here we go again

Heart Condition
by Jericho Brown

I don't want to hurt a man, but I like to hear one beg.
Two people touch twice a month in ten hotels, and
We call it long distance. He holds down one coast.
I wander the other like any African American, Africa
With its condition and America with its condition
And black folk born in this nation content to carry
Half of each. I shoulder my share. My man flies
To touch me. Sky on our side. Sky above his world
I wish to write. Which is where I go wrong. Words
Are a sense of sound. I get smart. My mother shakes
Her head. My grandmother sighs: He ain't got no
Sense. My grandmother is dead. She lives with me.
I hear my mother shake her head over the phone.
Somebody cut the cord. We have a long distance
Relationship. I lost half of her to a stroke. God
Gives to each a body. God gives every body its pains.
When pain mounts in my body, I try thinking of my
White forefathers who hurt their black bastards quite
Legally. I hate to say it, but one pain can ease another.
Doctors rather I take pills. My man wants me to see
A doctor. What are you when you leave your man
Wanting? What am I now that I think so fondly
Of airplanes? What's my name, whose is it, while we
Make love. My lover leaves me with words I wish
To write. Flies from one side of a nation to the outside
Of our world. I don't want the world. I only want
African sense of American sound. Him. Touching.
This body. Aware of its pains. Greetings, Earthlings.
My name is Slow And Stumbling. I come from planet
Trouble. I am here to leave you uncomfortable.

Please

The poems of Please are sneer & shudder, the twisted pleasure of a chokehold & a voice in your ear with demands, a dream moment in the hallway of someone's childhood home & the picture on the wall you cannot turn away from. The voice of Jericho Brown's sensuality is almost shocking, not in & of itself, but because I have not, in recent memory, read poetry with this type of sexual urgency. The sheer number of poems concerning homosexuality in Please compound into a type of ferocity, an insistence to be held. Brown never turns away from writing about race or sexuality, but his work carefully, illuminates & penetrates the everyday moments when society or a type of fear have created small moments of rejection & blindness. I... Actually, honestly, I don't even know what to say. Should I mention that Please is Brown's first book, that it won the 2009 American Book Award? All of that seems besides the point. Brown writes with the kind of bravery I would like to write with. Bottom line. Exhibit A:

Runaway

Barefoot in the actual dark, I packed a paper bag
And found the way out of my lover's house.
I had only the glass coffee table as obstacle; I slipped
Around it without stump or stumble. I left
The door slightly open; no draft lives in Louisiana's summer.
And how could I not move so quickly and away
When twenty years earlier I had learned this skill--
How to shake the night's hand in confidence,
How to trust that no start will talk? I deserved this,
My anniversary--I had run from the sound of my father's sleep,
The front yard's magnolia, understood its promise to shed
And cover, that tree's duty to that
Smell and knew too my duty to tear like a switch through
Air, to strike the street's edge in a pair of tattered shoes,
Unconnected, alone. I made it
To Fairfield Street before the headlights of Daddy's pickup
caught me
In mid-blur. But I left my lover better: I knifed a tired before I went
So no light could find my back, no right hand could break from
Steering. One fist clenched
My brown bag as I sniffed for magnolia and made a deal with
the dark.