Electric Arches

Eve L. Ewing

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781608468690
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires nord-américaines

Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the fantastical, Ewing takes us from the streets of Chicago to an alien arrival in an unspecified future, deftly navigating boundaries of space, time, and reality with delight and flexibility.

letters from the flatlands

On Prince

In 1990 I would sit alone in the kitchen and eat Jell-O

and I would speak along with you when you promised:

don’t worry

I won’t hurt you

and my delirious synthesizer heart

would go kuh kuh kuh kuh in my ribcage,

until it was over and I had to rewind

fast, or be alone again.

I didn’t know what a Corvette was but I knew it was small

and that it made you sad, and I wanted to have a

trembling, breaking voice like that, and I wanted

a motorcycle and something to be sad about.

I wanted to play guitar with the rain falling

all off my body, and shake my shoulders when I walked.

See, I loved you because I had never seen

someone in a movie that looked like me before,

or at least how I thought I could look

if I grew up to be beautiful.

Our same skin, always shining,

adorned with every kind of taffeta

and smooth curls, falling perfectly around my face

like they were drawn there.

That was my secret revolution.

I would have fought Morris Day if you asked,

hitting him with small fists and watching the gold

in his jacket yield and bend until it went dull.

It wasn’t lost on me that they gave Joker your color

when he stormed the place, signing his name to everything

they had called art. He twirled a scepter,

defaced what he could, and smashed the rest.

They should have had you there, or me,

dancing amidst the plaster clouds and sullied canvas.

And I knew then

that 1999 would never come,

and we would always be here among the organs.

And there was never a music video for that song,

but if there was I wanted to be the one

with a lion in my pocket,

and it wouldn’t be a tiny lion or a giant pocket

but just a special filthy cute magic

that made the most fearsome things my friends,

and made my hands strong.

Origin Story

This is true:

my mother and my father

met at the Greyhound bus station

in the mid-eighties in Chicago.

my mother, all thick glass and afro puff,

came west on the train when she was nineteen,

lived in a friend’s house and cared for her children,

played tambourine in a Chaka Khan cover band.

my father, all sleeveless and soft eye,

ran away from home when he was seventeen,

mimeographed communist newspapers

and drew comic books

like this one, for sale. one dollar.

my mother bought one.

love is like a comic book. it’s fragile

and the best we can do is protect it

in whatever clumsy ways we can:

plastic and cardboard, dark rooms

and boxes. in this way, something

never meant to last

might find its way to another decade,

another home, an attic, a basement, intact.

love is paper.

and if my parents’ love was a comic book,

it never saw polyvinyl, never felt a backing.

it was curled into a back pocket for a day at the park,

lent to a friend, read under covers,

reread hanging upside-down over the back of the couch,

memorized, mishandled, worn thin, staples rusted.

a love like that doesn’t last

but it has a good ending.

sonnet

after Terrance Hayes

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove.

Chicago is a chorus of barking dogs

[Logan Square, night, May 30, 2015]

[a. notes on the sonic biosphere]

It’s not like I had forgotten. But I didn’t rightly remember, either.

Not from a distance. Not in the way that I do when you are next to me, asleep,

and they are right outside your window: first only one, then three,

then more than I can count, though I try to see each one with my eyes closed:

a pitbull, a shih tzu, a wide-headed mutt, arrayed across the gangway

as though lining the back of the stage—one voice, one warning, though they are many.

You don’t stir. Even when the woman upstairs begins to scream,

throwing things and shouting every name for the worthless.

[b. notes on your parentage]

Watching you breathe through the billowing, bellowing vapor that is the place we are from,

I remember a name for you: my Division Street baby,

a Blue Line baby in a redlined city,

a black and white and brown baby. A Cabrini-Green Studs Terkel Clemente baby.

You’re a metal flag and a wig shop, my darling.

On that merit alone I don’t mind sharing this thirty-six-inch-wide not-a-bed with you

since, good as you are at sleeping through the dogs and the fury,

I’m that good at making it a whole night without moving an inch.

And when you call out in the night, I’ll call back.

[c. notes on the n...