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crises.
    I think this is problematic.

Stakes Is High
    . . . ’cause his life is warfare.
    â€”MOS DEF AND TALIB KWELI
    You know those people who are uncomfortable
    having a conversation at a comfortable level?
    Like, you ask Tony his thoughts on Kobe
    or the LA Lakers. And Tony responds:
    Schwarzenegger ruined their state.
    Four years in office and more debt than ’03?
    Come on, man. Fuck California.
    Yeah. So Tony’s my dad. He’s retired
    but doesn’t know it. He thinks sleep is
    death’s first cousin. Early a.m.s
    my brother and me tiptoe meandering routes
    around our house, avoiding his line of sight.
    These are the hours he tunes to AM talk.
    Reads his paper where the stakes are high.
    Two Decembers ago, my brother Brian and me.
    We’re sharing cognac sips and cigarillos
    shooting stars in a powdered driveway
    when dad breaks from the Al Sharpton Hour.
    Tracks prints to basement floor. He starts in
    on precipitation: What type of grown-ass men
    trek lines of snow through a house?
    Me and your mama raised you better than that.
    He shifts into hyperbole: When you two start
    having kids, I hope you take plenty of movies.
    Your mama and me plan to kick back—watch
    the decline of common courtesy. Then Brian
    makes a wrong move. Smiles. Says snow was
    trailed in a square. Technically a half rhombus.
    Pops leaves us. Leaves the earth: Oh, so you
    wanna joke about geometry? I hear scientists
    developed a system for tracing racist thoughts.
    Can you use your math on that?
    Someone should make a drug to kill every last
    bigot in the world. They should pump that shit
    through the faucets. Drunken laughs march Dad out.
    In what world does he live? Michigan bigots
    own bunkers. Unregistered land. And if I spent
    one summer as a survey worker, if I phoned a woman
    named Shanquita and assumed she lived in a hood,
    is that intra-racist? Is it double-back racist to assume
    you assume she was black? To assume you are not?
    Would I be exempt from the ax? Could a black poet
    fail the test? Let’s say yes. Let’s call my F a defect
    of private schooling and exclusive subdivisions.
    Let’s call my death another gulp in the throat
    of history’s tireless typhoon, spinning backward.

The Light
    I caught it like a shard of glass catches a beam.
    How a stranger’s smile can level a man. Can light
    his sunken chest. Swell a new breath. In other words
    I was the shard who glinted your eyes. In that light
    blue halter, fifth hour, you were the poetry
    I normally ignored. Your ballpoint’s clean marks. Light
    blue, light touch against my windbag essays. That made
    you especially stunning. Made you lightening
    I had to harness, hand in hand, beneath a desk. Or
    in an unattended dark room. Tenderly, red light
    washing over us. As I did. Abruptly—telling
    you it takes the right type of girl to make a black-white
    relationship work. You loved how Common rapped “The Light.”
    I listened to him more than you. His sly anti–white
    woman rhymes never touched me. But you. You filtered through
    a magnifying glass. Warmed the cherry orchard, white
    with frost. Your light sweetened my pit. You are lightning
    crashed through his pulpit into this poem. Beaming. Yes, white.
    A gleaming ax hacked through what we were growing into.
    I was the ax. You were two syllables too many. White
    space in a wheeling sonnet. A corner I couldn’t turn
    in nine lines. But now I am mourning. Thanks to you, first light.

Bonita Applebum
    Do I love you? Do I lust for you?
    Am I a sinner because I do the two?
    â€”A TRIBE CALLED QUEST
    Because you introduced me to Wu-Tang
    kung fu flicks, Five Fingers of Death
    & 36 Chambers
    over quarter candy & sweet peach Faygo
    pop on a playground bench.
    Because you held my hand
    as I cranked the boom box volume knob.
    Because you lived next door to my boy B.
    Because he slept through twelfth grade
    to the tape-recorded husk of your voice.
    Because he never