better than to see as a oneness. Nor do I believe in Oreos and Negroes and Coons and African- Americans. Blk people are not candy —we do not come in such simple flavors. In years past, I’d drive my father through waveform Appalachian topography— not merely where nothing is urban, but those weakly molested swaths of this country that favor empty Edward Hopper landscapes. Look at all this (my father gestured with a pause I thought reverent). Can you believe they stole all of this? —(him thinking stolen from us) him thinking through his cis- het brotha lens, and I thought yeah, I am sure the indigenous’ minds cannot escape such belief. Such blk men, at times, we have this pinching manner of seeing ourselves as America’s most gruesome and primary plunder—us lashed us Plessy’d us Tulsa’d us share crop’d us King’d us red-lined us white flight’d us King Crack’d us three-strike’d . . . us Michael Jackson’d us gentrified us Cosby’d— our minds wounded to the point of weaving unlike threads into a continuum noose that ever scarves our necks. I do recognize the urge to wear something unfamiliar above your shoulders—being accessorized in a style that does not feel as if your spine is being snapped. No brothas own these red caps in my family, yet they do talk about Latinx immigrants “taking” construction work the same way they used to talk about crack taking their dignity or blk women “taking” jobs or white men “taking” blk women. I wonder, young brotha (who is not my brother, just something that blk men say), how bone-close did you have to cut to graft yourself in this winning. Those others, those born not brothas—who find no safe theatre to costume in and wear plainly the crosshaired blue lesions of their American realities —after this current remaking of greatness is rested, your others will remember, will recognize still, your face once this red and white folly is cast off and—like a chronic exhibit—returned to the climate- controlled archives of the next four more hundred years.
