Christian J. Collier
As a Man of Honor
In a field of firefly & daisy, I nursed a black eye I’d earned
fighting a friend who’d called a girl I’d loved from afar a bitch.
Like any American,
I was defensive of what I couldn’t declare mine.
I raised my fists & swelled each curved knuckle
on his pink cheeks & chin.
Everyone should cherish something enough
to bleed & be bled for it.
I dubbed myself fortunate
destruction was a tongue I was fluent in long before my hand fit,
the first time, inside a woman’s skinny hand &
the warmth fevered up & down the coarse bed of my palm.
Is it not a gift to grasp early what one’s capable of,
how the blood caked on the limbs is won? In Appalachia,
the oldest lords of red dust & mountain demand honor
be a reason to bend oneself into an armament.
In honor’s name,
I’ve fed the teeth I’ve jabbed from my assailants’ jaws to their prairie
as tribute. Applause emerged each time from the woods.
In return, honor rewarded me
nothing more than my own nerves & bones to nurture--
a body stung by violeting bruises,
five cracked ribs, a broad nose to ice.
A standard always comes with costs.
A purpose guides the heart to action, stubborns
the mind, casts a lilac light
on the leaf-pebbled path we’re meant to walk.
Though I’m more mature now in belief
regarding what makes a man a man,
I don’t question
what I am or what I’ve been.
I lay low my skull—praise what makes & takes me apart.
In a field of firefly & daisy, I nursed a black eye I’d earned
fighting a friend who’d called a girl I’d loved from afar a bitch.
Like any American,
I was defensive of what I couldn’t declare mine.
I raised my fists & swelled each curved knuckle
on his pink cheeks & chin.
Everyone should cherish something enough
to bleed & be bled for it.
I dubbed myself fortunate
destruction was a tongue I was fluent in long before my hand fit,
the first time, inside a woman’s skinny hand &
the warmth fevered up & down the coarse bed of my palm.
Is it not a gift to grasp early what one’s capable of,
how the blood caked on the limbs is won? In Appalachia,
the oldest lords of red dust & mountain demand honor
be a reason to bend oneself into an armament.
In honor’s name,
I’ve fed the teeth I’ve jabbed from my assailants’ jaws to their prairie
as tribute. Applause emerged each time from the woods.
In return, honor rewarded me
nothing more than my own nerves & bones to nurture--
a body stung by violeting bruises,
five cracked ribs, a broad nose to ice.
A standard always comes with costs.
A purpose guides the heart to action, stubborns
the mind, casts a lilac light
on the leaf-pebbled path we’re meant to walk.
Though I’m more mature now in belief
regarding what makes a man a man,
I don’t question
what I am or what I’ve been.
I lay low my skull—praise what makes & takes me apart.
The Devotions
If I could blink & arrive back in my eighteen-year-old skin, sitting
in my car in Northgate Mall’s parking lot after it’d closed, I can’t say
I’d still bend my throat & make the few notes within it a song
for the white girl whose dad burned my love letters as she watched.
That kind of nakedness,
I’ve never found comfort in.
My strained, low voice on the phone that night though, magic,
a worn map that nearly brought me fully to her
before an officer approached, black pistol & flashlight in hand.
Fear became an unbodied passenger
weighing down the vinyl seat beside me.
I wonder if she recalls
the ballad dying abrupt in my mouth,
buried then & forever after. In its place,
I pled for her to love me enough not to hang up & leave me
to face whatever the cop willed happen
without a witness. She held me, tight-knuckled,
against the lilac valley of her ear, barely breathing.
The only true thread of her I’ve ever had to hold,
there in the listening.
The devotion she couldn’t grant any other moment, mine. Solely.
Under the heft of midsummer,
when she said nothing, she said everything.
If I could blink & arrive back in my eighteen-year-old skin, sitting
in my car in Northgate Mall’s parking lot after it’d closed, I can’t say
I’d still bend my throat & make the few notes within it a song
for the white girl whose dad burned my love letters as she watched.
That kind of nakedness,
I’ve never found comfort in.
My strained, low voice on the phone that night though, magic,
a worn map that nearly brought me fully to her
before an officer approached, black pistol & flashlight in hand.
Fear became an unbodied passenger
weighing down the vinyl seat beside me.
I wonder if she recalls
the ballad dying abrupt in my mouth,
buried then & forever after. In its place,
I pled for her to love me enough not to hang up & leave me
to face whatever the cop willed happen
without a witness. She held me, tight-knuckled,
against the lilac valley of her ear, barely breathing.
The only true thread of her I’ve ever had to hold,
there in the listening.
The devotion she couldn’t grant any other moment, mine. Solely.
Under the heft of midsummer,
when she said nothing, she said everything.
--
Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, TN. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, December, and elsewhere. A 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow, he is also the winner of the 2022 Porch Prize in Poetry and the 2020 ProForma Contest from Grist Journal.
Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, TN. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, December, and elsewhere. A 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow, he is also the winner of the 2022 Porch Prize in Poetry and the 2020 ProForma Contest from Grist Journal.