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The Summer A Tribe Called Quest Broke Up

       
         all them black
                     boys in the ‘hood
                                               had they wallets
                                                                           unearthed in cities
                                                                                                            they ain’t never
                                                                                     seen before & they
                                                                                                  was all empty
                                                                      ‘cept for maybe the bones
                                               of the last woman
         to hold them in her arms &
    call them by the
    name they blessed the
    earth with & all of the horns
                                            on my block crawled back
                                                                                 into they cases & marched to
                                                                                                                          new mouths & fathers
                                                                                                                          had nothing to press
                                                                                                                          their lips to & make sing &
                                                                                 i think this why brandon’s mother
                                                     left & what difference is there
   in those things which we lose
   & those things which decide
   to gift us with a kind
                           of feral silence?
                                         the change that leapt
                                                                     from our pockets into the cracked
                                                                                                  basketball courts & the older brothers
                                                                                                  
                                                                                                   who never found their way back home

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib writes poems when he is not sitting in his Columbus, Ohio apartment eating red velvet cake, or judgmentally thumbing through your record collection. His first collection of poems, Three Crosses, was released in December 2012, and his second collection, Sons of Noah, is forthcoming from Tired Hearts Press in 2014. He wants you to tell him your top 5 albums of all time.

ISSN 2157-8079
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