Hanif Abdurraqib | I Would Ask You To Reconsider The Idea That Things Are As Bad As They've Ever Been

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain't Worth Much was released in 2016 and was nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in fall 2017 by Two Dollar Radio.

Hanif Abdurraqib's website.

Also by Hanif Abdurraqib: They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us The Crown Ain't Worth Much The Summer A Tribe Called Quest Broke Up Ode To Jay-Z, Ending In The Rattle Of A Fiend's Teeth Just Like That, A New Black Child Is Born To Replace The Buried One

March 2018
Ohio Poets

Hanif Abdurraqib

I Would Ask You To Reconsider The Idea That Things Are As Bad As They've Ever Been

In the year that felt like one

hundred years, Kendrick let

a small flame dance along the tight

braids pulled in rows along his head

by someone with thin & aching fingers &

when two trains sped along the tracks

outside of our emptying apartment, either swallowed

by a sprawling city or being coughed out

of it, the windows shook & one night

the picture of a man — who was supposed

to be Jesus but looked like no savior the hood

would ever claim — fell off of the bookcase & in the morning,

I stepped in the broken frame's constellation

of glass & it might seem like what I'm saying

is that hell always comes from above & seduces

its way south but what I am actually saying is the real daughter

of loneliness is that which finds a home

inside of you when nothing else will,

the thing that burrows & makes a way even

beyond the bone & I am fed up, again,

with the prediction of my own misery. Art imitates

life, but particularly the moment where flesh

was broken into once & then somehow found

a way to heal itself again despite the body imagining

pain as a thing of its most brutal nightmares & I have

no living mother to call out to & so surely you all will

do for an hour, or a night, or however long it takes to

pull from my memory the magnifying glass & the ants

laboring beneath it in the summer of my mother's funeral.

A boy sets insects on fire first & then walks from a home's

charred ruins smelling of ash. A boy forgets how he can feel

pain first & then shovels broken glass into his mouth with his

bare hands & the blood runs from his lips & each drop becomes

a cardinal, state bird of every place where he misses someone.

Oh, Jesus of a beard that looks like my father's beard, Jesus of gold chains

and a tall white tee, Jesus of braids, rowed back along the scalp

by a thin-fingered and long-nailed sage: grant me the mercy

of a bed in which I do not tangle my limbs with anyone else's.

Grant me a cardinal which sees its reflection in the window

of my bedroom & tries to break the glass into one hundred pieces.

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