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lyrics

1.

An orchestra of chalkboards bowed by the thinnest fingernails of Midwestern-make hit the eardrum through the maze of headphone wires. Smoke exits in lungs in long streams. Niggas on the corner comment on the ways vapor floats into the vast nothing. The city hums underneath the songs of Field Hollers. Corner kids sit on the curb. The forty ounces of Colt 45 clinks against each other. Glass on glass. Bottles clang. Bodies of black boys frozen mid-though. They’re behind the three-point line. Up for student council. Frozen at the skatepark. Kids on the sideline sit with faces stuck. Hardened with knowledge that time’s up. Mouth flushed with calm. Corners of lips firm. Hands clenched or folded; some caught fallings. Some let their headshang. Whether in shame or solidarity. Bodies wrung with its own weight and tells how the noose stretches in its effortless way of accommodating the subject.


2.

In the barber shop on Fourth and Janes Street Vivian says, “America made us only citizen enough to pay taxes.” Clicks her long press-on nails on the counter by her clippers. They hit like snare drums like thye playing along to the news. It’s the same shit. Same old song of a kid killed on the East Side. Buena Vista. Down by the pub. A kid shot near the ice cream parlor while riding his bike home after dark. He pedals his way home quick enough to be driven to Hospital across town. The anchor calls it a miracle before shifting to the meteorologist who makes a joke about rain that won’t come.
A woman fields Vivian’s comment and responds. “You right… but you know i won’t give a damn when those reparations come in.”

she and vivian cackle in the corner of the nearly empty barbershop taking turns smacking each other’s arms with the back of their hands. One after the other. Than other after after another. The barbershop is mostly empty. The sound of the laughs carry-on for a while. One chair is being sat in by a customer. The four-year-old calls out in discomfort a young barber grips his head give him a line. The boy cries hysterically.

Moe sits in silence. His barber’s chair only filled by him most days. His eyes not as keen. His hands nowhere near as steady. His lines crooked, his fades have become sloppy. A copy of the Saginaw News opened wide to the middle. Today’s copy rancid with the stench of menthol cigarettes and the absence of literacy. It always is. Moe sighs. The same one his momma used to make when she was contemplating how to respond. However, nothing would come from him today. His head slides back to rest on the chair. A log being chainsawed soon follows.

The child stops crying long enough for the line to be cut. The young barber takes money from the mother of now pacified four-year-old boy, who now stands behind her leg with a Dum-Dum sucker securely tucked in his mouth. She asks what Moe dreams about. No one cares to guess these days.

The plantation his grandfather picked cotton on and the one-room-sharecropping hut Moe grew up in. Somewhere between the asscrack of Baton Rogue and the swamp New Orleans sinks on. They never ask about the Magnolias he yanks from trees in the midst of R.E.M cycles. Never ponder the window he place them on and how the smell makes his momma his hysterical.

Never ask how Momma used to tell him not to worry about reparations. Told him they weren’t coming. Told him his Granddaddy already sold that forty acres and a mule they had received from the first payout. Buy out? Sell out? She told Moe that his granddad sold out. Said he traded his life, well-being, and her life for a crisp ten-dollar bill. He used it to buy bread and butter that they overcharged him for at the general store in the town over. His momma said he sold the mule, Jelly Roll for a bottle of tonic on the way back home to the shack.

“Mm.” Moe says again slipping out of his dream. This time in the absence of his employees. He smiles at the Styrofoam plate of Fried Catfish from Magic Kitchen. The first six letters of the sign have worn away. Probably still blowing across the city of Saginaw by the wind and what remains is comparable and just as accurate.

Moe takes the plate from chair beside him. He runs his hands across his name written in sharpie before clicking the lights of the shop off before clicking the lock behind him. He drives home to his dog, Lucille, and a picture of his wife Clementine put on a rather empty bookshelf. He eats the fried fish before falling asleep to whirr of static from television losing signal.

The barber shop burns the next day.

As a matter of speaking, we could say it was Moe’s shop. But truth being told, the bank held the deed. His Down Payment securely slid into the depths of a vault. And we could be polite and offer the fact that they liquidated the shop, but there was nothing left to sell. Only cinders piled on top of trauma. A bank intern didn’t think selling the cinders were still lit was a good idea, and the bank manager didn’t either. But only because they thought they would make back their investment if they liquidized the collateral, and besides Moe was only in Saginaw because of water.

The Stop and Shop owner around the corner saw Moe a few times after that. Before no one else and after no one else cared to look. Said she’d never watched an old man cry like that before. Said it was a silence. The sound of a heart exploding or imploding or breaking. She didn’t settle one of those modes because she said it was all of them at once. Said she heard Prince after that moment and understood. Told me that she knows doves cry in the absence of sound because the absence of war doesn’t exist so how would they know to cry for it.

credits

from empty space​(​s​)​., released November 24, 2020

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guero Midland, Michigan

Hi my name is Thomas and I make music that feels like a middle schooler at the 7-11 mixing genres at the slurpee station. It comes out alright.

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