Robert Lashley will be reading at Cascadia Magazine’s Evening of Words + Ideas at the Rendezvous Jewlebox Theater at 7 pm, Friday Sept. 13. More details here.

 

Blood is the color that mixes late September.
It tints the concrete of a late sunset mass.
It makes a mass of niggas and black birds.
…………..The OG in white will take them
It is on wings of those beat and broke in migrations,
those caught up in wounds and rickety structures,
those lost in aroma’s poisons and intoxicants
allusive until they couldn’t breathe.
…………..The OG in white will bring them
Allusive is the errant gangsta disciple
as he washes his pavement of red.
Allusive is his second act with body bags 
and his church with invisible chimes,
and his yellow tapes fluttering in the leaves
(And dust-to-dust coloring everything around it)
Lord, I’ll go sweeping through the city
Where my hood niggas have rolled before.

.

The old man claps, and cleaner particles
become a set of flying night birds
The old man claps and ruins of a playground
become neither ruins nor a playground.
The arcs of the busted jungle gym
lift and re-sheath their pipe swords,
lift every rock that interacts with his ash
as the swing set chains stop their hanging.
…………..The OG in white will bring them home.

.

At dusk, home goings are everywhere.
Agony moves through Anglican storefront.
Agony lies still in the gravel.
Dope boys barely make their stops now.
Dope fiends run to the water.
At dusk, the OG finds place after place
to give rosaries and proper burials 
I will stand someday by— by the river.
Won’t be back on this block no damn more…
…………..The OG in white will take them.
…………..The OG in white will bring them home.

.



Artwork by Barry Johnson.

Robert Lashley is a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. Like his hero James Baldwin, he tries to be an honest man and a good writer. Follow him on Twitter at @thebigsparrow.

Barry Johnson, based in Seattle, is a self-taught, interdisciplinary artist who explores race, identity, and culture through mixed media paintings, sculpture, photography, and performance work. Shifting careers from high tech consulting to art-making in the mid-2010s, he is known for bold, dynamic works that explore identity. Johnson notes that “My entire body of work is only meant to say everyone is unique in their own way.” Follow him on Instagram at @barryjohnson.co.