Thylias Moss

Ultimately improved by it: slant light hitting his prison obliquely near the state bird’s pointed head accentuated crest, the black-ringed bill from which wheat-wheat-wheat-wheat from which whoit cheer , whoit cheer ; cheer - cheer-cheer inspired Ronald Cotton to listen as in his head, the solitary cardinal indulged in snails which seemed like polished fossils of trophy hog tails (after prize butchery) that Ronald was able to recall, his hair a mess of replicas of them as industrious as the state whose success was poultry & eggs tobacco & soybeans as well as convictions: None as tightly knit as Jennifer’s (not even the state flag) that she could identify Cotton that cotton’s taking on appearances other than burst white of a dense localized haze from which to weave memory, following pink-petaled start, rather a satellite dish of a flower, pollen/sensor- studded antenna protruding from the center undeniably; the jury couldn’t acquit Cotton of its role in documenting and altering Jennifer’s history, many lives changed as result of consequences, sensors that boast duality of receptor and transmitter: witness: insects give and take, taint what is put out, taken in; mix it up so that interrelatedness spreads and the understandable error of metaphor becomes less erroneous over time: eleven years in prison, innocence locked up, protected although in prison, it resembled something else. If Cotton strained, he could see the top of a Ferris wheel on the horizon just a possible segment of a rainbow the length of a chain of cardinal feathers even though it wasn’t that at all. The eye witnesses all the time, even the unseeing eye is turned toward a focus on black, saturation dense as conviction; the eye processes, pulls in whole vista to a retinal speck of convergence which is to say there is some Cotton in Poole, some connection, independent shared participation in cold beer, occasional cards turkey-spread in the right hand without knowing the other sank into the seat at the cinema the same way and sampled Funnel cake at the state fair within a week of each other and more than that in common: both being men and convicted for what men really can and really do, do. Including sometimes confessions and apologies; cash reparations after the innocence is free to extend its parameters to unlocked doors, be an oversized over-zealous white bird floating down the aisle, its cottony haze lifted in order to kiss and marry Ronald’s calm delight in being able to take his time leave his longshoreman’s mark on ships that take some of him to any port in the world: durable goods such as the DNA whose precision detects human exactitude, and could build as many Ronalds as time would permit something Jennifer now desperately wants to do, restoring what was lost because it was like something else, because the fact of similarity is compelling, convincing; if connections could not be made, there’d be no havens, no fugitive status lost to fusion, no links to God, no human murmurings whose constant echoes are also the gentle silvery hum of fans praying over computer motors to cool them and also mimic motion of small wings amplified to make sound in the distance much like the electric razor preparing a head on death row clean as a light bulb. Ronald was prepared to be believed; he saw the quiet manner of his long days in court as evidence of his rationality and contemplativeness such as befits clergy; a potential propensity for order, mercy, the steadiness required to dispense blessings mostly on the undeserving without emotion or judgment selfishness or preference while he was being judged guilty for lack of emotion, for Jennifer’s incontrovertible emotional insistence on Cotton’s being the one—she had to finger him to be comfortable within her survival. No way to mistake to ever forget details documented in memory, the event relived to the point that it resculpted her brain into a Cottony bust (he was there to be the perfect model) whose reality floated away in a Poole, as only the reflection of Cotton identified as source. A situation also called (must-have) moonlight. Here’s the new & improved Cotton: eleven years in the making; enough time served to anger to ruin it; at that same room’s temperature it became doubt of clemency, pardon: peculiar butter that erupted as gratefulness for the miracle of absolute exoneration when his impossibility as rapist was proven. Even Cotton conceded that the composite sketch bore a just resemblance to Cotton, displayed a metaphor for men like Cotton, the seeds of capability in the structure of the face, the human repertoire that includes Cotton who softly consents to meet Jennifer when she asks him to funnel her regret and apologies deep into himself, accepting that she meant no malice toward him but toward the perpetrator whom many men resemble, all brothers, family of man resemblance; Cotton’s own daughter, Cotton’s own wife could be in a similar position; no offense taken, captivated by the beauty of Jennifer; her superior logic refusing to let the crime against her silence her; as sure, as certain, as dazzling about speaking up about mistaking Cotton for Poole as she was in identifying in the lineup the closest thing there to Poole the best available, the incredible likeness that memory seized, filling gaps in the recollected Poole with Cotton’s particulars. She felt better in her cotton- touched skin. Metaphor is a form of forgiveness; a short rope of it knots-up those that can’t come together any other way into being defined by the other. Strange and estranged pairings give rise to mutable truth that can yield to both dawn and twilight demands that things be seen differently. Jennifer in moonlight instead of being illuminated moon whose face was also in Emmett Till’s way, but this generation of Jennifer has another side home late after a day of good faith in which she and Cotton team up at a church to speak up about doubt as less a shadow than certainty. Memory is as accurate as metaphor, an overlay that always fits something, that like the purest most sparkling water is too naïve not to submit to any vessel into which it’s poured. Just to be guzzled. Perhaps the vessel in which cotton becomes a pool in which North Carolina is shaped like an embryo: Humanity still on the brink of infancy.

My mother’s named for places, not Sandusky that has wild hair soliciting the moon like blue-black clouds touring. Not Lorain with ways too benevolent for lay life. Ashtabula comes closer, southern, evangelical and accented, her feet wide as yams. She’s Florida Missouri, a railroad, sturdy boxcars without life of their own, filled and refilled with what no one can carry. You just can’t call somebody Ravenna who’s going to have to wash another woman’s bras and panties, who’s going to wear elbow-length dishwater to formal gigs, who’s going to have to work with her hands, folding and shuffling them in prayer.

Therefore, no more recounting of dreams, a routine thing that bores with expectations of invention, unfiltered non sequiturs, unusual embraces only from the practiced young woman who everyday remembers being a bride, she is changing behind that white curtain Leora fifteen again experiencing prematurely the pure suckling of a baby fifteen with a virgin desire for pure suckling something to do with jasmine with jasmine tea existing only without accident It blooms while Leora sleeps when she sleeps at night and it is also dark for the jasmine four hours of tea sucking on blossoms, Cestrum nocturnum like colostrums: the earliest secretions, and then only milk from mother —there it is seven times over jasmine bath after jasmine bath till the tea can get no better highest grade as stasis all As gets so boring, ka-put to the test of innovation all the right answers Leora sees herself mermaid, eel, tiger fish from waist down form-fitting skirt of winks under that bonefish or ladyfish profile: tail fins already split, caught in transition from legs to fin hybrid mutant bastard mestizo mulatto masala mule mix mutt hm/bm/mmmmm watered down (jasmine bath tea) spiked (jasmine bath tea) stands taller on tips of split tail fin ps: pastiche, salmagundi when all dressed up Leg and fin share custody so young men sacrifice only below the belt to please her many wounded soldiers her company From now on storming the beaches rocks already aftermath, the breaking of dozens of sphinxes the taming of sandstone lions and griffins, gargoyles Leora takes to breast anything capable of sucking and being filled, no ban on leeches and vipers that stick out like misplaced overdeveloped hairs and while in position, her free hand shaves the heads of Medusa’s children screaming for more nursing with her eyes closed, her free handy blade, sharpened life line The liquids of history therefore tend to ferment; the beverages for walks down memory lane therefore become pungent cheeses and wines, the odes to bitterness and sweetness happen. This is also desirable. Taste depends on how the glass tilts, how tongue curls. What’s difficult is maintaining gaps as gaps. A sustainable nothingness. But something enters. Sustainable nothingness looks like a niche. Ghosts and spirits of what’s been lost. A young woman looks over her shoulder. Close watching of what’s fading does not mean the change from substance to spirit would be observed. On the tippy-tips of split tail fin looking over her shoulder a long line for the nurse, exceptional business, nonstop nursing and the milk won’t stop, years are at the end of the line. Pull the plug on a nearby respirator (how on earth?) (don’t assume location, location, location) the substance travels the line joins the community of electricity, colonies of gigantic storms on the sun and appearances in auroras that the mermaid sits under as under any canopy nonstop The spell of the tide tailored to make the one falling under its influence fall more willingly. It feels nothing like falling at all: Leora describes rehabilitation Sand sparkles remembering having been alive only once Leora’s eyes sparkle upon contact with crabs and their incredible redness that ought to teach her something about fire she does not know with top-heavy ways of knowing (the brain should travel the stations of the body, and one day the eyes and navel, when the eyes accompany the brain, line up in a row) —then a real reason for revision Dream on Accordingly, pureness of the situation milks its own purity Fantastic and looks disgusting (no matter where the eyes are—candidate for truth) but purity is still pure following such a milking The mermaid’s pregnancy has to be called immaculate after repeated searches for the limits. Lost without those. Pure. Last resort and best explanation for birth of a human baby from a mermaid without a human pelvis or womb. The best xrays cannot find them. Machines arrive on the beach and leave defective. Leora continues nursing her baby first in line The milk is pure. It does not need to be pasteurized. Makes                               (empty) no one ill. Nothing in it allows allergies. The chemistry                                       (empty) of the milk is pure.                                                                                         (empty) The molecules of the tabernacle of purity. (as if they are empty)                                                                  (nothing is right here) Law Flattened out they are like flattened tetrahedrons, probably are smashed pendulums now Leora blessed with impossibility of the usual kind of rape her own brand jasmine bath after jasmine bath without legs she does as much sitting as anyone who ever sat on a throne wheelchairs keep evolving

Snow White was nude at her wedding, she’s so white the gown seemed to disappear when she put it on. Put me beside her and the proximity is good for a study of chiaroscuro, not much else. Her name aggravates me most, as if I need to be told what’s white and what isn’t. Judging strictly by appearance there’s a future for me forever at her heels, a shadow’s constant worship. Is it fair for me to live that way, unable to get off the ground? Turning the tables isn’t fair unless they keep turning. Then there’s the danger of Russian roulette and my disadvantage: nothing falls from the sky to name me. I am the empty space where the tooth was, that my tongue rushes to fill because I can’t stand vacancies. And it’s not enough. The penis just fills another gap. And it’s not enough. When you look at me, know that more than white is missing.

A young black girl stopped by the woods, so young she knew only one man: Jim Crow but she wasn’t allowed to call him Mister. The woods were his and she respected his boundaries even in the absence of fence. Of course she delighted in the filling up of his woods, she so accustomed to emptiness, to being taken at face value. This face, her face eternally the brown of declining autumn, watches snow inter the grass, cling to bark making it seem indecisive about race preference, a fast-to-melt idealism. With the grass covered, black and white are the only options, polarity is the only reality; corners aren’t neutral but are on edge. She shakes off snow, defiance wasted on the limited audience of horse. The snow does not hypnotize her as it wants to, as the blond sun does in making too many prefer daylight. She has promises to keep, the promise that she bear Jim no bastards, the promise that she ride the horse only as long as it is willing to accept riders, the promise that she bear Jim no bastards, the promise to her face that it not be mistaken as shadow, and miles to go, more than the distance from Africa to Andover, more than the distance from black to white before she sleeps with Jim.

My ancestors weren’t hippies, cotton precluded fascination with flowers. I don’t remember communes, I remember ghettos. The riots were real, not products of hallucinogens. Free love had been at Redbones since black unemployment and credit saturation. The white women my mother cleaned for didn’t notice she had changed. I guess it was a small event, a resurrected African jumping out the gap in her front teeth. I guess it looked like a cockroach; that’s what she was supposed to have, not dignity. My mother just couldn’t get excited about the Beatles, those mops she swilled in ammonia everyday on their heads. Besides, she didn’t work like a dog but like a woman; they aren’t the same. The hair was growing long for the same reasons Pinocchio’s nose did. I can think only of a lesbian draping crepe paper chains over my head to make a black Rapunzel possible; that’s how a white woman tried to lift my burdens. At the time I didn’t reject her for being lesbian or white but for both burdens. That was when I didn’t want Ivory soap to be what cleaned me, made me presentable to society. All the suds I’d seen were white, they still are but who cares? I’m more interested in how soap dwindles in my hand, under the faucet. I’m old enough to remember blocks of ice, old enough or poor enough. I remember chipping away at it, broken glass all over the floor. Later in the riots, the broken glass of looting tattled how desperate people were to keep cool. There are roses now in my mother’s yard. Sometimes she cuts them, sets them in Pepsi bottles throughout her rooms. She is, I admit, being sentimental. Looting her heart. My father who planted them is gone. That mop in the corner is his cane growing roots.