Testify

Douglas Manuel

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781597090452
• eBook ISBN: 9781597095754
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

This award-winning debut book of poetry examines race, masculinity, religion, class, and the African American experience in the American Midwest. A book of elegiac ambivalence, Testify 's speaker often finds himself trapped between received binaries: black and white, ghetto and suburban, atheism and Catholicism. In many ways, this work is a Bildungsroman detailing the maturation of a black man raised in the crack-laden 1980s, with hip-hop, jazz, and blues as its soundtrack. Rendered with keen attention to the economic decline of the Midwest due to the departure of the automotive industry, this book portrays the speaker wrestling with his city's demise, family relationships, interracial love, and notions of black masculinity. Never letting anyone, including the speaker, off the hook, Testify refuses sentimentality and didacticism and dwells in a space of uncertainty, where meaning and identity are messy, complicated, and multivalent. "Manuel charts the raw emotional complexities and the impossible daily reckonings that confront a young black man coming of age today in America....Each powerful testimony in this collection stands as evidence of an eloquent and dramatic new voice in American poetry." ?David St. John, author of The Auroras and Study for the World's Body "These potent poems testify to those ambivalent moments that might rend or right us, as when an interracial couple drive past a truck with a Confederate flag painted on its back windshield and from which a little boy turns to smile and wave: his ' blond hair // split down the middle like a Bible / left open to the Book of Psalms.'" ?Anna Journey, author of The Atheist Wore Goat Silk

II

“ARE YOU READY TO HELP THE PARENTS OF THIS CHILD IN THEIR DUTY AS CHRISTIAN PARENTS?”

My godmother answered Yes and traced

the sign of the cross on my forehead. I’m driving

to see her, pines blotching the side

of the road. I want Cindy to stay

young. She uses a walker now, an old woman,

curly hair and wrinkled hands

soft as feathers. In her backyard,

we feed birds bread. Pigeons so close

we could christen them. Wrens and warblers

congregate. Cindy drove me to church every Sunday

after my mother died. Before I leave

today, she’ll make me recite the rosary in the parlor,

sunlight revealing new lines on her face.

We don’t go to church anymore.

She doesn’t travel well. Christmas and Easter—

the only times we step inside St. Mary’s. Make a wish,

she says—a cardinal’s just landed, red cap sharp

as the pope’s hat. Cindy was Mother’s

catechism sponsor. She remembers her voice. I can’t.

This pecks at my head, so I tell her.

But I’ve never told her how I call

her my fairy white godmother, never admitted

I no longer believe. As always,

when we go inside, I light the votive candles.

OF WASP HUM AND CATACOMBS

Because my brother cooked

coke into crack, some baking soda,

water, a little of this, a little of that.

If I remove the plank from his eye,

I’ll break my mother’s back. Oh,

how I forget! Mix up and confuse.

That’s okay. She can’t walk anyway.

And here I am walking, no, swarming

because a friend said something

about mothers scraping off

their daughters’ clits in Somalia. I wish

I had a twin sister, whose eyes itched

when mine itched, whose ears—

My limbs dance alone.

Is someone talking about me? I don’t

talk to my brother on the phone. Hello,

you have a collect call from—Seneca

choked on bloodsmoke. I fear my bones

are lined with cancer. I’m not joking.

I’m not cooking. I’m walking home

from the grocery, arms full of brown bags.

I’M MY FATHER’S NAME

I’m the tangled Christmas tree lights he cursed,

the logs he split for six dollars an hour, his Thunderbird

and/or the gnats haloing his bottle’s lips. I’m the heel

of the platforms he wore in ’72, the cake-cutter Afro pick

he split that white boy’s wig with, the glass dick

he smokes his crack from. I’m the perm kit, the false

teeth bubbling in the cup on the nightstand as he sleeps,

the record collection he sold for crack. I’m the luggage

his eyes carry, the pride seeped out of his lips

when death stood on his chest and left for a future visit.

I’m the smell of his breath: menthol cigarettes,

tooth rot, and biblical thoughts. I’m each purple scar

on his face, the dance hall he never got to open,

the hamburgers he smuggled to TV night in prison. I’m

the fire in his voice when he told his stepdad,

If you hit me again we’re going to war. I’m the sawed-off

he shot into the front porch, the Dawn dishwashing liquid

he showered with, the latex glove he used to pull out

his shit when he was constipated. I am Little Douglas.

I am Locust Street, his street, the block he made pop

with junkies. I am the boy on the corner, waiting to yell, Police!

LOST SIDE OF LOSS

That rattling animal, the self, you left

inside your mother. Take

your eyes away from the soil.

Look at t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• Notes
• Gratitudes
• Biographical Note