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  sisters like Chapman would arrive. I shook my chin wool

  then, and placed my hand over the guitar string’s window

  till it stilled. “When the moon’s black,” I said. “Be faithful.”

  A PLATE OF BONES

  My silk slick black muscular back-talking

  uncle driving me and a school

  of fish corpses to church. The sick-eyed

  gap-mouthed bass, the kingfish without

  kingdom, the sliver-thin silver fish—each

  dead and separate in a cool bucket. Gilded

  and shapely as a necktied Sunday morning,

  the fish. Sit upright, he said, and I sat right up,

  riding shotgun looking hard at the road.

  He muttered, Crackers, as if it was something

  swinging from a thin clear wire,

  the clump of tiny maggots in a trout’s brain,

  the flies lazing like the devil’s jewelry at our backs.

  Last night when the white boy’s arm

  lassoed his daughter’s neck, my uncle

  said nothing until they left. I let him feed me

  the anger I knew was a birthright,

  a plate of bones thin enough to puncture

  a lung. But the words did things in my mouth

  I’d heard they killed people for. They went

  to a movie and sat quietly and touched

  or did not touch in the darkness. My uncle watched

  the news with the sound turned down

  until she came in, my silk slick black back-talking

  cousin, his daughter. He went to work

  beating a prayer out of her skin.

  THE SHEPHERD

  “I am here, in my father’s house.”

  —“The Sheep-Child,” by James Dickey

  If you and every person in the county mailed

  me an envelope of five to ten dollars, I think

  I could rehabilitate the sheep. You should know,

  however, that they are mentioned over three hundred times

  in the Bible. Remember when John the Baptist

  sees Jesus coming toward him and says,

  “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin

  of the world”? Lambs, which is to say sheep,

  are mentioned twenty-eight times in the Book of Revelation

  alone. I like the wily black sheep of the shepherd boy

  who lacked training as well as the brooding sheep

  at the insomniac’s fence. Sheep strike

  the same pose each season: sheared and suspended

  from hooks like strange fruit or fidgeting in open fields

  like boys in oversize baseball uniforms.

  What if your momma tried to make you join a pony

  league of ten- to twelve-year-olds who were coached

  by a man they knew as “Coach” and you knew

  as a wolf sweating your mother’s body?

  Whenever my parents fought, my father would drive me

  to the dollar movies to watch and forget the movies.

  The rain left stripes on our faces. The news

  of another sheep’s death was often on my mind.

  The story of how sheep fall in love with moonlight;

  how sheep go astray and are bruised.

  My father sometimes burned upon the sofa

  like a campfire, and a dry whimper

  broke from him. Sometimes in mid conversation,

  sheep begin drifting off to sleep. You say, “Sunshine,”

  and their eyes roll over the horizon. I love the sheep

  of the lost lake and the sheep of patron saints.

  Once my mother bought a sheepskin brush

  for my father’s sheepskin jacket. He held her then,

  as if she were a shepherd’s guitar. My love is sentimental.

  It is the good news that holds us. I am still in the house

  with the music that makes my brown face soft

  and gives the sheep a reason to believe. How, Mr. Dickey,

  would you have told your father about your pet

  imaginary sheep the day you kneeled in the backyard

  with a choked hose and thirsty bucket, him saying,

  “How ’bout playing football or basketball if not baseball?”

  and you yielding to nothing, you shaking your wooly head

  above the emptiness, half hearing the wind mutter, “Punk,”

  or your father mutter it, and when the water came finally,

  you crying, your father walking out of the fence?

  HIDE

  The tire was like the wet hide of a seal

  dropped from the bridge

  to waters as black as a seal

  glistening that way in the wake

  of sparkling nighttime dead

  if a thing can be that dead

  in the same breath the limp tire

  damned and dropped from the rail

  the night we ran away rolled

  from the three-wheeled scampering Ford

  like a gawking with no face

  like a hole to the place you wanted to live

  I was the wet hide too in a seal

  of shadows on broad river bridge

  sleepy as the drowned and black

  listening that way to the wakefulness

  dead if wakefulness can be that dead

  and lit the nighttime littered with breaking

  and tired of running away of being rolled

  from a damp dream by fists and scampering

  to my gawking shoes as you led me

  from our house with a flat line across your face

  the heart weary of its grief desires forgetfulness

  but I never wanted it to be that way

  FOR BROTHERS OF THE DRAGON

  a pecha kucha

  [PREMONITION]

  I dreamed my brother said I’d live with the feeling

  a child feels the first time he sees his brother disappear.

  I went down on my knees and sure enough, I was the size

  of a boy again. With my shins like two skinny tracks in the dirt,

  I could almost hear a train carrying its racket up my spine.

  [OPENING SCENE]

  The day Malcolm X was buried, his brothers were in a motel

  watching the funeral on a black-and-white TV. If I were in their story,

  I would have run down the assassins and removed their eyes.

  It does not matter if this is true, only that it can be conceived.

  [HOW FICTION FUNCTIONS]

  However else fiction functions, it fills you with the sound

  of crows chirping, alive alive alive. But that’s temporary too.

  Tell my story, begs the past, as if it was a prayer

  for an imagined life or a life that’s better than the life you live.

  [SCENE AT THE GRAVE]

  I am considering writing a story about the lives the brothers lead

  afterward. They will change their names a third time and abandon

  their families. They will visit their brother’s grave at Ferncliff.

  They will be poor and empty. One will bag the dead man’s bones

  while the one holding the shovel begs him to hurry.

  [FORESHADOWING]

  I keep thinking I’ll have a dream about the smoke clouding

  the bar my brother and I used to haunt. We spent hours saying

  nothing. He pretended he didn’t know the man raising us was

  his father but not mine. Instead I dream about the mouth

  of a dragon, the smoke of a train vanishing into a mountainside.

  [DRAMATIC ARC]

  One brother will want, at first, redemption; one brother will want,

  at first, revenge. Their story will be part family saga and elegy,

  part mystery. What changes them before the story begins will be,

  at first, more important than what changes them when it ends.


  [IMAGERY]

  I have no problem with the flaws of memory. The bird carcass

  stiff as the shoe of a hit-and-run victim on the side of the road

  might just be a veil the wind pulled from the face of a new bride.

  Why was the imagination invented, if not to remake?

  [OPENING DIALOGUE]

  The motel’s twin beds will be narrow and dingy. On each pillow

  will be a sweating peppermint candy left by a desk clerk

  who will sigh the way my mother sighs. “Y’all look like the ghosts

  of Malcolm X,” I’ll have her think, carelessly. “Y’all smell

  like men who slept all night in a boxcar or on a roadside.”

  [SYMBOLISM]

  However else fiction functions, it fills you with the sound

  of running away. The dirt, the smudged mirror, even the silences

  between speech have something to say. In novels

  there is no such thing as a useless past or typical day.

  [FLASHBACK]

  I’m thinking of black boys in the countryside with a white boy

  who’d seen, only a summer before, a black man strung up

  at the edge of town. They’ll be singing when they drag the white boy

  to the river and throw him in. They’ll be singing when they

  dive in and drag him back to shore before he drowns.

  [STATIC CHARACTERS]

  In my novel all the minor characters will look like various friends

  and family: Blind Vince Twang, BlackerThanMost, Deadeye Sue,

  Lil Clementine. They will be more human than my protagonists

  because they will be left with lives that do not change.

  [POINT OF VIEW]

  The chin of Malcolm’s widow will quiver below her veil.

  Where is home now? she’ll think. It will be the wind

  or her trembling that moves the veil. I am not going to describe

  her face because I want you to think of her as a bride.

  [SETTING THAT ILLUMINATES CHARACTER]

  When I try remembering dirt, I remember my mother’s pale carpet

  stained by mud and my brother on his knees with a hairbrush

  and bar of soap, scrubbing before school. I do not remember

  the names of the birds who lived outside our house,

  but I know their music was swallowed by the passing trains.

  [ALLEGORY]

  One brother will tell the other a story: Once, in the shadow of a tree

  lit with song, when a black woman unbuttoned her blouse,

  all the birds came to dine. It will mean there are people who root

  and people who roam; people bound to a place

  and people bound to an idea, whatever the idea may be.

  [CONNOTATION]

  I wish I was not the kind of man who abandons

  those who love him repeatedly. My brother must be

  one hundred pounds heavier now than he was

  all those years ago. Because growing old is like slipping

  into a new coat without taking the old coat off,

  I think of him bearing the weight of our family.

  [DELETED CHAPTER]

  You’ll find salt in the eyes of anyone who kneels too long

  with his head in the dirt. I should say what happened

  to my brother when he was sixteen. My mother found him

  naked and weeping to himself in the closet. Because

  I wasn’t there, there is no suitable place in the story for this scene.

  [FALLING ACTION]

  Later both X brothers show up at the widow X’s door and miss

  the softer woman she was before. Here, I am not going to say

  she forgives them. When she turns them away, I imagine

  the sunlight bleeding its heaviness upon their backs.

  [METAPHOR]

  Because I am a brother of the dragon, call me Dragonfly.

  When I dream of the train riding our parallel spines, carrying

  our history, the weight that turns my brother into fire, makes me

  scattered light. In my story the X brothers will live

  without their brother, but that doesn’t mean they’ll survive.

  [ALLUSION TO THEME]

  It’s all true: the pair of tracks through the darkness,

  men who look like me, disguised. The bewilderment

  that cannot be described. What I feel is Why. In fiction

  everything happens with ease, and the easefulness kills me.

  [RESOLUTION]

  I am full of dirt sometimes. I am trying to tell you a story

  without talking. I promise nothing I write about you

  tomorrow will be a lie. Instead of fiction, brother,

  I will offer you an apology. And if that fails,

  I will drag myself to your arms crying, Speak to me.

  THREE MEASURES OF TIME

  I. How My Brother Tells Time

  By noon and the hours jumping toward dinner bells.

  By the goodness in the body smelling sweet

  as the air around our mother’s good-night sentence,

  the one long since gone flat as money,

  the belly shrouded in hunger.

  The past is nutritious; the past is there on the table

  with the hair you know is Ma’s color.

  It’s curling and somewhere she is marveling

  her light-headed, near comic hairdo.

  Absence in each Hello, her teeth are yellow,

  her belly stretch-marked, her glasses

  were supposed to be scratch-proof and unbreakable.

  She is in the kitchen cooking something

  and singing, each pink note ringing through the rooms,

  but it’s not the kind of shoo-bee-doo-bees the radio loves

  to spit at you. If she wrote the words down,

  they’d be illegible, darkening, prideful. You might ask her

  later if she’d finished dinner, but she’d already be asleep.

  Let’s wait in the hall outside her door with our plates.

  No such thing as thanklessness. Let’s sing until she’s sound

  awake, half brother. I am or I am almost the same as you.

  The hour is hushed and clicking to rust

  and cleaving and cleaving to her: the meat that made us.

  II. How My Father Tells Time

  By knowing how the year jumps forward.

  God in the meat of a chicken. The smell

  of barbecue in a sentence, the scent

  long gone flat as money. Animal hunger

  in the mouth like the hollow side of a bell.

  And remorsefulness bland as the grease

  on the carcass. The past has its nutrients,

  but it is too thin for color, and it is shapeless.

  Like wind troubling my mother’s hairdo

  when she looks at you sideways,

  a gathering storm in each Hello.

  The day is yellow, but it is not scratch-proof

  or unbreakable. By the time the coals die down

  you’re asleep before a whispering TV.

  No such thing as darkening.

  Let’s sing the old songs until the hour is new.

  Step-Daddy, half of me belongs to you.

  III. How My Mother Tells Time

  By none of the hours jumping at the window.

  By the joblessness of God and the body

  beneath a floral bedsheet. A sentence

  with no sense of anything but money.

  A mouth of bad teeth and a past bland

  as grease in hair too thin for color.

  Sleep is a form of absence.

  Nothing sings without food.

  You are in the kitchen with a spatula

  above something inedible or inevitable

  and darkening. Or you are asleep

  in a locked room. O Blood,

  the hours cling to y
ou.

  [GOD IS AN AMERICAN]

  THE AVOCADO

  “In 1971, drunk on the sweet, sweet juice of revolution,

  a crew of us marched into the president’s office with a list

  of demands,” the black man tells us at the February luncheon,

  and I’m pretending I haven’t heard this one before as I eye

  black tortillas on a red plate beside a big green bowl

  of guacamole made from the whipped, battered remains

  of several harmless former avocados. If abolitionists had a flag

  it would no doubt feature the avocado, also known as the alligator

  pear, for obvious reasons. “Number one: reparations!

  Enough gold to fill each of our women’s wombs, gold

  to nurse our warriors waiting to enter this world with bright fists,

  that’s what we told them,” the man says, and I’m thinking

  of the money-colored flesh of the avocado, high in monosaturates;

  its oil content is second only to olives. I am looking

  at Yoyo’s caterpillar locks dangle over her ear. I dare you

  to find a lovelier black woman from Cincinnati, where the North