I am the brick city,
red dirt gristle, skidding
the shoulders of my streets,
outside forty year old chicken fries,
where congregations of weathered
brothers in tattered breakers
clog their nostrils like project
plumbing, lambent eye and sniffing,
swilling on gin sips, pausing
only to whistle at a gleaming Caddie
pulling onto a tarmac lot
or whisk a sleeve across sheen-d
cashew lips, sucking the grease
of dark meats till the bones
are scraped clean;
I am the plaza stairwells,
where dark eyed hookers drink
themselves dead, nursing
the glass throats of eight
dollar handles, lifting skirt
hems to Suburban strangers,
silver to curb, the sweat shakes
and scrambled black shits
of two am skag cravings.
I am the sagging porch stoop,
where Kimsburough’s mulatto
doppelganger, sips blank brew,
bare handed, slapping, striated,
steel necks, beat-box-blues-ing,
hundred year hymnals
whisking the whip lashed backs
of illegals cross my state borders.
Welcome to my filthy, alphabet heart—
where sistas in Sunday suits and six story
hats, flood the tooth picked aisles
of Vietnamese hair shops
for bagfuls of Afro sheen
grease, and synthetic curls—
black, slick bodies, sliding South
at sundown in flight, down Shartel street
like a spoonful of melted margarine,
spilling back to the shake of shotgun homes.
We'll go to our graves wondering
what kept old Wright alive,
a noose fixed tightly around his neck
like a rattle snake seizing the pulse
of a deer mouse within its jaws.
Rumor says his Mama sucked the air
right out of that court room,
and releasing it three days later
howlin' into the calico print
of a pillow case, the same low
pitch moan a heifer makes
pushing out the blood slicked,
boney rump of a calf,
sawed every roof in Moss Point
cleanly in half, tearing that year's
cotton crop straight from the roots
and three hundred miles down
Route 66. Folks used to say
the family always had its ties
in dark things, Ruth's milky
cataract eyes caught everything
like two grease stained windows
peering down from an upstairs
attic. A little secret-
when Gerald was found dead in the marsh,
wasted as a Southern Comfort grin
and half his jaw shot off with a
45, Ruth just nodded
in the direction. As children we
would hold our breath passing
the sagging porch stoop of
their filthy shack, imagining her hacking
away at the circles of human
skulls or eating tablespoons of
soil gathered from fresh graves
like undercooked grits. A black
water child of the devil
done and seen stranger things
than his soul pulled back
from hell's front door,
so we weren't too surprised
when Wright's neck didn't
give way like the wood of a
black gum tree, dried
to burn fast, and the cream
colored curds of Ruth's eyes
wide open, smiling like she was
chewing on a piece of honeycomb.
Father Moon stumbled home
one night, grease lit in the cheeks
and polished off, like two drums
of hammered metal or the silver
knife marks of minnows.
Dizzy on puddles of moon shine
Moon waned sickle, spitting
up soft matter on a stark mattress
the dark space around him
whisking orbits, like a fork
breaking into the greasy
phlegm of egg yolks.
The moon thought fondly of
his six thousand daughters,
born of the roiling New England
crab bakes of adaptable Cancers.
Clumsy. Sidelong, crawling
on tight ropes of salted sand-
beneath the silver sliver of the moon,
sliding forever in and out of their lives
like a rigged nickel, gambling
in the tight crevice of a coin slot.
“Tenacious,” slurred Moon
to describe his daughters;
formed alone in the remnants
of their fathers’ after birth:
clots of molten dust, the umbilical
cord of gaseous matter
snaked round their shells
like the permanent gouges
fingernails leave behind,
scraping away at the patina
of old wood.
Driving home the moon wanes
silver crescent, the steel tracks
bright as birch bark
in the black overgrowth.
Shivering, my dogs howl
for the dirt, loosened from the shoulders
of the road and Dylan's molasses voice
like two radios whistling round
the same lost wave length.
I can feel my age dragged
through the cracked windows,
mint and stale Marlboro smoke
stoking the slick, pink walls
of a mouth I once loved
in the aftertaste of the ice
edged air. "The Times are
a-changin' -"
but I can still remember
Corrine O' Sullivan's lips
red as blisters in a crease,
and the white paint
fraying in the runnels of
her daddy's truck bed,
the red-rust metal, cold
beneath our blanket-
her hair splayed across
my chest the same way
school children clumsily trace
turkey cut outs from construction
paper at Thanksgiving.
How much meaner the Main Road
than the dark hair collapsing over
her flannel dressed shoulders
when she stood to leave.
Jasmine Smith studied English Education at the University of Central Oklahoma with an emphasis in Native American Cultural Studies and Creative Writing.
She is greatly inspired by the works of Aime Cesaire, Linda Hogan, and Li Young Lee for their lyrical quality and the attention to their diverse ethnic identities. Her work reflects her strong attachment to her African American and Creole identity, the South, and to the mythos that weaves itself into even the most mundane routines of everyday life.
ISSUE:
F A L L
2012
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