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Trash
I
All the men I loved were dead
-beats by birthright or so the legend
went. The ledger said three out of every four of us were
destined for a cell or lead shells flitting like comets
through our heads. As a boy,
my mother made me write
& sign contracts to express the worthlessness of a man's
word. Just like your father,
she said, whenever I would lie,
or otherwise warp the historical record to get my way. Even then,
I knew the link between me
& the old man was pure
negation, bad habits, some awful hyphen filled with blood. I have half
my father's face & not a measure of his flair for the dramatic. Never once
have I prayed & had another man's wife wail in return. Both burden & blessing alike,
it seemed, this beauty he carried like a dead doe. No one called him Father
of the Year. But come wintertime, he would wash
& cocoa butter us until our curls shone like lodestone,
bodies wrapped in three layers of cloth just to keep December's iron
bite at bay. And who would have thought to thank him then? Or else turn
& expunge the record, given all we know now of war & its unquantifiable cost,
the way living through everyone around you dying kills something elemental, ancient.
At a certain point, it all comes back to survival, is what I am saying.
There are men he killed to become this man. The human brain is a soft
gray cage. He doesn't know what else he can do with his hands.
II
The Knicks were trash. Head colds at the outset of a South Bronx summer:
trash. The second hour after she is gone,
the moment the song you both used to slow
-dance through the kitchenette to comes on, moving on: all trash.
Death is trash. Love is a robust engagement with the trash of another.
Monthly bills of any kind are trash,
although access to gas and electricity
is not, so there is that to consider.
Blackouts are incontrovertibly
trash. Much like student loans, or the fact that we live in a culture of debt such that one
must always be behind to make some semblance of what our elders might have called living.
My friends often state in the midst of otherwise loving group chat missives that life is trash, though
we all keep trying to make one for some reason or another, and the internet says my friends are trash,
that black men and boys are trash, and it makes me think of the high Germanic roots of garbage-which
is perhaps the first cousin of trash-that part of the animal one does not eat, and we are sort of like that, no?
Modernity's refuse, disposable flesh and spectacular failure, fuel and fodder,
corpses abundant as the trash on the floor of the world.
Aging is trash. I am years past thirty now and so any further time qualifies
as statistical anomaly,
you can't expect good
results with bad data, trash in, trash out, they say,
and I'm really just searching for better, more redemptive
language is the thing,
some version of the story
where all the characters inside look like me and every
single one of us escapes with our heads.
III
Saturdays, it was my job to pick the bones from cans of fish which became the unwieldy
piles of pink flesh that, once fried, became the cakes we ate for dinner that night, breakfast the next
day, dinner again to close the loop. Decades passed before I saw the beast in real time, realized, like Baldwin-
who once saw his mother lift a yard of velvet, say that is a good idea, and for months thought ideas were shocks
of black fabric-that salmon lived outside the bounds of Foodtown shelves
we searched for deals in the early '90s,
supermarket circulars held tight
in our too-small hands, armaments against American cost. Older now,
a literary type with insurance to boot, I tell you this story
at our kitchen table, unsure of what
I am trying to convey, exactly.
Something about the flexible nature of human knowledge,
perhaps: a speed course in semiotics over poached eggs. Or maybe
some version of the same tale
I am always telling, that the wall
between the world & me grew weaker once I left
what I loved. Children of the poor, their small words
& smaller sense of scale.
Back then, life on Earth
was Yonkers, NY,
& my grandmother's salon.
Every leather-bound book was a Word of God. And there I was,
an affront to history, creative, even in my ignorance, sketching planets
in the air as my big sister sang soul outside my bedroom window, her voice
like something ancient and winged,
pulling summer into being.
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