Kwame Dawes

South Carolina, c.1950 You got that clean waistcoat, the bright white of a well-tailored shirt, you got those loose-as-sacks slacks and some spit-polished shoes, and you know, whether you are looking like money, or about to take a stroll, to tilt that hat like you own the world; yeah, smoke your pipe, roll your tobacco, and hold loose as authority, your muscles, lithe and hard; and every so often, when you feel the urge, you reach into the waist pocket and pull out that watch on its chain, then look in the sky and say Gonna be a cold one when it come, like God gave you that fancy clock to tell the future. These are the easy boys of the goodly South; waiting for what is out of frame to happen: the sheriff with his questions, the paddy wagon, the chain gang, the weight of the world. Waiting, with such delicate dignity, fickle as the seasonal sky.

For Rosalie Richardson I am a tornado child. I come like a swirl of black and darken up your day; I whip it all into my womb, lift you and your things, carry you to where you've never been, and maybe, if I feel good, I might bring you back, all warm and scared, heart humming wild like a bird after early sudden flight. I am a tornado child. I tremble at the elements. When thunder rolls my womb trembles, remembering the tweak of contractions that tightened to a wail when my mother pushed me out into the black of a tornado night. I am a tornado child, you can tell us from far, by the crazy of our hair; couldn't tame it if we tried. Even now I tie a bandanna to silence the din of anarchy in these coir-thick plaits. I am a tornado child born in the whirl of clouds; the center crumbled, then I came. My lovers know the blast of my chaotic giving; they tremble at the whip of my supple thighs; you cross me at your peril, I swallow light when the warm of anger lashes me into a spin, the pine trees bend to me swept in my gyrations. I am a tornado child. When the spirit takes my head, I hurtle into the vacuum of white sheets billowing and paint a swirl of color, streaked with my many songs.

After Alfred Stieglitz Not so much the missing of things but the nostalgia of colors, their music, the ordinary revelation of a family’s life caught in the flop and dance, a jig, if you will, of their layers, outer and inner skins, the secret things so close to the body, the taste, the salt and sweet of blood, and shit, and piss, and then, rinsed and scrubbed, leaving beneath the astringent scent of soap a musky marker of self for strays to smell or imagine as they walk past the parade of the living on taut lines, propped by poles with nails for a hook, above the startling green of grass and hedge, the barefaced concrete steps, the sky, inscrutable as a wall; this is what one carries as a kind of sweetness — the labor of brown hands, elbow-deep in suds, the rituals of cleansing, the humility of a darning or a frayed crotch, the dignity of cleanliness, the democracy of truth, the way we lived our lives in the open.

It was Christmastime, the balloons needed blowing, and so in the evening we sat together to blow balloons and tell jokes, and the cool air off the hills made me think of coffee, so I said, “Coffee would be nice,” and he said, “Yes, coffee would be nice,” and smiled as his thin fingers pulled the balloons from the plastic bags; so I went for coffee, and it takes a few minutes to make the coffee and I did not know if he wanted cow’s milk or condensed milk, and when I came out to ask him, he was gone, just like that, in the time it took me to think, cow’s milk or condensed; the balloons sat lightly on his still lap.