OLD BOY & LIFE STORY {2 Personal History Poems about Racism in the American South}
Old Boy,
swallow your bullets
let the lead
sit in your belly
that weight like an anchor
holding a Bloated wood hull
Blood-swollen decks
right offshore, right offshore...
You old boys, with fat wagging tongues
and shotgun shells thumbs
your backroom meetings
dirty hands, salt of the earth
my ass, you chew bones and spit blood
caught up under your nails.
You old boys - - don’t think for a second
that I don’t know you.
I came from you.
Old Boy, don’t you burn no churches ’round here
don’t you burn no crosses
because I know who you are.
I came from you.
All the sheets in the world can’t hide the truth
of who you are.
I can see right through.
You’re pink and soft, trembling and damp.
You’re scared, Old Boy.
You’ve always been scared.
So, you just swallow those bullets that you’ve been saving up
in the name of your own daddy
in the name of your own greatgrands
and the slow death
of the world they taught you to believe in.
You just let that lead sit there in your belly
like the weight of everything you came from,
everything I came from.
Better yet, throw those bullets out into the river
with your own sad, ruined body
and listen to the sound you make
breaking the surface
setting all those old ghosts free.
To tell you her life story,
she’d crawl under that low table,
tuck into a ball,
duck walk crawl,
lay down flat-bellied
on the nubbed-out carpet
Smelling dirt and plastic,
the cold of the concrete in the floor seeps up.
She’d tell about watching
small hands fidget,
rising and falling from tabletop to chair
elbows pressed close to bodies
and feet hooked ‘round the legs of chairs,
scuffing, rolling toes.
Air too warm,
like sleeping breath.
Thick buzz of sound and light,
making tired,
voices, thin windows in the corner
green grass between buildings,
hard look of brick.
Nothing at home was made of brick
except the bottom part
of her great-grandmother’s house
and old fallen chimneys out in the woods,
from people that’d been there before,
after the other people who had been there.
You felt quiet
still and cool in the yellow white light
the cinder block room
eyelashes curled up silky and black
butterfly mouth, proboscis
a word you’d never heard, did not know
skin, the river bank
right hand was resting on the edge of the table
thumb feeling out the line from top to side,
the formic seam
some pages flat and silent
Adult voice
droning layer in the air
heavy over the room of round tables
Your hand drops to the edge of the chair,
under the table, into the shade
feel along the hard line
lean the body forward, hold to the cold
silvery leg
The hand began a crawling toward,
nervous animal, under the table
only a foot away
surprising how easy it is
for hands to find one another,
familiar clasp, palm across palm
fingerprints like the river we all grew up on
hot and dry, the dock railing in the summer sun, blanched
dark water in the undershade
same color as you.
There’s no way she could tell,
and no reason she’d need to,
because you felt it, too
the cold of that grasp,
adult hand like air conditioning
smooth and bloodless
the pulling the warm creatures curled together
up into the bright of the room above the table
lifting the holding hands like some dead thing,
some sad thing.
“You will not,”
voice from behind, from above,
before they knew what was happening,
hands still clasped together,
dumb and silent in the air,
because what can a child’s fingers speak,
“hold hands with,”
wrists encircled,
a swift outward pull, uncoupling the grasp
breaking the hold
set the hands firmly onto the table,
issue the declaration
that tells the story of who they are,
“little white girls.”
To tell you her life story,
she’d have to crawl down on the floor,
low down on her hands and knees,
and tell you that she knows:
This isn’t her life story,
in the way that it is yours.