Grocery Shopping with My Mother by Kevin Powell

Author:Kevin Powell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2022-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

Friday, June 1, 2018

10:56 a.m.

Haiku for Black Boys

Richard Wright taught us

Souls will swell like weighted wings

And break down white walls

Saturday, September 18, 2021

5:11 p.m.

Enough

They shoot us

in the back

They shoot us

’cuz we Black

They shoot us

in the bed

They even

shoot us

when we

dead—

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

8:04 a.m.

Baseball

Baseball is the father I wish I had

Me, a boy of Summer and Spring

Like the almighty Casey with his bat

Swinging and missing a cloth-less fastball for strike three

The way he only saw me three times in my life

Him abandoning me and my mother when I was eight

That father hole as mammoth as the heroical soul of Hank Aaron

Fatherlessness filled by those days

I religiously bounced a pink sponge ball off a building wall

Playing catch with myself

Or taking hard swipes like Casey

At balls thrown by no one at all

My ma never played games

Left that to her only child

As she scrunched and conformed

Her body into intentional walks

And brutal hits by wild pitches

hurled at poor brown women

So that she and I would not die before we scored one lonely run

And other than my single mother and welfare and food stamps

Baseball drafted and dragged me into manhood

By the spiked cleats of my Ty Cobb rage

It grew me past white milk dabbed across my top lip

Past the nasty disses of my pleather second baseman’s glove

Past my closest cousin’s hook slide around our blood and flesh

Past Hemingway’s old man and sea tailing a fish and Joltin’ Joe

Baseball schooled me on how to bubble-gum my selfie

In the prickly splinters of busted fences

Like August Wilson’s Troy Maxson

His life a soiled, raggedy globe with the stitches come a-loose

Hanging from a rope hanging from a tree

Hanging him hanging me

If I forget my birthright of stolen bases and stolen geographies

If I don’t understand

Better to have no daddy

Than to have a punch-drunk one pinch-hit for an absent one

If I don’t understand that Willie Mays

Sprinted like he was speed-racing the Underground Railroad

Because he was

The wind ripping that cap from his head

His back to the world like Miles Davis’

As he caught freedom in his outstretched mitt

Whirled ’round like a

Shot putter in the Olympics

And flung freedom to his momma and them

In a cotton field of dreams

I want to be Willie Mays

The say hey kid with the coolest swag

I want to be Ken Griffey, Jr.

The boom-bap kid with the coolest swag

Because baseball teaches you

To dive fingertips first into tomorrow

like Ichiro and Fernando Tatís, Jr.

Teaches you to chant praise songs for history and math

Teaches you to collect and tuck yourself into shoeboxes

Teaches you what not to do with a bat

Like that day Columbus clubbed Kojo

Over the head with a Louisville slugger

The lump in the centerfield of Kojo’s brain

as towering as the Empire State

Because Columbus’ hands were not splendid enough

To make his point plain

Kojo was never the same

After that day he plopped to the earth like a badly missed fly ball

And my folding bed and I brawled for weeks in blank horror

At how my beloved baseball

Could be double played instantly

Like Tinkers to Evers to Chance

By hate and trauma

As in the afternoon I went outside

in my new White

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