Go for Your Guns
- Go for Your Guns
1977, year of the Roots miniseries. They watch howKunta won’t be Toby, how he can make believe
he won’t need that foot, how he isn’t afraid to loseit. When Damon ain’t here, in Denise’s house, eating her food,
he lives in his van, his own mobile home, alwayswith nowhere to go, no real home since his stepdaddy told
him to go again. I’m gonna paint the van green, he tells her.Emerald or jade, something—.
Regal or royal, she interrupts, placing two fingers on his lipsto shush him and smooth his mustache. Above their heads,
adorning the wall, a velvet painting of a black womanbirthing the universe from her skull, afro aglow with thoughts,
galaxies ripe with rings circling planets, beltways of stars litas if they were paths leading to all the great nowheres
they could never be. You know, you ain’t gotta leave. You ain’tgotta live in that raggedly van, she says. Lighters, records,
cords, pipes, razors, everywhere. Her living room all darkexcept for the glow from the TV illuminating the line
from slavery to their very bodies, still black, still not free, alwaysneeding to think on their feet, always needing to be ready to flee. [End Page 37]
Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana. He is currently a Middleton and Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California where he is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. His poems are featured on Poetry Foundation’s website and have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, The Los Angeles Review, Superstition Review, Rhino, North American Review, The Chattahoochee Review, New Orleans Review, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere. His first full length collection of poems, Testify (Red Hen Press, 2017), won an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award for poetry. In 2020, he received the Dana Gioia Poetry Award.
