We had gotten a whole hog
from Aulander, pink-fleshed
and splayed like a sacrifice
to cover sin, which is belief
that tomorrow is a place
we can eat.
I walk around the offering
before the body is pulled.
The men maneuver flame
and smoke seems to follow me
no matter where I go. Dad is gone
to tend the fire.
My uncle motions the bag toward me,
peels it from the bottle’s mouth like
a fast-moving rain cloud. It burns sweet
on my finger. I look around nervous [the way
I would years later when the homeless man
outside 7-Eleven returned with Mad Dog, OE,
and something for himself].
That’s good stuff, my uncle says, and I nod
in belief, face contorting into an amen.
But it burns. It burns
like the split-open swine on cinder-block.
See! How the smoke follows our gods
like eyes of a portrait, an heirloom.
The men walk in their own ritual
of pretense, ignoring whole conflagrations.
My uncle ignores hole burns in his chest.
Just like Dad. [One day I’d beg Uncle Skin
to put the cigarettes down.
He’d say there’s no point in quitting now
when he could feel what was chasing him
already had hold.]
Temple of blackened-breathing, charred
flesh, his lung is smoking in the pit,
it’s right there, leapt from his torso.
We hop out his truck and the brown paper
cloud disappears under his seat, crackling
its own thunder.
He shows me how to coerce
embers back into flame while
he lights a Newport. Done:
the tradition handed down.
[Decades pass and I still drink cognac,
my throat an altar of wet ground, each sip
proof, each taste a howl for resurrection.
Bring it back, that moon, bring it back, his smile
an introduction, a soft mischief.
I don’t even think Dad would’ve minded
the Hennessy really, but I never told him.
Most beliefs we build on secrets.
When I say cancer runs
in my family, what I mean is
my father and his five siblings
couldn’t run fast enough.
What I mean is I ain’t been back
to my hometown since this uncle’s
funeral. What I mean is
Dad is gone. My uncle followed
like smoke. I’m being chased.
A monster’s hot breath
searches for my lungs.]
I get down face-to-gnarled-face
with the animal whose skin pops.
I can smell the pork
ripen like impending rain
on the summer air.
I summon the fire now.
Swallow it. Like the men & gods before me
[I stretch a rod through billowing
smoke to touch, to test, to measure
a prophecy against an unforgiving sky].
Copyright © 2020 by Junious Ward. This poem appeared in Sing Me a Lesser Wound (Bull City Press, 2020). Used with permission of the author.
may also kill them,
but she had no great plans
to live happily ever after.
Today is all she could manage,
that & the breathless sounds of Pres,
tamping down the day’s anarchy.
Twenty years earlier, her voice left her,
so she quit smoking. When it returned
it was vibrating like a dusty contralto.
Today she smells facts:
the air thick with tomorrow’s rain,
a slow leak in the basement.
The five shots of Jameson on his breath.
His undershirt brushed with
someone else’s perfume, a scent
she’d worn in high school—Shalimar.
Twenty years ago, on a dime,
she’d have cut or shot him to clear
the air, but today is not that day.
Today she looks at her body
with some hesitation. It’s late
in the morning & the gravy’s
gonna run thin tonight.
Will she miss the wanting, the having or the gone?
Copyright © 2022 by Linda Susan Jackson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 4, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
Why does the thin grey strand
Floating up from the forgotten
Cigarette between my fingers,
Why does it trouble me?
Ah, you will understand;
When I carried my mother downstairs,
A few times only, at the beginning
Of her soft-foot malady,
I should find, for a reprimand
To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs
On the breast of my coat; and one by one
I let them float up the dark chimney.
This poem is in the public doman.