in our hands, we walk like sleepy soldiers
through Nicholtown, ringing bells, knocking on doors,
spreading the good news
of something better coming. Sometimes,
the people listen.
Sometimes, they slam their doors
or don’t open them at all. Or look sadly down at me
ribboned and starched, my face clean and shining
with oil, my words earnest as anything:
Good morning, I’m Sister Jacqueline and I’m here
to bring you some good news today.
Sometimes they give me a dime but won’t take
my Watchtower and Awake!
Sunday it’s Watchtower study at the Kingdom Hall,
two hours
of sitting and sitting and sitting.
Then Monday comes and the week starts
all over again.
ribbons
They are pale blue or pink or white.
They are neatly ironed each Saturday night.
Come Sunday morning, they are tied to the braids
hanging down past our ears.
We wear ribbons every day except Saturday
when we wash them by hand, Dell and I
side by side at the kitchen sink,
rubbing them with Ivory soap then rinsing them
beneath cool water.
Each of us
dreaming of the day our grandmother says
You’re too old for ribbons.
But it feels like that day will never come.
When we hang them on the line to dry, we hope
they’ll blow away in the night breeze
but they don’t. Come morning, they’re right
where we left them
gently moving in the cool air, eager to anchor us
to childhood.
two gods. two worlds
It’s barely morning and we’re already awake,
my grandmother in the kitchen ironing
our Sunday clothes.
I can hear Daddy coughing in his bed, a cough like
he’ll never catch his breath. The sound catches
in my chest as I’m pulling my dress
over my head. Hold my own breath
until the coughing stops. Still,
I hear him pad through the living room
hear the squeak of the front screen door and
know, he’s made it to the porch swing,
to smoke a cigarette.
My grandfather doesn’t believe in a God
that won’t let him smoke
or have a cold beer on a Friday night
a God that tells us all
the world is ending so that Y’all walk through this world
afraid as cats.
Your God is not my God, he says.
His cough moves through the air
back into our room where the light
is almost blue, the white winter sun painting it.
I wish the coughing would stop. I wish
he would put on Sunday clothes,
take my hand, walk with us
down the road.
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe
that everyone who doesn’t follow
God’s word will be destroyed in a great battle called
Armageddon. And when the battle is done
there will be a fresh new world
a nicer more peaceful world.
But I want the world where my daddy is
and don’t know why
anybody’s God would make me
have to choose.
what god knows
We pray for my grandfather
ask God to spare him even though
he’s a nonbeliever. We ask that Jehovah look
into his heart, see
the goodness there.
But my grandfather says he doesn’t need our prayers.
I work hard, he says. I treat people like I want
to be treated.
God sees this. God knows.
At the end of the day
he lights a cigarette, unlaces
his dusty brogans. Stretches his legs.
God sees my good, he says.
Do all the preaching and praying you want
but no need to do it for me.
new playmates
fancy stores my mother has walked
into. She writes of elevators, train stations,
buildings so high, they hurt
the neck to see.
She writes of places with beautiful names
Coney Island, Harlem, Brownsville, Bear Mountain.
She tells us she’s seen the ocean, how the water
keeps going long after the eyes can’t see it anymore
promises a whole other country
on the other side.
She tells us the toy stores are filled with dolls
of every size and color
there’s a barbershop and a hair salon everywhere
you look
and a friend of Aunt Kay’s saw Lena Horne
just walking down the street.
But only the dolls are real to us.
Their black hair in stiff curls down
over their shoulders,
their pink dresses made of crinoline and satin.
Their dark arms unbending.
Still
we hug their hard plastic close and imagine
they’re calling us Mama
imagine they need us near.
Imagine the letters from our own mother—
Coming to get you soon—
are ones we’re writing to them.
We will never leave you, we whisper.
They stare back at us,
blank-eyed and beautiful
silent and still.
down the road
Be careful when you play with him,
my grandmother warns us about the boy
with the hole in his heart.
Don’t make him run too fast. Or cry.
When he taps on our back door, we come out
sit quietly with him on the back stairs.
He doesn’t talk much, this boy with the hole
in his heart
but when he does, it’s to ask us about our mother
in New York City.
Is she afraid there?
Did she ever meet a movie star?
Do the buildings really
go on and on?
One day, he says—so soft, my brother, sister and I
lean in to hear—I’m gonna go to New York City.
Then he looks off, toward Cora’s house down the road.
That’s south, my sister says. New York’s the other way.
god’s promise
It is nearly Christmastime.
On the radio, a man with a soft deep voice is singing
telling us to have ourselves a merry little . . .
Nicholtown windows are filled with Christmas trees.
Coraandhersisters brag about what they are getting,
dolls and skates and swing sets. In the backyard
our own swing set is silent—
a thin layer of snow covering it.
When we are made to stay inside on Sunday
afternoons,
Coraandhersisters descend upon it, take the swings
up high,
stick their tongues out at us
as we stare from behind our glassed-in screen door.
Let them play, for heaven’s sake, my grandmother says,
when we complain about them tearing it apart.
Your hearts are bigger than that!
But our hearts aren’t bigger than that.
Our hearts are tiny and mad.
If our hearts were hands, they’d hit.
If our hearts were feet, they’d surely kick somebody!
the other infinity
We are the chosen people, our grandmother tells us.
Everything we do is a part
of God’s plan. Every breath you breathe is the gift God
is giving you. Everything we own . . .
Daddy gave us the swings, my sister tells her. Not God.
My grandmother’s words come slowly meaning
this lesson is an important one.
With the money he earned by working at a job God
gave him a body strong enough to work with.
Outside, our swing set is empty finally,
Coraandhersisters now gone.
Hope, Dell and I are silent.
So much we don’t yet understand.
So much we don’t yet believe.
But we know this:
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday,
Saturday and Sunday are reserved
for God’s work. We are put here to do it
and we are expected to do it well.
What is promised to us in return
is eternity.
It’s the same, my sister says,
or maybe even better than
infinity.
The empty swing set reminds us of this—
that what is bad won’t be bad forever,
and what is good can sometimes last
a long, long time.
Even Coraandhersisters can only bother us
for a little while before they get called home
to supper.
sometimes, no words are needed
Deep winter and the night air is cold. So still,
it feels like the world goes on forever in the darkness
until you look up and the earth stops
in a ceiling of stars. My head against
my grandfather’s arm,
a blanket around us as we sit on the front porch swing.
Its whine like a song.
You don’t need words
on a night like this. Just the warmth
of your grandfather’s arm. Just the silent promise
that the world as we know it
will always be here.
the letter
The letter comes on a Saturday morning,
my sister opens it. My mother’s handwriting
is easy, my sister says. She doesn’t write in script.
She writes so we can understand her.
And then she reads my mother’s letter slowly
while Hope and I sit at the kitchen table,
cheese grits near gone, scrambled eggs
leaving yellow dots
in our bowls. My grandmother’s beloved biscuits
forgotten.
She’s coming for us, my sister says and reads the part
where my mother tells her the plan.
We’re really leaving Greenville, my sister says
and Hope sits up straighter
and smiles. But then the smile is gone.
How can we have both places?
How can we leave
all that we’ve known—
me on Daddy’s lap in the early evening,
listening to Hope and Dell tell stories
about their lives at the small school
a mile down the road.
I will be five one day and the Nicholtown school
is a mystery
I’m just about to solve.
And what about the fireflies and ditches?
And what about the nights when
we all climb into our grandparents’ bed
and they move apart, making room for us
in the middle.
And maybe that’s when my sister reads the part
I don’t hear:
a baby coming. Another one. A brother or sister.
Still in her belly but coming soon.
She’s coming to get us, my sister says again,
looking around
our big yellow kitchen. Then running her hand
over the hardwood table
as though she’s already gone
and trying to remember this.
one morning, late winter
Then one morning my grandfather is too sick
to walk the half mile to the bus
that takes him to work.
He stays in bed for the whole day
waking only to cough
and cough
and cough.
I walk slow around him
fluffing his pillows,
pressing cool cloths over his forehead
telling him the stories that come to me
again and again.
This I can do—find him another place to be
when this world is choking him.
Tell me a story, he says.
And I do.
new york baby
When my mother returns,
I will no longer be her baby girl.
I am sitting on my grandmother’s lap
when she tells me this,
already so tall my legs dangle far down, the tips
of my toes touching the porch mat. My head
rests on her shoulder now where once,
it came only to her collarbone. She smells the way
she always does, of Pine-Sol and cotton,
Dixie Peach hair grease and something
warm and powdery.
I want to know whose baby girl I’ll be
when my mother’s new baby comes, born where
the sidewalks sparkle and me just a regular girl.
I didn’t know how much I loved
being everyone’s baby girl
until now when my life as baby girl
is nearly over.
leaving greenville
My mother arrives in the middle of the night,
and sleepily, we pile into her arms and hold tight.
Her kiss on the top of my head reminds me
of all that I love.
Mostly her.
It is late winter but my grandmother keeps
the window in our room slightly open
so that the cold fresh air can move over us
as we sleep. Two thick quilts and the three of us
side by side by side.
This is all we know now—
Cold pine breezes, my grandmother’s quilts,
the heat of the wood-burning stove, the sweet
slow voices of the people around us,
red dust wafting, then settling as though it’s said
all that it needs to say.
My mother tucks us back into our bed whispering,
We have a home up North now.
I am too sleepy to tell her that Greenville is home.
That even in the wintertime, the crickets
sing us to sleep.
And tomorrow morning, you’ll get to meet
your new baby brother.
But I am already mostly asleep again, two arms
wrapped tight
around my mama’s hand.
roman
His name is as strange as he is, this new baby brother
so pale and quiet and wide-eyed. He sucks his fist,
taking in all of us without blinking.
Another boy, Hope says,
now it’s even-steven around here.
But I don’t like the new
baby of the family.
I want to send it back to wherever
babies live before they get here. When I pinch him,
a red mark stays behind, and his cry is high and tinny
a sound that hurts my ears.
That’s what you get, my sister says.
His crying is him fighting you back.
Then she picks him up, holds him close,
tells him softly everything’s all right,
everything’s always going to be all right
until Roman gets quiet,
his wide black eyes looking only at Dell
as if
he believes her.
new york city
Maybe it’s another New York City
the southerners talk about. Maybe that’s where
there is money falling from the sky,
diamonds speckling
the sidewalks.
Here there is only gray rock, cold
and treeless as a bad dream. Who could love
this place—where no pine trees grow,
no porch swing moves
with the weight of
your grandmother.
This place is a Greyhound bus
humming through the night then letting out
a deep breath inside a place
called Port Authority. This place is a driver yelling,
New York City, last stop.
Everybody off.
This place is loud and strange
and nowhere I’m ever going to call
home.
brooklyn, new york
We did not stay in the small apartment
my mother found on Bristol Street,
Brownsville, Brooklyn, USA.
We did not stay because the dim bulb that hung
from a chain swung back and forth
when our upstairs neighbors walked
across their floor, casting shadows
that made my brother cry
and suck hard on his middle fingers.