This poem was published as part of Bayou Blues: Ecopoetics of the Gulf South, a collection of ecopoetry centered on Houston, Texas curated by Hurricane Season editor, Aarohi Sheth.
Lyric is a lie to the sentence and snow is a silent engine.
While in it, all I can imagine is a slow torch prodigal
in its returning. I entered your story Jim like a crow to a cloud.
Leaving Houston all I could see was the potential of snow
on my fingers. And I know that I notice blackness
when separated from blackness. And know that I am a motor
running off of grief. Jim, a hundred years before me,
you carried your pistol shiny as a broken mirror.
And after reading what happen to you, I fell
to my bedside like groveling at a saint's feet.
The pathetic way I left my family in Houston was the pathetic way
I found you, as if family was something less visible in the night.
As if the snow somehow makes the night less of itself.
The only language I choose to acknowledge is distance. No,
I was away from all I was meant to know, an animal unaware
that its stripes were scars. Telling the truth could kill us.
I reach for stories in dead black men for catharsis. In the driveway,
I unpeel the frost— as a gauze. There are truths I've never told relatives,
like how others' memories can speak to you like good rain.
Shall I call you brother or uncle then? Jesus Christ!—
Like a lie I whir into irony -- how only kin can sentence
the sentence. Jim, your white light still lights and breathes in cursive.
On my skin where I picked at quills, I wrote:
Grief is a happiness too. Suddenly, feeling family
as opposed to knowing family, we can bear these truths.
I was heavy about myself because snow does something
to you the way flesh burns memory into you--
And I know if lyric lies to us, it must still reveal
a skin perfected.