Chicago

We preach freedom around the world, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other, that this is a land of the free except for Negroes? --President JFK, 1963 The boy on the green line holds tight & fast to the rail as we rock from Chicago. he is young enough to be my brother—this manhood is something borrowed from his father’s sock drawer, the magazine under the bed, the things he thinks he knows. I am birthed from this madness, I know the train’s hum, its rick-rick-thud as we climb. & when the boy flashes his slick- backed piece of man—how hard he hits the floor, how smooth his jaw graces the rail—the gun church-shining in his palm as he falls. The boys come steady as dogs to this train-car, this fight, they come with their knives and they steal & fight & say the things they think they know and we shake our heads and think he is not one of us. Dear Chicago, the wheel of violence spins so fast all the colors blur together. This city is heavy in them, dark as a body on the floor. Chicago is the most segregated cities in the world. Here, we learn all the ways to separate, to assimilate, to take from the other, we give names to what we cannot understand. To the boy on the green-line—your skin a deep wood—you are my father and my brother, a martyr for why we write poems like this.