each night as if I could bend pinion into a frail sickle    slake every thirsting

palm with a blade

There’s a joke that nothing makes Black people run faster       than

other Black people running

Tell me something

only if you know it

Why are we running      if not because the loyalty is in our DNA       native as an

apocalypse

Do the birds know

their blades look like blades against

even a threatless sky

what is patience

but a luxury of the hunted

the appeasement of a mosquito is just a docile format of bloodshed             tell me

when destruction gonna be our fate

surrender is as expensive as it is unjustifiable

I am trying to vanquish a hereditary sadness

I am trying to say I was born with my mother’s face

and my father’s skin who says    I have the face of the future

named so   for being the last obscurity     he will see before he dies

just my luck        to be born    a few years before

the end of the world

my parents draw nearer the end of their running              we are listening

for the tragedy that will escort them out of this life          leaving me

holding only the blood

LESLIE ODOM JR. SINGS OBAMA’S ANGER ON NPR

The strings twitch into a song

the way the wind flinches a tree

into the end of October

I look into     the belly of Mississippi

and on screen the Black man opens

his mouth to reveal a small white woman

and the song is a fugitive just like that

the song is a mask made of everyone

I have ever loved    and all the quiet

we are now     The song is and is and is

and ends     A hair exhausted of its color

gone now to the shade of harp strings which

beckons the fingers to harm themselves

into a music     and I imagine hatred

must require an entire orchestra

A legion of calloused working hands

similar to my Father’s own pair

only in the weight and desire

But again what else is there to a pair of hands

besides what can be flayed loose?

Beneath the skin perhaps a matrix of bones

sun starved and maybe even the color of mercy

Maybe not    maybe just a barely country

maybe the most fathomable wound

And this is less about anger than it is drought

how dehydration is considered a failure

of the well      rather than an impeachment

upon the throat       And here it is as hot as ever

Here a November where nothing is cold enough

to die    Here Obama’s anger Chechen dolls onto

my computer and everything a man hasn’t said

lays a bloody lullaby in my lap and this too is history

a labor of callouses and blisters and other casualties

of running and I have never known music not to escape

I have never known myself not a fugitive from my own anger