—after Vince Staples

Stage-lit, Big Jay McNeely’s blackness popped
against backdrops of white, raptured faces,
and so no matter where he turned,
they’d follow. He could take them up,
down, and all around if he so desired.
If their hooping, hollering softened
he would start honking his horn and
slide into a high and mutated squeal.
As the note rang out, it would feed
into riotous applause and fervor. Awe
-struck, red-faced, white folks in such fervor
that you’d best be on that stage if you black,
certainly not in the crowd at arm's reach.

As if he, himself, morphed into the music,
Big Jay’s sweaty and black frame contorted
to the bending notes and melodies,
and by the end of any solo, he would
fall flat onto his back so fast the white folks
all caught heart attacks, and he would
blow, blow, blow his sax toward God in heaven.

The crowd, all its white and raptured faces,
chanted as if a mob on the street, crying, Blow!
Blow! Blow, negro! Blow! Off the stage and on, say,
the street they might’ve spit at him and hurled slurs
at him, the facial expressions just the same
as when the music filled them with ecstasy—
eyes popped and mouths agape, hysterical, the line
between joy and hatred so thin it might not exist.