Afterimages

I However the image enters its force remains within my eyes rockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve wild for life, relentless and acquisitive learning to survive where there is no food my eyes are always hungry and remembering however the image enters its force remains. A white woman stands bereft and empty a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson recalled in me forever like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep etched into my visions food for dragonfish that learn to live upon whatever they must eat fused images beneath my pain. II The Pearl River floods through the streets of Jackson A Mississippi summer televised. Trapped houses kneel like sinners in the rain a white woman climbs from her roof to a passing boat her fingers tarry for a moment on the chimney now awash tearless and no longer young, she holds a tattered baby's blanket in her arms. In a flickering afterimage of the nightmare rain a microphone thrust up against her flat bewildered words “we jest come from the bank yestiddy borrowing money to pay the income tax now everything's gone. I never knew it could be so hard.” Despair weighs down her voice like Pearl River mud caked around the edges her pale eyes scanning the camera for help or explanation unanswered she shifts her search across the watered street, dry-eyed “hard, but not this hard.” Two tow-headed children hurl themselves against her hanging upon her coat like mirrors until a man with ham-like hands pulls her aside snarling “She ain't got nothing more to say!” and that lie hangs in his mouth like a shred of rotting meat. III I inherited Jackson, Mississippi. For my majority it gave me Emmett Till his 15 years puffed out like bruises on plump boy-cheeks his only Mississippi summer whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie as a white girl passed him in the street and he was baptized my son forever in the midnight waters of the Pearl. His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year when I walked through a northern summer my eyes averted from each corner's photographies newspapers protest posters magazines Police Story, Confidential, True the avid insistence of detail pretending insight or information the length of gash across the dead boy's loins his grieving mother's lamentation the severed lips, how many burns his gouged out eyes sewed shut upon the screaming covers louder than life all over the veiled warning, the secret relish of a black child's mutilated body fingered by street-corner eyes bruise upon livid bruise and wherever I looked that summer I learned to be at home with children's blood with savored violence with pictures of black broken flesh used, crumpled, and discarded lying amid the sidewalk refuse like a raped woman's face. A black boy from Chicago whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi testing what he'd been taught was a manly thing to do his teachers ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone in the name of white womanhood they took their aroused honor back to Jackson and celebrated in a whorehouse the double ritual of white manhood confirmed. IV “If earth and air and water do not judge them who are we to refuse a crust of bread?”