Animal Phat Farm, and: Jim Opus [jim oh-puh s]
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Animal Phat Farm
… the quarreling and biting and jealousy which had been normal features of life had almost disappeared.
Almostall niggas are fly, but some niggas are flyer than others.This is law like how all squares are rectangles but notall rectangles are squares. Collapse that: some niggas aresquares. Some need the threads to carry the conversation,the freshest cuts of fabric currying favor for their flavor,and that's the bare minimum to establish blackness ashis mind's orientation. Regarding crack sales, B.I.G.left behind ten commandments but the boys went andsettled on a cool seven to truly see if skin is kin, twobeing the designer wear and flyness-inequality edictsalready stressed. The rest: whatever approaches withtwo raised fists is a hater that must be dealt with swiftly;whatever goes up on four legs, or has wings, gets choppedup and fried for dinner in the grease trap; no nigga shallput sleep or studying above the pursuit of sex; no niggashall refuse to sip the reddest Kool-Aid; no real one shallbe killed on the court, or on the field, or on the joystickson multiplayer mode, or in any situation where somebodycan corroborate his apparent inadequacy, strip him downto the most supreme stereotype and then deny, deny, deny. [End Page 101]
Jim Opus [jim oh-puh s]
[2nd Period, Honors English during class reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]
* * * * *pale people can't even imagine nigger love us loving our familiesmy mom pushed me out nigger and that was history
she and my dad took me out of nigger school now I can readan acclaimed book with nigger inside it and I am blessed by
slave sharecropper blood the pigment of inkcoiled into alphabet a manner of celebrating
commending complimenting my blackassness as precious metalcounting me in Du Bois's fraction giving me deed to my industrious
mind the "gap" between my Jim body and an idea to hireniggas as in employment where white made kin felons broke
prospects a chance at homes that weren't shotgunproperty a paradise for nigger -spawn the shady the sketch
somebody who knows better still than only living in my look [End Page 102]
Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Pushcart Prize-winning poet and the author of Telepathologies (Saturnalia, 2017). He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His poems have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Granta, The Nation, and elsewhere.
