The Crown Ain't Worth Much by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

Author:Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-943735-23-5
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Published: 2017-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

OK, I’M FINALLY READY TO SAY I’M SORRY FOR THAT ONE SUMMER

when I watched American Pie 2 twice a week & listened to all nine

minutes of “Konstantine” on the way to every party with the sun

still out in a car thick with sober voices spilling out of the windows

& making another mess all over the sidewalks. I guess this is what

it looks like when youth is writhing on its deathbed but the boys

who claim it are still very much alive & blooming & being split in

half by a beam of moonlight stumbling in through a window and

falling all over the sheets in a bed that is not ours. In the heat of

that summer, I escaped the parties on Friday nights to find the

near-silent bedroom of a girl who I pretended to stop talking to

when my friends said we’re college guys now, but who I used to

shoot hoops with in the backyard & skipped out on prom to go

record shopping with last spring & that summer, we would sit on

her floor & let the Supremes record play all the way through twice

& tell each other stories about how our college roommates snored

all year & how we didn’t sleep like we used to under this city’s

moon & how we never got used to eating alone & how we instead

got used to hunger & how small we’ve become because of all these

things & then we would lay with each other without ever touching

& I didn’t know how to talk about distance out loud & in the

mornings over breakfast with the guys when Jeff would yell how

was it last night across the table & I knew what it carried even then

& I still smiled into a brown tornado of coffee until the plates

rattled with fists pounding & laughter & high fives & isn’t it funny

how silence can undress two bodies & press them into each other?

& when I say funny I mean the feeling that stretches itself out in

your stomach while you watch someone cry into their palms & turn

their face to the night before they walk away from you for what

you know is the last time before there is new sharp & boundless

city between the both of you forever & when fall came, boys sat up

in their beds alone & gasping while their hearts rattled out the

ghosts of every unspoken love that dragged them there & then a

whole country crawled itself across the ocean & went to war.

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