Philadelphia, Negro

Gregory Pardlo

 

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As we can’t get enough of Gregory Pardlo (his lecture, reading, and pants were some of the top highlights of our recently completed summer workshop), we thought we would revisit his poem from issue #54

Tiny-House

Philadelphia, Negro

Alien-faced patriot in my Papa’s mirrored aviators

that reflected a mind full of cloud

keloids, the contrails of Blue Angels in formation

miles above the campered fields of Willow Grove

where I heard them clear as construction paper slowly

tearing as they plumbed close enough I could nearly see

flyboys saluting the tiny flag I shook in their wakes.

I visored back with pride, sitting aloft dad’s shoulders,

my salute a reflex ebbing toward ground crews in jumpsuits

executing orchestral movements with light. The bicentennial

crocheted the nation with the masts of tall ships and twelve-foot

Uncle Sams but at year’s end my innocence dislodged

like a powdered wig as I witnessed the first installment

of Roots. The TV series appeared like a galleon on the horizon

and put me in touch with all twelve angry tines of the fist

pick my father kept on his dresser next to cufflinks

and his Texas Instruments LED watch. I was not in the market

for a history to pad my hands like fat leather mittens. A kind

of religion to make sense of a past mysterious as basements

with upholstered wet bars and black-light velvet panthers, maybe,

but as such a youngster I thought every American a Philadelphia

Negro, blue-eyed soulsters and southpaws alike getting

strong now, mounting the art museum steps together

like children swept up in Elton’s freedom from Fern Rock

to Veterans Stadium, endorphins clanging like liberty

themed tourist trolleys unloading outside the Penn Relays,

a temporal echo, an offspring, of Mexico City, where Tommie

Smith and John Carlos made a human kinara with the human

rights salute while my father scaled the Summit

Avenue street sign at the edge of his lawn, holding a bomb

pop that bled tricolor ice down his elbow as he raised it like

Ultraman’s Beta Capsule in flight from a police K9 used to

terrorize suspicious kids. Your dad would be mortified too

if he knew you borrowed this overheard record of his oppression

to rationalize casting yourself as a revolutionary American

fourth-grader even though, like America, your father never lifted

your purple infant butt proudly into the swaddling of starlight

to tell the heavens to “behold, the only thing greater

than yourself!” And like America, his fist only rose on occasion,

graceful, impassioned, as if imitating Arthur Ashe’s balletic serve,

so that you almost forgot you were in its way.

Poetry

Gregory Pardlo is the author of Digest, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection Totem was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. His poems appear in The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere.