They say that his kind does not belong here. But he was rendered thus by a substance older than the rock of Gibraltar being ground to a fine dust and scattered to the four winds. Finally coalescing on this spot.
He burns on the corner with a borrowed cigarette unlit in his mouth. "Brother, you smoke?" he says through lips scorched and cracked. Dark as an iron skillet aged by naked flames. I stop, Marveling As kindling catches behind his eyes. "Nah, I don’t."
He eyes me as a mark and sparks leap from his tongue. … got a dollar, man? I just need one more to finish my PhD …" But his words are wasted. I have already been captivated by his hair erupting like breasted robins streaking across the bleeding edge of sunset; The blaze filling my eyes.
I give him a dollar, crumpling it into the basin of his cupped hands, Where it smolders to bone-ash amongst the fired stones of his fingers. "Thanks, man." he grins, mouth wide tongue splitting like a pomegranate. Steam rises from the crevice, ghosting him as he darts down the subway stairs.
Autumn is the scent balanced between asphalt and dying leaves. New England calls me home. A Nor’easter witches back a headstone, Casts time-polished bones for signs and points me to the city.
This is the time when clouds strangle sunlight to whisper, When creativity is throttled to a murmur. Streets are lean, pale mice stretching for burrows; muses curved fetal inside their jowls.
Beggars exhale tendriled dreams, stale to the touch.
My shadow has weighed me empty: A smokehouse filled with ghosts drying inspiration on the back of my tongue like tobacco leaves at harvest. New England has called me its home.
It is only a moment… before a horn cracks silence, And boughs stoked heavy with summer’s borrowed flame, Send leaves plowing downward in a violence of hush.
II. Affective: Washington, D.C 1985
Beggars exhale tendriled dreams, stale to the touch; A winter’s longing stitched above their eyes. When the buildings grant substance to shadows, you can’t walk the length of a block without hoarfrost as a companion.
Someone remembers how summer seemed locked in the clenched fist of a lump of coal.
Winter offers no apologies for the way air hangs dense; heavy as sin dangling from southern oak. The clouds, hushed as chameleons, slow descend frigid pillars of sky.
On the streets, the pickings are scarce. Pedestrians with necks bent to bone rarely notice a mass of humanity shivering, balanced on the line between here and not.
It’s almost magical, the way the homeless can coil around a corralled pocket of heat, no bigger than a hummingbird’s egg.
A sock-gloved hand swipes a stray drift off the top of a stolen shopping cart, the contempt almost palpable. No amount of ashen-white snow can camouflage a tin cup’s barren womb.
III. Disorder: Appalachia, NC 1964
Someone remembers how summer seemed locked in the clenched fist of a lump of coal. But that was in December, when the coal man’s swagger was a quaked rippling of dappled, white thunder. The dwindling sharpness of winter thinned his pockets, but would never thaw his contempt for us.
He held fast the secret of fire in our neighborhood and not even Prometheus could be so cocksure. Coal chutes were ebon whores he choked to whimpered protests, clanging their jaws shut afterwards. With us children, he deviled our every chance encounter. "The cops gonna arrest your brothas and sistas at the protest today. Throw their black asses in a cell way back in the jailhouse."
By evening, his words still ricocheted true in our heads.
Mike’s Delicatessen made sandwiches thick as come-all. Heavy enough to render tables swaybacked and bowlegged. But his was the only white-owned business on the block. Something in the wolf-lean melancholy of winter told us to rescind the dusky-hued amnesty we had granted his skin. The gunpowder and sweetness honeycombed into our bones had been sirened inert by too many sunless days.
One morning, a blue jay’s song slipped smelling salt under our skin. And where else was depression to go, but anger?
The police cocooned the store in nightsticked layers. Protesters encircled the mass, incubating it to a malignant cyst. We children stood, fingers hooked to white-knuckled clench, Gleaning truth through the links of the playground fence.
Silence.
An icicle fell in a summoning of now. A brick somersaulted through a spike of sunlight. A nightstick rounded into a hollow of flesh. On the delicatessen’s brick wall, slick, scarlet flowers began blooming. Bright as the summer leeches we burst between our fingers.
Uprooted
It took all our weight to drag the chain over the stump. My brother and I, heaving links large enough to strangle hope. The tractor hummed and screeched, hitched and began humming again. Smoke carving the blue morning to marble. Yesterday, we played King of the Hill on the stump’s weathered face, open to sun and stripped raw of emotion. Today, we played Judas with a kiss of iron. Grandfather feathered the clutch once to tighten the noose. The engine leaning into murder as a runner into the wind. I saw my grandfather; a bird riding the shoulder of Atlas. The worries of the world pushing them down into the soft ground. The chain began digging into wood. A lover's embrace gone shockingly wrong. In a final wrenching, the hollow sound of heart fabric ripping, the stump leaned over into the soil. Roots pulling from the earth like an infant stolen from the womb. I don't know what we expected to see. No secrets emerged, phoenix rising from an ashen grave. No wisdom imparted. Only the stump tilted skyward, balanced on an askew longing. We stood with our hands at our sides, eyes lost in the tremoring song of earth broken like a promise. Grandfather said it would be evening before we would cut it up for firewood. His voice quiet, reverent. Betraying the hope that whatever love had married root to earth, whatever life still clung to gasping roots Would have time to die before we laid axe to wood and released the spirit of rings generations old.
A history of hands cupped around a crescent of soil is where I’m from. (Picture the setting moon winking between saplings two years resurrected from fire) The opposite horizon is a birth glow of sunlight Lazarused by the Atlantic, Warming the belly of clouds rising like foundry smoke. But that was before we traded the horizon for the perfect shingles of our new neighborhood, carved from the wild like a bird shape pulled from wood. Corn and wheat were sown to concrete. Plowshares stagnated to flowerbeds. Horses sold to memory. We unhinged the moon, drug it behind our caravans, Hung it crooked in the sky above our prefab roofs. Believing we could pass down its meaning to our children as we had promised to do with our ancestral stories. Falling as locusts upon the opiate grasses of New Edens, we noticed neither the moon nor our history fading like the shrinking calluses of our hands.
