Cortney Lamar Charleston
Meditation on Wings and Meeting Gabriel in a Philadelphia Prison
“Lot of niggas go to prison / how many come out Malcolm X?”
- DICE RAW
Gabriel? Well, first and foremost, he was a black boy, like me, like
a disproportion of the boys in the room with us, some brutal ratio.
You know, I still remember that first poetry workshop he
joined the class; we were shooting with the brothers on the
Rubik’s Cube of love, passing it like a blunt in circle over
a rotation of songs, even hands that twisted necks having
trouble subduing it – the halo that sharing ourselves is.
Dean asked from his corner of the city if I love my girlfriend,
because the girls he’s seen around there aren't the kind
you give the same crown as your mother: them jawns be...
From another corner, mention of a newborn daughter,
how she fits in his hand like a stolen watch, though
we don’t speak long about time borrowed or taken.
Then there’s another shout, an allusion to the heat
of the color pink. Red nodding. Aaron laughing. Gabriel
writing, pushed against his edges like a point of graphite,
heaven’s light making a keyhole of him, the gold cross
around his neck reflecting the rays into my heathen,
its bottomless color.
When I freed my eyes, I looked upon him from a position
of privilege – right place, right time. I noticed his skin was
both darker and smoother than my own, and our eyes were
mud by birth, so neither could decide which of us was guilty
and which was innocent, who was saint and who was sinner.
I spoke to him – in the way God speaks to emptiness – but he
didn’t speak back, the visible clump of a fist nestled between
his vocal chords, maybe the very reason why he was even here,
not more than sixteen years old and behind bars like a rapper’s
persona. Hopefully the kind who name-drops Malcolm X. All the
verses we mull, maybe, his own Elijah: his new wings, of gauze.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Cave Canem fellow and Pushcart Prize nominated poet living in Jersey City, NJ. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Eleven Eleven, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Journal, The Normal School, Rattle, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere.
Return to January 2015 Edition
“Lot of niggas go to prison / how many come out Malcolm X?”
- DICE RAW
Gabriel? Well, first and foremost, he was a black boy, like me, like
a disproportion of the boys in the room with us, some brutal ratio.
You know, I still remember that first poetry workshop he
joined the class; we were shooting with the brothers on the
Rubik’s Cube of love, passing it like a blunt in circle over
a rotation of songs, even hands that twisted necks having
trouble subduing it – the halo that sharing ourselves is.
Dean asked from his corner of the city if I love my girlfriend,
because the girls he’s seen around there aren't the kind
you give the same crown as your mother: them jawns be...
From another corner, mention of a newborn daughter,
how she fits in his hand like a stolen watch, though
we don’t speak long about time borrowed or taken.
Then there’s another shout, an allusion to the heat
of the color pink. Red nodding. Aaron laughing. Gabriel
writing, pushed against his edges like a point of graphite,
heaven’s light making a keyhole of him, the gold cross
around his neck reflecting the rays into my heathen,
its bottomless color.
When I freed my eyes, I looked upon him from a position
of privilege – right place, right time. I noticed his skin was
both darker and smoother than my own, and our eyes were
mud by birth, so neither could decide which of us was guilty
and which was innocent, who was saint and who was sinner.
I spoke to him – in the way God speaks to emptiness – but he
didn’t speak back, the visible clump of a fist nestled between
his vocal chords, maybe the very reason why he was even here,
not more than sixteen years old and behind bars like a rapper’s
persona. Hopefully the kind who name-drops Malcolm X. All the
verses we mull, maybe, his own Elijah: his new wings, of gauze.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Cave Canem fellow and Pushcart Prize nominated poet living in Jersey City, NJ. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Eleven Eleven, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Journal, The Normal School, Rattle, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere.
Return to January 2015 Edition