Record Rack, for Holding 45s
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Record Rack, for Holding 45s
You're Soul's manger of vinyl, group home and auction-blocked evidence and proof of every recording session out the studio's almost-plantation door. You like looking at yourself so much you belong on a basement bar, holding Hennessy & Coke in a Santa Claus hat surrounded by Jet centerfolds. You're a mini-grocery store cart, menu of wax. You're a cut-out bin of slots, a retirement home, a used car lot. If you were a row of striking sanitation workers, you'd need Jesus and you'd need metaphor. Pre box-set and born by a river, you need love like I do, don't you? You have no name in the street or anywhere else. You're the day Teddy Pendergrass almost died. That's why there's no behind-your-back to say nothin' behind. You're a double descriptive, a verbal noun and a still-life conveyor belt to a Rock Hall obituary. No wonder Donny Hathaway made the Celie Color Purple Fingers at you before leaving the room. [End Page 901] No food stamp booklet, Apple I-Pod or pyramid at an Earth,Wind & Fire concert will ever hold ours like you've held ours our dusty, lifted-higher, hot buttered, humanity.
Thomas Sayers Ellis, one of the founders of the Dark Room Collective, is an associate professor of English at Case Western University, where he teaches courses in creative writing and African-American literature. His first volume of poetry, The Maverick Room, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2005. He is also author of the chapbook The Genuine Negro Hero (Kent State University Press, 2001), one of the three poets collected in the anthology, Take Three (Graywolf Press, 1996), and co-editor of On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists (New Cambridge Press, 1994). He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
