Toombs 4

There are many clues to where
we are: Pine trees lined like corn stalks,
onions and pecans fed on sand.
Cotton fields colored like cranberry, flecked harsh
with childhood memories. The people—white,
withered—trail to baptisms and sermons,
pray for harvests. Pumping
wells and frying corn, they gaze at the
minstrels chained to wall, watermelon
wallpaper unthreading. They recite
Little Black Sambo for grandchildren,
after the town library banned it.
I pick the porch cracks under my feet,
imagining those vidalia fingers reaching
from ground to Toombs, Georgia.

I too was grounded—in grade school
for letting black girls braid my
hair, traipsing fingers
past cheeks and ears, dipping
through the strands of my
mother’s interjections. Those girls
later told me, white people
only learn the chorus of the song.

Mutiny 4

Two years since I’d spoken to a father,
too discomforted to tell him
I don’t call you dad. His
voicemails landed like birds,
irritated with the branch
flailing between talons,
grooving smooth between grasp.

He taught me to fry onions
and season venison, but not
to balance checkbooks or marry
once. When younger, I thought
cheating was hereditary, but I’ve settled
for social conditioning, and set to break
habits too like him. Once, my boyfriend, folding
bed sheets beside me, asked, Why won’t you call him?


(Okay, seriously. Help!)

Lullaby 4

I’m starting to figure me out, starting
to whisper, lullaby, lullaby, lullaby,
on the steps of this house, where I played
jacks with girls of the long ponytail
and absurd name, like Tami or Treni.
Absurd always ends in i, which is the end
of lullaby, and the beginning of irises,
which bloom this year with a fierceness.

I’m starting to hate my shoes, toe worn through,
and their scruff on the concrete in that open
vowel way, while the sinking sun splits
the roofs of houses into geometrics, trails
the iron fence like a tin cup along the ribs
of a jail cell or monkey bar. I watch it dip
into treetops, graze my thumb over the concrete
where, even now, I swear I see the chalk.
Who really remembers how to play outside?

Euthanasia 4

When cancer grates and livers fail, when dogs fight
and clients don’t pay my sister, the executioner, arrives
with her intra-muscular Telazol, her smock of bright colors.
In my dreams she leans over the meek, the old, the lame
of paw, pierces the skin of their hindquarters soft
as the belly of a mushroom, injects what she calls
the pink juice—Euthasol—a drug with too much
earnestness, too much enthusiasm, too much
ease. In my dreams, she grabs the splintered foot,
cold stainless steel already sticking, and shaves patterns
from the toes. People pay, and good, for private cremations
and paw molds. And in my dreams, my sister the executioner
never overheats the kiln, never breaks a mold.
But in this life
she breaks a mold, grabs some boarding dog, parts fur to phony.
In this life, she tosses the body into the fridge next to Tuesday’s
sandwich and Cerenia, which, she tells me is the color of raspberry.
She tells me of Bob, the pudgy cremator, how, with each bagged body,
he quips It’s a dead dog in a feigned British accent. She laughs
every time. She laughs because, in this life, there’s no playing God,
no mechanic husband crying on examination tables over
an HBC (hit by car), no doubt when they find tire marks
between shoulder blades. Afterward, she scrubs the table
with Roccal-D, signs condolence cards. Last week, she
brought me three, asked me to weigh them carefully, pick the best.

Em Dash

—That yellow heel that clumps on the
sidewalk, but not in that inexperienced way
when toes are lightly lifted and slender sole
crammed to cracks, but in that yes, I know
manner. Sally is a name for any children’s
story writer who forgot what a y means.
Sally is the name of the left leg striding
down the center lane, straddling yellow
lines in shoes that scream impractical and
fresh, somber and reclamation. Recurring
as swift as punctuation is the clack of
bipedalism, Sally’s knees creaking. No one
told her, when she stood, her heart would fight
gravity, would block and bleaken with each
upward stride, each horizontal beat. No one
told her pulses and women should walk on knees.—

Of Attics and Pleas to Lovers 4

For me, no garret, no loft, no sky parlor. Only
some space below pitch. Fill my space
to slanted roof. I am known for being
awkwardly shaped. I bare rafters and
am difficult-to-access. To assess. To accentuate.
Convert me. I can be your window, your staircase,
your neglected, hard-to-get storage. I am no
mass of unmoving air. Rise from lower floors,
get trapped, compound my reputation: Inhospitable.

Don’t insulate, decrease my cost. I have no
boarded floor, no ceiling. Windows and skylights
pale to my chester drawers and failed projects—
copper etched trophies, holidays,
a briefcase bulged with Kennedy newspapers,
three generations of shoes, those pieces of
the carousel you had begun to build, wooden
tops creaking in stale whirls of fans.
Remember how they glimmer in filtered light.