
the blueshift journal
blueshift / ˈblo͞oˌSHift / noun
the displacement of the spectrum to shorter wavelengths in the light coming from distant celestial objects moving toward the observer.
DANEZ SMITH

Danez Smith is the winner of a 2014 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He is the author of “[insert] boy” (YesYes Books, 2014), one of the Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2014, & two chapbooks– “black movie” (Button Poetry, 2015), winner of the 2014 Button Poetry Prize, & “hands on ya knees” (Penmanship Books, 2013). He is a Cave Canem, VONA, and McKnight Foundation Fellow. His writing has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, Narrative & elsewhere. He was featured in The Academy of American Poets’ Emerging Poets Series by Patricia Smith. He is a founding member of the multi-genre, multicultural collective Dark Noise. Danez placed second at the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam and is the two-time Rustbelt Regional Champion. In 2014, he was the Festival Director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam. He holds a BA from UW-Madison where he was a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar. He lives in Minneapolis, MN.
manish
From the window, I watched a father teach his boy to fight.
It was precious. It was a terror.
At parties, when drums & wine beg the holiest knee
to bend, don’t we pause the spades & wake the children
to watch our sons dance a man’s dance?
Boys on my block play games with no names
& much fist. Other times they play soldier, or gangsters, or house
when the girls have turned their attention to the wild
noise of their not yet men. Did I ever tell you of my dream?
The one in a field filled with our fathers, but they can’t be
more than ten. One stands in the middle, he says play dead
& they all fall down. He says stay alive
& some start throwing hands at everything, some just stay dead.
NOTES ON BLK JOY
D'Angelo's "Untitled" is on BET, your forehead pressed against the screen trying to look down, praying there's a few more inches of TV. you don’t know what drives to you press your skin to the screen filled with his skin but you let yourself be driven, be hungry, be whatever this is when no one is around. you don’t know what a faggot is but you know a faggot would probably be doing this. you don’t know what a faggot is but you know you might be one. You don’t know what you are but you know you shouldn’t be. but you know that when D’Angelo sings how he sings looking how he looks, inside you something breaks open & then that odd flood of yes, a storm you can’t call a storm but the wind sounds like your name.
-
your auntie & 'nem done finished the wine & put on that Ohio Players or whatever album makes them feel blackest. they dancin' nasty & you watching from the steps when you should be sleep. your uncle is usually a man of much shoulders & silence but tonight he is a brown slur in the light, his body liquid & drunk with good sound. you feel like you shouldn’t be looking at how shameless he moves his hips, how he holds your auntie like a cliff or something that just might save him. your mama is not your mama tonight – she is 19 again she unsure what burns in her middle. your not-mama is caught in a rapture so ungospel you wonder if this is what they mean by sin, & if it is, how, like really how, could this be the way to hell? you’ve never seen her this free, this on fire this - “BOY!” she screams at you but not so you’ll go back to bed. she calls you to her, you grab her hands, she shows you where you come from.
-
your grandma sent you out to the big freezer to get some pork chops & while she said they were on top, you can't find them to save your behind. you see neck bones, pig feet, whole chickens, chicken wings, chicken thighs, chicken nuggets, chitterlings, pizzas, freeze pops, some meat you don’t know the name of, but not the chops. grandma is gonna have to find it herself. your grandma doesn’t have much but she has this. who cares about kingdom if the children don’t thin? this was her great northern prayer to make the girls round & winter tough, watch the boys grown broad & alive. glory be the woman with enough meat to let the world starve but not her family, glory the pork chops she sends you to get but you can’t find, glory the woman who knows where she placed what is dead & what feeds, who rules the skillet with both hands while both she & the dinner bleed.
-
last summer you weren’t bowlegged & your mama noticed you got thick once you shed winter’s wool & she damned the young new fat wrapped around her narrow boy & the secret was out: you had secrets & those secrets had hands & mouths & bulges pressed against your jeans in someone else’s mama’s basement & your jeans are too little & this city was too beige & small for your wild, stay oiled legs to walk & run your mouth to someone’s son talking grown & acting like y’all got no home training & oooo he spread you flat & open & arched, your back the black edge of everything, the sun dipping down, look how quick the stars came to spill their barely light everywhere & somewhere on the other side of the horizon inside you a sun falls right out the sky, burns & burns until it pulls back out & you get darker every week in August walking around so black & sassy & unkillable & filled with shine boys look at you & go blind - most with rage, some with hunger.
-
you went to the mall & got errrrythang airbrushed cause homecoming next week. you've been practicing the heel-toe for a month now & you need the fit to be as on point. you buy a tall-tee cause you must. you cop some forces cause what else? you didn’t buy new jeans but you’ll ask your grandma to iron a hard crease how she used to do your church clothes & you expect to be some kind of holy. you bring the tee & the forces & the yet-pressed jeans to the airbrush booth, you want your name in red, your school year down the leg, the shoes with a design almost bloody. & all those little stars that they do for free. so many stars. you gonna be so fly. a sky decked out in ruby.
-
when white folks talk about being black they never talk about how your grandma’s brow softens when you raise the spoonful of hot peas to your mouth on New Year’s or how you mother called into her room in the morning to rub lotion on your face when she’d pumped too much. they don’t talk about being called into the kitchen to do you dance or sing count or just stand there so your mama could be proud in front of company. they won’t talk about the rage & terror her voice when she catches you fighting in the park or with liquor on your breathe or anywhere you ain’t supposed to be, but are, or the joy she feels when she looks at you, grateful she still has a boy to look at, that no one has tested her joy & succeeded.
Parade
Tomorrow, as everyday,
I will see the man who looks like my father
& shakes like my aunt, tangled in his wild, ashen song
& I’ll think “I must make him beautiful”
as if he is not already, so no, I only seek to be a vessel
for his jittered light – the drug you know.
Tomorrow, when I see the man riddled with too many blues
since Reagan, I’ll follow, learn his new language & it’s hymns
(sometimes it’s the name of children locked away
in summer, sometimes just a boy crying for whoever will come).
Come, ye of lacquered flesh!
Come children of Othello & Aretha!
Our uncle will wake up a god, let us praise his stumbling gospels
let us not tell him he is not a god, not yet.
Follow him, ye black & bruised people! Follow!
flee your homes carrying whatever makes noise, be it drum or lit swisher
fireworks or skillet or Janae’s hair, beaded with joy.
& tomorrow the clack of her braids will not sound like a sudden mist
of bullets, we listen to her shake her head & only hear a reason to dance.
Tomorrow, we flood the streets with song be it Gospel or Gucci Mane,
Earth, Wind & Fire or just the sound of water on a black man’s back.
Tomorrow, we watch our daughters pick their hair out
in public & shout hosanna & merciful & ashe.
Come, think not of work or school or whatever you do to survive
our new motherland. Tomorrow anything that doesn’t love your darkness
has no name.
We must refuse to tithe to a beast that keeps swallowing the children
sending the fathers to wade in profitable dungeons.
Come, tomorrow, we walk until the prisons turn to tulips
& prisoner means man dancing in a yellow field.
Tomorrow, we walk & our feet will beat an earth prayer
& the daughters caught in crossfire dance a last dance
in fresh graves. We walk until our feet are red as August sky
& not blood, we will walk until our feet
are barely feet to the ocean that brought us here
the one riddled with sharks & familiar bones
& we will say to her
what have you done with the kin we lost in your wet mouth?
& she will say
that was ages ago, you have drank them by now.
& we will not understand, we’ll name the ocean
a drunk, wingless god, & swear off water all together
until one woman, skin dark as a funeral dress
walks to the water’s lip
shouts Emmitt to the waves
spits in the tide
&, surely, surely, a boy begins
crawling his way to shore.