FreezeRay:  Poetry With A Pop
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Hanif Abdurraqib

At The House Party Where We Found Out Whitney Houston Was Dead 


I am tucked in the corner, underneath a choir of arching floorboards 
wailing for sympathy from about four dozen relentless feet, and I am telling Jasmine 
that there is like, ONE song that everyone at this party knows all of the words to. 
I tell her that we were all born of the 80’s. All born of parents 
who watched the revolution shove itself into a too small suit at the turn of a decade that 
left them in homes with welcome mats that read: 
“Your hearts are the lost luggage at the airport of the next generation.” 
I tell her because of this 
we have earned one song we all know the words to, in the same way we have earned 
this breeze, sitting on top of our skin tonight and staying, the way any good apology does 
while we scroll through our iPods shouting out the names of 80’s pop songs we 
both kind of love like a secret, and we keep scrolling right up until 
someone runs into this room that is over capacity by at least nine righteous, glowing bodies 
and tells us that Whitney Houston woke up dead 
in Los Angeles two hours ago. Our friend Amber is like 
five PBRs deep, and drunk enough to yell at her boyfriend 
for the Whitney Houston-less iPod he has been using to DJ this party. 
 
We, the war generation. The only way we know how to bury our dead 
is with sweat 
or blood 
or sex 
or anything pouring from a body to signify we were here, and the wooden floor 
of a basement belonging to an old house on Neil Avenue 
makes as good a burial ground as any, Says the small boom box now playing DJ 
in the center of this room, and the Whitney CD inside, pouring out of the speakers 
just loudly enough to let everyone in this room get a small taste of Whitney alive 
and young, and telling us exactly how to squeeze exactly what we are owed 
out of this Saturday. On a night when I don’t understand where love lives 
in the way I will understand where love lives in coming months, but I understand 
there is a saxophone solo at about 3 minutes and 30 seconds 
into the song “How Will I Know”, and I’m pretty sure love has a vacation home there, 
and we are all invited tonight when steam rises off of these bodies 
like a sacrifice and the first time I see Jasmine cry is when we are watching all of our friends 
convert grief into perspiration. I tell her that I see our reflection 
in the pools of sweat, and we look like two flowers 
that have never stop opening, I say, 
We be bloomed so wide by the end of this night won’t nothing in this city be able to hold us 
 
later, we press our backs into the roof of a house that even at 4am 
sways with us like a metronome of well-timed memorial. The sky is 
unchained, and careless, and wrapped around us both like our long discarded childhoods. 
I look up and ask myself again why the stars have so long tolerated 
the audacity of clouds. I laugh loudly and tell Jasmine that it is 
impossible for a human being to wake up dead. 
 
She is already asleep.

Hanif Abdurraqib writes poems when he is not sitting in his Columbus, Ohio apartment eating red velvet cake, or judgmentally thumbing through your record collection. His first collection of poems, Three Crosses, was released in December 2012, and his second collection, Sons of Noah, is forthcoming from Tired Hearts Press. He wants you to tell him your top 5 albums of all time.
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