Great.
Thank you, Nicole.
That was-- I'm someone who has dabbled in erasure a bit
and kind of backed away from it because I
felt like-- well, one, just plainly,
I'm not very good at it.
But also because there are ways to-- for me-- where I'm sitting
with texts that displeases me.
Anytime I was brought to erasure,
I was brought to it because I was
displeased with the current conditions of a text
or the present conditions of a text,
and I wanted to reformat them.
But I found myself so steeped in rage or frustration.
And so I think like erasure is--
the work of an erasure poem is like a brilliant craft point.
But I also think-- and I don't know if, Nicole, you
had this experience.
I also think it's a real emotional experience and a way
to temper our emotions around existing language
that is unbearable or untenable in some way.
And so, yeah.
That was really great to hear.
So for the pieces I wrote for this project,
they were all kind of--
I started to think a lot about police
and how I first encountered police.
And it was--
I lived in a neighborhood where the cops fucked with everyone,
but it was also such a neighborhood
that sometimes the police were too afraid to come into it.
And so my most high contact engagement with police
was on TV, through shows like New York
Undercover or The Wire, or movies like New Jack City
where the priority was making police officers appear cool,
right?
Or like, particularly when you get these like New York cop
shows, they're kind of like we're beyond sympathy even.
And we're at a point where it's like the cops are
cool and aspirational.
And so I wrote a series of poems that
are all the same title that kind of breaks down
my engagement with that media when I was young,
and how I have divested from it now, perhaps.
And this piece is about Carver from The Wire.
And there is a scene--
and the notorious Carver scene in The Wire's
where he jumps on top of the car.
It's like in earlier season one.
He jumps on top of the car, and like yells some threats
at the dope boys who are hiding in the buildings.
And I remember seeing that for the first time being like,
he's the cool one.
I was young.
So it's not like it was yesterday.
I'm like, well, he's the cool one.
Look at the way he's decked out and all this shit.
And now, when I went back to watch that scene
to work on this project, and I was
like kind of horrified by not only
the presentation of Carver, but also the language
he was hurling into the atmosphere.
So all the TV shows are about cops.
"You can always tell which police officer is supposed
to be the cool one by the way the cigarette
dangles between their cracked fingers,
or by the way the cigarette smoke dances around a diamond
ring, or by the platinum chain their badge swings
from, by the whip they push through the back alleys
they grew up on.
You can tell the cool cop by how they
know the older brothers of the dope boys
and don't drop government names when yelling out
of a tinted window, how they keep the elbow
angled just right when shooting ball the way
coaches who circled the hood taught them on a court lined
with needles and broken glass.
You can tell the cool cop by the way
they eyeball the stash, don't even need to keep a scale,
say fuck the interrogation.
There is no truth that doesn't reflect itself in blood.
You can tell by the song that plays
when they put the siren on top of the bend,
something you maybe heard sliding around
along the leather back seat of an OG's ride.
Know the exact way to order a sandwich at the corner spot
and who to ask for the dirt.
It is so seductive to blur the line between beloved
and executioner, not afraid to take the dirty money as
long as street niggas don't forget who ain't doing
a bid behind a stray bullet.
And I admit, back in the day, I loved the moment Carver leapt
atop a Nissan Sentra in his black kicks and baggy jeans
and offered a sermon of threats to the boys hiding somewhere
in the concrete forest, the way his mouth undressed
the slang in its familiar comforts when he yelled,
'You do not get to win.
We do.'"