Cortney Lamar Charleston
“Still Life with Torso of Cornrowed Neo-Soul Sanger” The video rolls: first the chords, and then, there he is; a spotlight skims him from the head down, creating a sheen on chocolate every shea butter believer must praise, and I’m tantalized to the point of hard staring, my bottom lip quivering with a lyric, I think. I’m not old enough for anybody around me to know certainly if I’m straight or not; how to diagnose my eyes’ fixation. I’m still coming into my own, another potential Mandingo bred to drip off the bone and as curious as any swallower of sound and light can possibly be. On the TV: a man, stripped to bare skin. Humanoid drum—a tighthide beat with many a homegirl’s whet-mouthed wanting: this boy, as church-going mamas chide, standing there buck naked, chest all out likely firm enough to dead a punch, abdominals in flex as he sets that falsetto aflutter from his throat like a caged dove. His pelvic bone leads eye lines into a censor-friendly tease at screen bottom; still, a point has been made in that mental darkness. I know what every man has between his legs, but I don’t know exactly what every man has. I know what I have between my own, and what I’d like to, and what a textbook says I’m going to get that I didn’t ask for. I know soul music comes from the pit of the stomach; my soul lived before my body had a name. It whispers prayer that a coffee-colored woman flours the bird of my spirit with lenient hands: call it a nappy headed dream, call it a pitied-fool’s fallacy—unless I twisted my roots. Maybe if I had them tilled, split like a cotton field into rows, if I could really sang like chicken grease in a cast iron skillet or was a prime cut of meat and mystery, then she would come to me, take me with her into a humbler past, our sincerest luxury our closeness when sleeping. 32 u Crab Orchard Review