I DREAM OF A DARKER PLANET

DARNELL "DEESOUL" CARSON

After Danez Smith

The summer is a whole year long, a festival of cookouts and family reunions and chasing down ice cream trucks, running back to momma with all her change. We will see smoke and not think  of our destruction, just our fathers on their favorite grills, making sure a few of the links are just  a little burnt for Uncle Keith and Cousin Teresa. You know how they like it done. The Wobble, or the Cupid Shuffle,  or any of the other billion line dances we’ve memorized like a spiritual will  come on, and we will grumble and force our friends to join us. It is always golden hour; we have always looked this good. A baby will be crying, as babies do, and all the mothers and aunties will say, Girl, let that baby cry, it don’t bother us none, and it doesn’t. Aunt Mary made that lemon pound cake we’ve been craving all year, and now my soul is rested. I think this is how rapture tastes. We reach for Black folks and find them waiting, not some trailing shadow of their absence. We have always been safe here. Every precinct that once was is now a community garden. We have never needed policing. Momma tells me she has given every mother permission to snatch me up if I act a fool. Imagine being loved so much. We look up at the sky and say What a beautiful day it is to be alive, and we mean it.

HOOD PROVERBS

1            And my father says unto me, “Do not cry or I’ll give you 

              something to cry about,” and behold, 

2            the tear crawls back into the tear duct, 

              unbirthed. My cheeks remain dry as 

3            a valley of bones. Now, I do not cry, 

              especially when there is someone to witness it, 

4            not when I stub my toe or when I am frustrated 

              or when the name at the end of the hashtag sounds familiar, 

              like someone I used to know or would’ve known or could’ve been. 

5            The world is nothing but somethings to cry about, and I see 

              how my father, in all his toxic, was just trying to prepare me. 

6            And my mother says unto me, “When we get in this store, 

              you better not touch nothing,” and already my hands are receding. 

7            Momma knows as much as anyone that anything in Black hands 

              can be a death sentence, a BB gun or Arizona or pack of Skittles. 

8            The key to survival, I learn later, is to keep your palms open 

              and seen and hope to God this enough to be passed over. 

9            And my auntie says unto me “You gonna be inside or outside, 

              but you’re not gonna be in and outside my house” 

10          and so we spend the rest of the day on the front porch, 

              running and yelling and arguing and seeing how close

              we can get to sunset before somebody tells us to get inside. 

11          I almost don’t notice the way my father scans the street 

              every time he calls us in for dinner, how he counts all 

              the neighbor’s kids to make sure they are still there, 

12          still screaming about seeing each other tomorrow.

Listen to Darnell read "I Dream of a Darker Planet" and "Hood Proverbs" below: