Evie Shockley

he’s as high as a georgia pine, my father’d say, half laughing. southern trees as measure, metaphor. highways lined with kudzu-covered southern trees. fuchsia, lavender, white, light pink, purple : crape myrtle bouquets burst open on sturdy branches of skin-smooth bark : my favorite southern trees. one hundred degrees in the shade: we settle into still pools of humidity, moss- dark, beneath live oaks. southern heat makes us grateful for southern trees. the maples in our front yard flew in spring on helicopter wings. in fall, we splashed in colored leaves, but never sought sap from these southern trees. frankly, my dear, that’s a magnolia, i tell her, fingering the deep green, nearly plastic leaves, amazed how little a northern girl knows about southern trees. i’ve never forgotten the charred bitter fruit of holiday’s poplars, nor will i : it’s part of what makes me evie :  i grew up in the shadow of southern trees.

the 14-year-old girl was treated like: (a) a grown woman. (b) a grown man. the bikini-clad girl was handled by the cop like: (a) a prostitute. (b) a prostitute by her pimp. the girl was slung to the ground like: (a) a sack of garbage into a dumpster. (b) somebody had something to prove. the girl’s braids flew around her head like: (a) helicopter blades. (b) she’d been slapped. the black girl was pinned to the ground like: (a) an amateur wrestler in a professional fight. (b) swimming in a private pool is a threat to national security. the girl’s cries sounded like: (a) the shrieks of children on a playground. (b) the shrieks of children being torn from their mothers. the protesting girl was shackled like: (a) a criminal. (b) a runaway slave. liken it or not —mckinney, texas, june 2015

when the cultivators of corpses are busy seeding plague across vast acres of the land, choking schools and churches in the motley toxins of grief, breeding virile shoots of violence so soon verdant even fools fear to tread in their wake :: when all known tools of resistance are clutched in the hands of the vile like a wilting bouquet, cut from their roots, while the disempowered slice smiles across their own faces and hide the wet knives in writhing thickets of hair for future use :: when breathing in the ashen traces of dreams deferred, the detonator’s ticking a queer echo that amplifies instead of fading :: when there- you-are is where-you-were and the sunset groans into the atlantic, setting blue fire to dark white bones.

“what, to the american slave, is your 4th of july?” —frederick douglass i.  august 1619 arrived in a boat, named and unnamed, twenty, pirated away from a portuguese slaver, traded for victuals. drowned in this land of fresh, volatile clearings and folk with skin like melted cowrie shells. soon shedding servitude. soon reaping talents sown on african soil. after indenture, christians, colonists. not english, but not yet not-white. antoney and isabella, whose marriage stretched the short shadows of america’s early afternoon into the dusky reaches of evening, whose conjugal coitus spent first the choice coin of africa on rough virginian citizenship, baptized their son, william, into the church of england. ii.  december 1638 fear must have shuddered into boston on the backs of true believers — men and women of an unadorned god — deep in the heavy black fabric of their coats and dresses like a stench. black a mark of pride they wore as if branded, never dreaming they could take it off. envy anticipated their advent. glittered at them, settling in, from the knife blades of the massachusetts. seeped like low-pitched humming from the fur lining the natives’ warm blankets. but desire docked in 1638. in from the harbor flocked a people whose eyes sparked like stars, even near death. whose hair promised a mixture of cotton and river water and vines, a texture the fingers ached for. who wholly inhabited a skin the midnight color of grace that clarified the hue of the pilgrims’ woolen weeds. fear and envy claimed pride of place, put desire’s cargo to good use. iii.  march 1770 that night, crispus attucks dreamed. how he’d attacked his would-be master and fled in wild-eyed search of self- determination. discarded virginia on the run and ran out of breath in salt-scented boston. found there, if not freedom, fearlessness. a belief in himself that rocked things with the uncontrolled power of the muscular atlantic, power to cradle, to capsize. awoke angry again at the planter who’d taken him for a mule or a machine. had shouldered a chip the size of concord by the time the redcoat dared to dare him. died wishing he’d amassed such revolutionary ire in virginia. died dreaming great britain was the enemy. iv.  july 4th: last but not least 17-, 18-, 19-76 and still this celebration’s shamed with gunpowder and words that lie like martyrs in cold blood. africa’s descendents, planting here year after year the seeds of labor, sweating bullets in this nation’s warts, have harvested the rope, the rape, the ghetto, the cell, the fire, the flood, and the blame for you-name-it. so today black folks barbeque ribs and smother the echoes of billie’s strange song in sauces. drink gin. gladly holiday to heckle speeches on tv. pretend to parade. turn out in droves for distant detonations, chaos, controlled as always, but directed away from us tonight. stare into the mirror of the sky at our growing reflection, boggled by how america gawks at the passing pinpoints of flame, but overlooks the vast, ebony palm giving them shape.

you put this pen in my hand and you take the pen from my hand. the night before the full moon the moon seems full. what is missing is a dark hungry sickle, the sliver of shadow eating us up inside. after the mountains breathe their mint-and-sorrow green against the long summer sky, they burst into hot october laughter, lighting the horizon with citrus, rust, and blood. you put this knife in my hand. we pull. we meet as oceans come together, heaving against and clinging across our salt watery boundary. we approach endlessly like two rails of one track, tied in a parallel that promises our eyes to merge, someplace far off in the distance. you put this feather in my palm. my fingers close around flight.

And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could.Asia Graves looks straight ahead as she calmly recalls the night a man paid $200 on a Boston street to have sex with her. The remembrance fills me with sorrow and shame.“If you want attention and you see that you’re getting it, you just follow your feelings,” senior Araceli Figueroa, 17, said. “It’s sad.” It pains me to tell you of it; but I have promised to tell you the truth, and I will do it honestly, let it cost me what it may.A plague more commonly associated with other countries has been taking young victims in the United States, one by one.

carnegie hall, october 19, 2014 beauty eludes me, usually. i soak up the lush red, violet, indigo blooms abdullah ibrahim’s cool fingers pluck from the keyboard’s bed, but bring to these ‘rooms’ (stanzas forged from replayed past as today’s not-news) no solacing bouquets. my weeds? i conjure rough green to rupture from seeds so furious they bleed — or, grieving, raise crabgrass and blue notes, peppered with rust, where he grows flowers. yes, i tend my plants incisively : no phrase that droops or wants out of the sun survives long. but the rest run wild, flush vivid, throw shade, deluge fruit, lavishly express their dissonant root.

dreaming the lives of the ancestors, you awake, justly terrified of this world: you could dance underwater and not get wet, you hear, but the pressure is drowning you: you’re awake, but just terrified of this world, where all solids are ice:underwater boogie, you hear, but the press sure is drowning you: the igbo were walking, not dancing: where all solids are ice,underwater boogie is good advice, because they’re quick to melt: the igbo were straight up walking, not dancing: and you’ve still got to get through this life: take my advice, quickly: they’re melting: you could dance underwater and not get wet: and you’ve got to, to get through this life still dreaming the lives of the ancestors

we make midnight a maquette of the year: frostlight glinting off snow to solemnize the vows we offer to ourselves in near silence: the competition shimmerwise of champagne and chandeliers to attract laughter and cheers: the glow from the fireplace reflecting the burning intra-red pact between beloveds: we cosset the space of a fey hour, anxious gods molding our hoped-for adams with this temporal clay: each of us edacious for shining or rash enough to think sacrifice will stay this fugacious time: while stillness suspends vitality in balance, as passions struggle with passions for sway, the mind wends towards what’s to come: a callithump of fashions, ersatz smiles, crowded days: a bloodless cut that severs soul from bone: a long aching quiet in which we will hear nothing but the clean crack of our promises breaking.

wedged in the top branches, rain still sighing to earth as a dissolute sky dissolves, a mozambican woman turns mother, her water breaking loose to pool with the flood licking the trunk below, a country-sized puddle calls forth the child whose name, the mother vowed, would not be drowned, no matter how high she had to climb. my mother’s water washed her bare yellow bathroom tile many years ago, a diluvial warning of my struggle to arrive. we fought to get me out, and have been tugging at each other ever since, tethered by a cord that simply thickens when it’s cut. we descended then, thirsting, churning, not into the waters that hound the mozambican mother, baying her and her baby in the tree, but into that enduring ocean in which — as mother, daughter, or both — a woman’s only choices are drink or swim.