Chorus at a Burning Cop Car

Abstract

Chorus at a Burning Cop Car Yannick Giovanni Marshall (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Virginia Chihota, Ndiri Mwana Wa. … (I am a child of ….) (2018). Serigraph on Linen Canvas, 210 × 201 cm, 82 5/8 × 79 1/8 in. [End Page 1] Chorus at a Burning Cop Car The Black Antifascist This is Basra. The mutiny of the suplexing flamethrowerengulfing the pigpen. Blowback through cruiser windowssingeing unopenable rear-doors. There is fire in your backseat.Fire where you would have imprisoned Shadrach and Meshachin pulled up belt-less jeans behind bulletproof glassand fading pre-arrest earth bodyslapped against the rear window like a mother. Now there is fire on the hood where durags squirmed like caught trout, firewhere our giants bent like oaks planted under low ceilings, firewhere the lionesses were claustrophobic in the backseat and the hell-houndspawed at the glass. Now your tire is an immolated monk,its rubber eviserated, and the Quiktrip tries to keep its soulin its aisles. There will be a rewilding. Sea-spray will soak hoodies, and black-tattooed blackskinstouch out at the sun, and the sun will allow to be touchedand will touch blackskins and glisten them like an afternoon ocean.Woodlands will be hosed down and steaming, overpopulated with ladybugsand the thugs will know them and not deli counter glass and shoutingand the inevitable darling in full shower-cap and nightgown regaliawill not hear the shot and fall on her knees nor Pietà. The fatherswill not have to wring their shirts, nor pretend to be strong,nor pretend to grieve. There is fire over your body, cop car. Not sincethe grand machine arms that strung you up like skinned cowsplacing your pieces in place laying your trunk into sparking metalhave you felt fire. And now to have your municipality stripped off your sides andyour authority sunken and your body returned to mineralsand chemicals, you are Negro-toned. I wonder if, for them, this is their '16 Jesse Washington.The QuikTrip their Francis L. McIntosh tied to the locust tree near 10th and Marketwith the rocks thrown at the cranium to melt it. I wonder if they felt the QuikTrip's fall in their sides andknew of what it might portend. That they saw 99¢ corn dogs scream for their lives and the gas threaten toblow and hugged up onto their property, kissing the top of their heads behind shut blinds. [End Page 2] God will weep for our lynching of this car. For the bulging of its seat coveringsand the crisp of the cupholders. History will close its books to us and we will have to deny itand say not to always bring up the past. And we will have to avert our eyesfrom rent-a-center security cam footage of silhouettes drawing your still beating metalfrom bushfire. The Conservative The black hordes descend in flames over you, cop car. They lick at your heels, o, you QuikTrip. They leap onto your back and beat you and drench you with kerosene and light themselves on fire. There is no justice. Only the Negroes in the trees. And the Vaudeville moon apologizing and apologizing above a black-scarved insurgency throwing Molotov cocktails into art galleries and nurseries. Where are your 'bolitionists, cop car? Who shall set you free? Are there no pickaxe swinging Delta crooners for you, o cop car. Your revolutionaries are many but none of them are poets. Q is not crouching atop a Friesian horse with arm extended to snatch our cities back by the scruff of their neck. No, you've been cordoned off, cornered, broken into and burned. You melt at the hands of the Wicked of "equality." Those who would sickle Athens into a work-camp and elect Senators smacking blackberry jam off their lips. Those who will graduate from cop cars to homes and sheltering places. You martyr, with no tombstone, no epitaph, no burial at sea, save the Darren Wilson bracelets on the wrists of your lovers waving. And the thin blue line pulled above torrents...