like a nigger now, my white friend, M, said
after my M.L.K. and Ronald Reagan impersonations,
the two of us alone and shirtless in the locker room,

and if you’re thinking my knuckles knocked
a few times against his jaw or my fingers knotted
at his throat, you’re wrong because I pretended

I didn’t hear him, and when he didn’t ask it again,
we slipped into our middle school uniforms
since it was November, the beginning

of basketball season, and jogged out
onto the court to play together
in that vision all Americans wish for

their children, and the point is we slipped
into our uniform harmony, and spit out Go Team!,
our hands stacked on and beneath the hands

of our teammates and that was as close
as I have come to passing for one
of the members of The Dream, my white friend

thinking I was so far from that word
that he could say it to me, which I guess
he could since I didn’t let him taste the salt

and iron in the blood, I didn’t teach him
what it’s like to squint through a black eye,
and if I had I wonder if he would have grown

up to be the kind of white man who believes
all blacks are thugs or if he would have learned
to bite his tongue or let his belly be filled

by shame, but more importantly, would I be
the kind of black man who believes silence
is worth more than talk or that it can be

a kind of grace, though I’m not sure
that’s the kind of black man I’ve become,
and in any case, M, wherever you are,

I’d just like to say I heard it, but let it go
because I was afraid to lose our friendship
or afraid we’d lose the game—which we did anyway.

BLACK HISTORY

BLACK HISTORY

X wrapped his hands around my throat,
and I wrapped my hands around his,
and then the two of us were in the wet grass

wrestling beneath a star clogged night
like two heads fighting for the same body
or maybe like two bodies fighting

for the same head while a circle of black
and white kids, and the girl who had been
his valentine (and would be again) watched.

This was after the annual Black History Month
Talent Show where my roommate and I sang
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” shirtless and baby-oiled

in black jeans in the name of what I’d call now
Dumb Buck History, but what I thought then
was a way to look sexy for all the girls

in the audience. We lost to two black leather-clad
brothers who recited Run DMC (“Two years ago
a friend of mine asked me to say some MC rhymes . . .”)

passing the big mic back and forth between lines,
and I know now it makes sense since
Black Cool seemed worth more than Black Pride,

rap worth more than gospel that day, and anyway
my roommate forgot several of the words
which would have been alright since no one