Blast/oma
By Chace Zachery Morris
Bet you never cradled your son
in your arms crease, renamed him
shotgun,
never slid your hand across umber
back like a slide pump after pushing
dear heavenly father & amen
into his black like a pair of shells,
buckshot prayer for the world that will
come for him.
Five dollars says you’ve never eased
your hands into your daughter’s thick curl
& heard it whisper back
in the tangled tongue of livewire, braided
wisdom into its kink & bottled fire, praying
she never has to triple-zero
at the ignorant pull of violent hands, detonated
on an empty street on a Tuesday, then called
terrorism by Thursday morning.
Youth of color are raised in glass, spit-smeared
& battle-tested because black, taught to only fire
ourselves if shattered, trigger choked.
My rag body tucked three-quarters into a fifth
of Henny’, your flag a dark comedy on marathon,
humor pouring from our bodies
but we are not laughing, realizing we live inside
a body that sees its brown as legion, and so irradiates
the entire biology to kill
its phantom cancer. Sets a drunken fire to me,
head to floor, demands I throw myself into the cold
wind a cocktail of cracked
bone and curse word, wild flail of blood
& seizure. Mama always said they’d have
a cell waiting
on me but I never knew how many
different ways that could be true. So, if we are
to be blastoma, God,
then let us metastasize, let us multiply,
malignant math tumoring in the failing brain
of the giant
until the whole system swells into asphyxia
choking on its own half-bitten-off, burnt flag
of a tongue.
Loaded
By Chace Zachery Morris
When the anchor called the boy black, there was a confusion
thick as Everglade humidity, tongue hooded in mouth,
bulging suspiciously from behind gritting pearl,
as my heart gripped the sliding Adam’s Apple of a shotgun.
When the police call us black, I hear gun range silhouette,
I hear New Year’s early morning sky, I hear behemoth
with skin of Kevlar, teeth- a row of hollow points-
gunshot smile with a ravenous id. I hear
28 bullets to teach the sum’bitch a lesson;
51 or 1 to the head to put it down for good.
And my blood becomes a rabid courtroom
sucker-punched not guilty, a tainted evidence.
When the comment section vipers the word black, the way
they’ve been hissing it lately, a thousand dead
fingers crack, combination-lock my stomach, all
searching for the impossible beast I was born of
to study, learn from, leash halo around its throat,
slide a knife into, drink of its untapped river, paint
their ghosts with its violent pulse, howl at everything
pale & virgin. Learn me to be that black and then some
if it means the gun will remain choked one moment
longer, my eulogy lodged in its trachea, the officer
too awestruck to Heimlich with his forefinger, to indulge
this nickel-plated side-piece he so lovingly nicknamed
Justice.
Apocalypsephyxia
By Chace Zachery Morris
I’m starting to better understand the faulty
wire-cross that inspired my brother to pull
a hunting rifle (of all things) in a parking lot
fight outside a downtown nightclub.
Same blood slang mashing my heart into
a careless patois, a lame-leg drag of a body
that aches triple in winter like a sharp metal
3 years inside the flesh still scraping for
warmer climate. Have you named your shrapnel yet?
I call mines gnaw – as in to erode with teeth,
as in loves the flavor of my marrow, thinks
I taste like chicken, as in sadomasochist grind
until it hits submissive and grits into smile,
my wounds abusing whiskey like a safe word.
Carlos’ gnaw was gripping the safe end
of a steak knife like a key a month ago,
and I could tell by the way his tongue pushed
against his closed mouth that he seriously
contemplated unlocking a man’s muscle with it
in the name of his own repair. Cancerous
shapeshifter, its form dependent upon how it breaks
the body down: shrill, dig, smolder, thief of fire, crowbar, plague –
you give it a name because
to cure a disease you must know its symptoms.
Maybe this the Zombie Apocalypse
and we’ve already ran out of bullets,
maybe this kind of desperate that turns us
on and we’re all a bit auto-erotic when it comes
to our own asphyxiation. I mean, it would explain alot:
why there’s never a coke mirror big enough
for us to fit our extinction on; why we forecast the Rapture
like an album release; why on the grey days
my city looks like an empty pocket, starving
for the heads of presidents. Why the rifle
my brother shouldered that night
was our grandfather’s, why it was already loaded before
he snuck it out that closet, unfired
since deer season of ’84, as if Papa was expecting
some reckoning to drag itself blood-dirty to his doorstep,
why I scare myself more and more
whenever I watch the evening news, classify
less humans/more doors, my hands a tense fist
around something sharp, ghosting the lock –
the room within.
Chace Zachery Morris is a 2013 Kresge Literary Fellow, InsideOut Literary Arts writer-in-residence & fiery Prince enthusiast from Detroit who sips Motown hot, spins tea on repeat & was greatly tempted to leave some of this blank in hopes of being classified as a possible Keyser Söze.
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