In Their Own Words
KB Brookins on “T Shot #4”
T SHOT #4
A boy can be a river if you let him. One where everyone
has fun in his waters & survives the flood. A boy is as tender
as a turtle, running to water not long after birth
if you stop him from drying up so soon. Niggas die
too often ’round here. ’round here, a boy is pinkish & left
in the sun. I want to drink from a river of Blackness
for a second, or a lifetime & no Florida mist takes me
back to this dimension where Black boys don’t get to be men.
I want the Black boy in me to be a river you can’t name
even if you send sounds underwater. Even if you swim & only
come up to be reminded of breath & sunlight,
I want to sink into ecosystems where human beingness sets in.
Discover his genius. Don’t dam him till he’s a pond,
or a tourist attraction, or another potential gasping for air
like a fish flopping for standerbys to kick it back in. Let’s dive
headfirst, America. I hear the Colorado is bottomless.
Reprinted from Freedom House (Deep Vellum, 2023) with the permission of the publisher.
On “T Shot #4”
I wrote this poem in 2021 – while contemplating how news cycles dictate when non-Black folks think Black lives are worth investing in, and while noticing how differently people treat me now that they (wrongly) assume I’m a Black man. I spent a lot of time that summer around water, so that inevitably seeps into this poem. I also spent a lot of time on long car rides, needing albums to keep me alert while driving. A mainstay in my go-to album is When I Get Home by Solange.
Every song on that album is beautiful; the landscapes – via place, rhythm, diction, harmony, and tone, among other things – that Solange creates within its 19 tracks is what I aspire to do in poetry books. One particular song called “Almeda” for sure inspired this poem. Especially this part of its chorus:
Black faith
still can't be washed away
Not even in that Florida water
Not even in that Florida water
The first sentence in this poem came to me before anything else: “A boy can be a river if you let him.” Before I even knew what that meant, I wrote it down; that’s how parts of poems happen for me. Truly, I think my poem/subconscious-self knows more than my conscious-self, if that makes sense. Poeming is working out something before I know it’s even a thing, often. Anyway, I then tried to pillage that phrase for meaning – what could it mean? What does it mean right now? After charting some answers out, I landed on the extended metaphor. That type of language (boy = water) is the engine that drives the poem, I think.
As I was writing this poem (as well as all the poems in Freedom House), I was thinking about the history of Black people in the U.S., and how that history became really clear to me as I’ve come to experience “manness” without consent. There are many things we’ve been subjected to without consent. I thought about hypervisibility ( I want the Black boy to be a river you can’t name / even if you send sounds underwater ) and how that has harmed me and other Black people I love. What I think it means to be Black in the U.S. is to always be dreaming of the world being softer to you, of thinking of you less as a problem and more like a body of water. This poem is me manifesting a new world for myself, for Black boys, and those who would benefit from letting Black people be as free as the song “Almeda” by Solange, which is everyone.
