We grew up listening to the gossipof elders in crowded salons, the HolySpirit, Hot 97, our gut’s drummajor signaling whether to runleft or right when a bullet’s ricochetcracked the nighttime air. Jokesabout our hair; mama’s weight;our place in the great graphof human potential. We slap-boxed until it turned to scrap-ping unexpectedly, scufflesblossoming from school yardplay we claimed was meant toenhance precision, little else.We had no good words for wealth; notrust in arbitrary rules, or sense of powerbeyond the kinds that shaped our livesinside discernible bounds: the belt,the badge, shoeboxes underneaththe bed which held abuela’s savings,first poems, the heels our mothersonce wore to shuffle the shine off the floorof a disco spot downtown, where workingpeople went to let the stress of day,last shift’s weight, evaporate. Weknew the cool ambrosia of hydrantwater; how, without it, we might not havesurvived the height of July’s brutality. We learnedSpanish to talk to girlfriends’ mothersvia landline, ask permission to speakfor a half-hour after school, para discutirla tarea, or some other benevolent, thoughtransparently false, claim. We dreamtof flight, and heavyweight fights, and playingour latest hits on late-night TV, crossingup small forwards on the NBA on NBCwith our uncles watching, theirvoices so loud the neighborsassumed someone must have losta bet. We imagined a world withoutdebt, or early death, or stress so heavythe mind must be lifted elsewhereto bear it and yet persist. Wewere latchkey kids, troubadours,substitute parents at fourteen,teaching little brothers to readand long divide, and ridethe bus home alone in time to reachthe front door just before dark,when the world put on another faceso we did too, and with masksand wigs we got from grandmadevised productions to fill the day’sremainder, command the languagewe inherited to live anew, or elsefail magnificently at trying to saywhat we held most dear, but could notyet sketch onto the palimpsestof the worldas we knew it.
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Copyright © 2024 by Joshua Bennett.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Joshua Bennett is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction: Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023); The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), which was a winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, longlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award, and is currently being adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios; Owed (Penguin, 2020), a finalist for the New England Book Award; Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.
Bennett earned his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has recited his original works at the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He has also performed and taught creative writing workshops at hundreds of middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities across the United States, as well as in the U.K. and South Africa.
For his creative writing and scholarship, Joshua has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Alongside his friend and colleague, Jesse McCarthy, he is the founding editor of Minor Notes, a Penguin Classics book series dedicated to minor poets within the black expressive tradition.
Joshua is a Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.
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Harvard Review publishes new poetry, essays, fiction, drama, criticism, book reviews, and interviews. From its beginnings, the journal has been committed to showcasing the work of emerging writers alongside established voices—or, as we like to think of it, publishing writers who will be famous next to writers who already are.
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