Black, Poured Directly into the Wound

Prairie winds blaze through her tumbled belly, and Emmett’s red yesterdays refuse to rename her any kind of mother. A pudge-cheeked otherwise, sugar whistler, her boy is (through the fierce clenching mouth of her memory) a grays-and-shadows child.Listen. Once she was pretty. Windy hues goldened her skin. She was pert, brown-faced, in every wide way the opposite of the raw, screeching thing chaos has crafted. Now, threaded awkwardly, she tires of the sorries, the Lawd have mercies. Grief’s damnable tint is everywhere, darkening days she is no longer aware of. She is gospel revolving, repeatedly emptied of light, pulled and caressed, cooed upon by strangers, offered pork and taffy. Boys in the street stare at her, then avert their eyes, as if she killed them all, shipped every one into the grips of Delta. She sits, her chair carefully balanced on hell’s edge, and pays for sanity in kisses upon the conjured forehead of her son. Beginning with A, she recites (angry, away, awful) the alphabet of a world gone red. Coffee scorches her throat as church ladies drift about her room, black garb sweating their hips, filling cups with tap water, drinking, drinking in glimpses of her steep undoing. The absence of a black roomful of boy is measured, again, again. In the clutches of coffee, red-eyed, Mamie knows their well-meaning murmur. One says She a mama, still. Once you have a chile, you always a mama.