I start down the road but I’m the road. Or
the stripes on the road. White. Edgeindicative.
A professor says, the history
of American music is Black history. He says it
to get a rise out of us but it’s true. Or might be
as true as anything. He’s teaching poetry
to a room of grad students paying
out the nose for degrees their parents
and other practical people know
to be without use. A road is practical.
Stoplights, guardrails, signage
regarding the merging of lanes:
practical. As a kid I learned
about the safety on a gun. A red button
pushed to keep it from firing. I learned
on a BB gun. For killing bats
in the family’s summer cabin. I presume
all guns have safeties, but I don’t know
a lot about them. I know it’s easier
to aim when you’re afraid. I know
how fear rises up from the knees, how it runs
up through the gut into the hands. I started
down this road and now I’m the road so
here: a man waited 1.5 seconds
to shoot a Black boy playing
with a toy gun. The man
was a white man. Police
man. The boy was twelve, was Tamir, is
dead. The history of guns is a history
of safeties. I start down the road
but I’m the gun. I start
down the road but I’m the person
on the phone calling 911. I say it
to get a rise out of me. I say something
about safeties. Something about
Tamir’s sister tried to run to him
but was tackled and handcuffed
while he bled out from the gut
on the playground. It’s important
to say this. It is a thing my people
did. The term “paying out the nose”
has its origins in a Danish law
whereby delinquent taxpayers
were punished by having
their noses slit. It’s history. In an area
with a history of avalanches, signs
are posted: Falling Rock. In an area
with a history of murder, streets are named
after assassinated Black leaders. When I say
a history of murder, I do not mean music
though white men love murder ballads.
I do not mean music though frat boys
use Lil Wayne lyrics as an excuse
to say the N-word in public. Years ago
a man told me the history of American music
is Black history, and I believed him.
Turn it up now, whatever station it is.
I don’t know how to end this.
from Poetry Northwest 12.1 Summer & Fall 2017More by Marty McConnell from the library
Copyright © Marty McConnell
Used with the permission of the author
on behalf of Poetry Northwest.