A Bondage Nocturne
In darkness / empirical evidence underhand / a fingertip rubs black / but not ink.
A porcelain doll / he squints and thinks. / Drags a thumb across yellow English teeth.
A tug of war / with ownership rites. / A girl fears a feral man / who talks
abed narration / whispering temptress / while her eyes stammer back neophyte.
While her eyes stammer back neophyte / [he] whispers temptress. / Talks
abed narration. / A girl fears a feral man / with ownership rites; / a tug of war
under yellow English overbite. / Dragging a thumb / he squints and thinks / a porcelain doll black
but not ink. / A fingertip rubs / empirical evidence underhand / in darkness.
Branching
The stomachs of daughters erupt
like burls on stalky trees.
Within a body, a sacred whorl curls
outside it, a kettle whistles steam.
You branched her where I could not reach / crossed good to annex evil
while I still parted hair for braids / plowing lines from nape to brow.
Chills quake a slave mother’s heart
for what happens beyond her gaze.
Her girl fourteen, “Yellow” Milly fifteen
singled out under the planter’s mien.
“To mulatto” v: a ritual distillation
removing color and taint
from plantation bait
budding yet another beige slave.
A Meditation on the Toppling of the Confederate Statue “Silent Sam”
(UNC Campus 1913-2018)
Sun-glazed statue too hot to climb
little orphaned rebel whistling
the Old South will rise. Collective whiplash,
when a woman lies sprawled beneath a grill;
in Charlottesville Nazis bear gruesome grins.
Sun-glazed statue too hot to climb
cooked up in America’s kitchen over time.
The metonymy of warfare: a lad and gun,
a whiplashed slave, the Old South’s son.
From the stairs of the Wilson Library
I spy ribbons of Do Not Cross tape
and one less sun-glazed statue to climb.
I reopen a sealed wound, the files of slavery,
each day a reckoning with ancestry
and whip-smart visions of the Old South’s demise.
More news of another blackface moment,
Virginia Gov’nr caught culturally misspoken.
Sun-glazed statues circumventing time
still taunting freedom with the Old South will rise.
- Three Poems - November 30, 2020
