Three Poems
Soul Food
I know collard greens
sizzled down in lard.
Eatonville reared
six kids to a unit,
umber cabins in a row,
the kitchen making do.
ancestors say: grub on
cornbread, buttermilk,
stretch it, make it last.
from smokehouse scraps, a diet is made,
no clean white cuts of meat.
peanuts ground down, worked through,
same way, different south.
breadcrumbs and flour
holding the place of meat.
pork cutlets steaming,
settling into oil.
as a warning:
a generational line of
busted arteries and thick blood.
Galveston, 1865
I remember the brown catfish jumping
down by the creek where freedom first sounded real.
Flies humming beneath the brown roof,
rotten lilies bending in the heat,
mule wagons groaning through the dust
letting us know the jook house is near.
White pointed fins pressed through the mosquito netting,
circling slow as hunger.
She trades her Sunday pearls for clean water
and keeps rocking the baby anyway.
At the doorway
condensation gathered on church glasses,
women boiling pots long after midnight,
somebody mama screaming through the screen door.
Somebody always praying over poisoned things.
Every hour
the porch light shook against the dark,
somebody mama screaming through the screen door,
mill ash settling into the floorboards,
pipes coughing brown water through the night.
The noise ends quickly,
same way creek water goes still before a storm.
No trace of a commotion,
just catfish stirring beneath poisoned currents moving south.
Freedom kept arriving half-finished.
Mercy never sounded real in Flint.
La flor de canela (cinnamon flower)
My grandfather cracked eggs against our sickness
while saints watched from the bedroom wall.
Limeño evenings sweating through windows,
street walls plastered with chicha,
fertile hills and broken rivers carrying us home.
Eucalyptus burned low on the stove,
Palo Santo smoke curling through the house
like prayer refusing to leave the body.
Brown hands crossed our foreheads in secret,
Catholic mouths whispering old African warnings.
The magnolia blossomed anyway,
even after white hands touched my hair
and stitched glory into lies.