Poems in the Draft Folder, or Thinking About Juneteenth...
I rarely post any of my original work because it always feels unfinished. But here's a poem I've been working on for a bit that I dusted off to review after reading Coates' "The Case For Reparations" and today, after looking at images of enslaved blacks, told that they were free today, 149 years ago today in Galveston, Texas before word would reach Jackson, Tennessee on August 8, 1865. My people are from Jackson.
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Blood on the leaves (working title)
I’m thinking about my cousin’s abundance that hires
A white comedy improv troop to entertain
The descendants of William Crawford Crymes,
And how the president is black, and my uncle isn’t here
To witness his reign, the absence of his older brother, who argued with all of us
About how many ears of corn one stalk would yield.
And my grandmother’s hands are smooth.
She didn’t have to clean up after white folks
Like her mother. She bathed, drew blood, and wiped shit off the bottoms
of the insane for nearly 30 years at the Milwaukee County Hospital.
Granny’s white polyester skirt filled a wire hanger
dangling from the shower’s head-- a grayish stain adorned
its center like a watermark.
Her washed out white stockings draped over the shower’s railing
dripped overhead to my fresh pressed scalp.
I always liked it best when granny pulled my resistant hair
to the sharp wiry, yet flowy, cornsilk flatness
over my mother’s shaky wrist
And my father’s heavy handedness
that burned the tip of my right earlobe to an iridescent coal
(if coal could hold light in its cooled state).
The onliest time, she once told me, that she was called nigger
was by a mad eyed pearl and olive patient in the psych ward
Whose banshee scream shuttered walls,
But only scraped at the back of the brain of the heavily
Medicated ones whose sad cow eyes
were vaguely aware of some other’s sad cow eyes
looking back at them shuffling them between the community room
And their own closed cells.
In this story,
Granny says the woman yelled,
‘I am Serbian! I am Serbian!’
and that locked identity in a sea of white walls, and white skirts,
and white stockings, and white gowns and white lights
and my granny somehow
soothes that hysteria with
her brown eyes, her brown hair, her brown lips
and her pink tongue
and says she knows.
And how quiet it all got so suddenly.
The sound of her own name hanging in the air between them
The woman would never call her nigger again.
And my grandmother isn’t humorless
when she tells me this story.
And these three middle age white dudes are goading us
to yell out suggestions.
There are 3 white people in my family now.
We yell the most ratchet things:
Toenail clippings
Weave hair
Farts
Toe jam
And we watch my cousin’s daughter narrate the scene
Of three corn fed, beer bellied white men try to entertain
the descendants of William Crawford Crymes
150 years after his father’s emancipation.
My crackhead (ex) cousin yells out ‘bugatti’ and we cackle
At the improbable and blackness of it all.
My dress is made of cotton
that I’m not sure is made in America
But my grandmother’s hands are smooth,
Because she only picked cotton when she was child,
And the cuts from the teeth of that plant
have long since healed.
And my cousin’s daughter has her father’s eyes
And she is the color of malted milk
in a cotton dress with colored polka dots
Her smile shines brightly
at her brown mother and her white father
And my grandmother’s hands are smooth
Soft as the fat of a baby’s underarm
My aunt is a white republican from Iowa.
she makes the most-wicked brownies,
Marbled with caramel and marshmellow.
And I here think,
I’ve been running from the south
and the white heat of it
The dark humidity of it,
Shadows and canopies of magnolia trees
When I tell my grandmother
about comments I get from racists online,
She tells me of how a black man
Who was asked to work on his scheduled day off to pick cotton
