^{A Found & Scrambled Diss Poem}

Negro Women in Greenville
in a special meeting.

Decided the members of council
get their wives to be cooks
and laundresses.

Their wives, able bodied
have declined to work. 

The result being Negro women
and wives of colored soldiers
will be prepared not to work—
refuse employment
without any reason whatever.

Negro Women can get along 
without working
for exceedingly difficult families.

For this class of loafers,
Negro Women flatly refuse 
to carry the labor.

 

^{July 4, 2024}

^{The Greenville News 
October 2, 1918, Page 4}

my uterus folds into a gun— 
although, I've never carried 
one. I don’t even like to say the word around our daughter
who grew toes in there. Instead, 
we say pun when we chat 
about the news at dinner. But they're everywhere, 
puns. At the store, a small 
boy with puns for hands 
shouts gotcha, gotcha, gotcha down an aisle of hula hoops, 
bubbles, floaties, 
and water puns. 
At the checkout, women's bodies on health magazines are covered 
by plastic panels, 
but puns, big ones, 
are on full display by the candy and gum. We pass billboards 
for The Pun Show on the way 
home and a line of protestors 
that wraps around the women's center. “Nothing is easy about motherhood," 
is written on a sign in all caps
over a heartline zigzagging 
red over a shouting mouth. I turn up the volume and a bird sings 
pío, pío, pío in Spanish. 
Fear laps at me
like the shoreline, slowly eating this state that’s shaped like a pun. 
Nothing is easy 
about motherhood,
but it is worthy of poems, magazines, billboards, and songs, so 
when I pull into the driveway,  
I decide to stick to my puns
and send out another mother poem tomorrow. For now, we unload 
groceries and make plans 
to go to a concert—our first 
big one since becoming parents. Neither of us says the what if 
we’re both thinking. 
Piu, piu, piu, 
our daughter hops on the sofa. Piu, piu, piu. Piu, piu, piu. 
Piu, piu, piu.

^{With lines from Lorine Niedecker’s Collected Works}

Are you from here? It’s been difficult 
because my heart is weak 
and schools of leaves past lonely piers 
on their way to water 
where my brother lives
in Jefferson. Where the spring 
looms also in phonographic deep song 

on a level with the water. Somedays, 
I can barely breathe or push 
thru marsh to meet my family 
for the holidays. In water, nearly landless, 
it’s like the medicine stopped working 
in the soft still-water 
twilight. I saw it happening, the rain 

came down in sheets. I’ve had this 
aching in my wrists for years. There’s something 
in the water like a flower will devour 
water. Because my blood 
is thin, I sink to water-death 
behind my house and try to keep a garden. 
How often do you see your children? 

Every morning I walk alone 
around the block and count my blessings.
It isn’t like when we were young, 
the cold-water-business of the water, 
the weather, less predictable 
in water glass descending scale. 
My throat is dry. I think they called your name.