Still Life with Black Boy’s Face Overlaying Project Buildings

By CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON

Hall of Famer Frank Thomas, from 1990 to 2005,
hit 448 home runs over the fence for the White Sox

with the notorious Robert Taylor Homes standing just
beyond ballpark grounds across the Dan Ryan Expressway:

the high-rises, bruises against the city-flag-blue sky,
eyesores. When the last tower came down, I don’t remember

the president, the mayor or any other politician standing
in front of the rubble with a megaphone vowing to get

the ones who did this; incrimination isn’t done quite so
publicly here, plus a project is a project is a project.

Whenever folks rolled to Comiskey, they saw those towers
and thought of G-Baby from Hardball, comedic little black boy

baseball player shot outside a building that looked sort of
just like those; Keanu Reeves’s character was kind of torn up

about the whole thing. Good riddance!—their one Red Line
train of thought, tears in their blue and green eyes. Hood

riddance, too. As we drive past, I glimpse the ghost of my young
face in the car window, overlaying the empty lot with reflection.

It’s a place where many people died but many, many, many more
lived. Those are the folks I identify with: I know what it’s like

to live; I have no idea what it means to die—I guess I’m not black
in that way. I’m, as they say, “blessed and highly favored.”

 

[Purchase Issue 13 here]

Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Cave Canem Fellow and the author of Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017). His poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, New England Review, Poetry, River Styx, and elsewhere.

Still Life with Black Boy’s Face Overlaying Project Buildings

Related Posts

"kochanie, today i bought bread" Book Cover

September 2023 Poetry Feature: Uljana Wolf

ULJANA WOLF
legnica your direction is uttered: night halfnight / legnica your sirens rise in the gate-keeper's lodge / and keep the flag on all clear: /            yellow yellow the direction’s right / a crooked wave the gate the cross / legnica in singsong of tracks land trickles away / legnica your sky

Poetry Feature: Poems from the Immigrant Farmworker Community

MIGUEL M. MORALES
Days into the promise of a new year, resolutions plentiful, blossoming, / seven farmworkers were shot and killed harvesting mushrooms in Half Moon Bay. / Those of us who sprouted from families, whose hands and backs worked the land, / waited for news of our farmworker siblings.

A White House against a blue sky, with a watertower on top.

Two Poems by Liza Katz Duncan

LIZA KATZ DUNCAN
First the marsh grass came, then the motherwort, / then bitterberry and honeysuckle. Blackbirds, / gulls and grackles built their nests. / Mourning doves call from the eaves / of the old factory, closed during the Depression.