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Your black coat is a door
in the storm. The snow
we don’t mention
clings to your boots & powders
& puffs. & poof. Goes.
Dust of the fallen. Right here
at home. The ache
of someone gone-missing. Walk it off
like a misspoken word.
Mound of snow. Closed door.
I could open it.
Or maybe just, you know—
brush it off.
Then what? The snow
on the other side. The sound
of what I know & your, no, inside it.
| I hesitate invoking that my daughter's mouth not her first vanity she tastes & smoothes her chin this way & that, bones replacing the fallen. it repairs itself: two forming new words: brushing past What is the tongue- between trauma & Incident & Think There is so much to fear. & now my second-born, brush, he says, |
|
Four tickets left, I let her go—
Firstborn into a hurricane.
I thought she escaped
The floodwaters. No—but her
Head is empty of the drowned
For now—though she took
Her first breath below sea level.
Ahhh awe & aw
Mama, let me go—she speaks
What every smart child knows—
To get grown you unlatch
Your hands from the grown
& up & up & up & up
She turns—latched in the seat
Of a hurricane. You let
Your girl what? You let
Your girl what?
I did so she do I did
so she do so—
Girl, you can ride
A hurricane & she do
& she do & she do & she do
She do make my river
An ocean. Memorial,
Baptist, Protestant birth—my girl
Walked away from a hurricane.
& she do & she do & she do & she do
She do take my hand a while longer.
The haunts in my pocket
I’ll keep to a hum: Katrina was
a woman I knew. When you were
an infant she rained on you & she
do & she do & she do & she do
Nobody straightens their hair anymore.
Space trips & limited air supplies will get you conscious quick.
My shea-buttered braids glow planetary
as I turn unconcerned, unburned by the pre-take-off bother.
“Leave it all behind,” my mother’d told me,
sweeping the last specs of copper thread from her front porch steps &
just as quick, she turned her back to me. Why
had she disappeared so suddenly behind that earthly door?
“Our people have made progress, but, perhaps,”
she’d said once, “not enough to guarantee safe voyage
to the Great Beyond,” beyond where Jesus
walked, rose, & ascended in the biblical tales that survived
above sprocket-punctured skylines &
desert-dusted runways jeweled with wrenches & sheet metal scraps.
She’d no doubt exhale with relief to know
ancient practice & belief died hard among the privileged, too.
Hundreds of missions passed & failed, but here
I was strapped in my seat, anticipating—what exactly?
Curved in prayer or remembrance of a hurt
so deep I couldn’t speak. Had that been me slammed to the ground, cuffed,
bulleted with pain as I danced with pain
I couldn’t shake loose, even as the cops aimed pistols at me,
my body & mind both disconnected
& connected & unable to freeze, though they shouted “freeze!”
like actors did on bad television.
They’d watched & thought they recognized me, generic or bland,
without my mother weeping like Mary,
Ruby, Idella, Geneava, or Ester stunned with a grief
our own countrymen refused to see, to
acknowledge or cease initiating, instigating, &
even mocking in the social networks,
ignorant frays bent and twisted like our DNA denied
but thriving and evident nonetheless—
You better believe the last things I saw when far off lifted
were Africa Africa Africa
Africa Africa Africa Africa Africa...
& though it pained me to say it sooner:
the unmistakable absence of the Great Barrier Reef.