Begin with a Failed Body

Poems

Natalie Graham

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780820351209
• eBook ISBN:
  9780820351193
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

This collection of poems begins rooted in the landscape of the U.S. South as it voices singular lives carved out of immediate and historical trauma. While these poems dwell in the body, often meditating on its frailty and desire, they also question the weight that literary, historical, and religious icons are expected to bear. Within the vast scope of this volume, the poems arc from a pig farmer's funeral to Georges de la Tour's paintings and Toni Morrison's Beloved. With an ear tuned to the lift and lilt of speech, they wring song from sorrow and plant in every dirge a seed of jubilation. Rich in clarity and decisive in her attention to image, Natalie J. Graham writes resonant, lush poetry.

I.

Junior Choir Recessional

This is where you wait among the filthy hills
of sinking graves and broken stones,
sweating in a crimson, polyester robe,
where you wait for water to make
you clean, wait for the hunger to come and pass.

You ashy underneath, socks don’t match, are dirty.
Same every-Sunday-dress don’t fit, hills of graves, rumpled earth.
Black as a buzzard, marchin in a half-heeled shoe, shoe bout broke.
This old, dirty, bout-broke shoe, and you marchin, steady marchin.

Sing now.
Bread of heaven, bread of heaven, feed me.
Soul singin, lined with sweat, nothing to do but sweat.
Wait. Soul singin, Feed me heaven bread

Lord, this soul gon clap.
This wing gon flap.
This broke, blackbird will

wait. You gon wait for him,
here, under the trees.
He’ll put a piece of candy in you,
sweeten that mouth.

Look. Here’s the church,
aint no steeple. This is how you wait,
baby bird, mouth cracked for a worm.

Bread of heaven, bread of heaven,
feed me til I want
no mo.

The Palm Beach Story

I make room for him
on our dilapidated chair.
The world outside shuts up.
A reticent sky is not angry,
but the glittering dark
withholds a story.

On a cracked laptop
a kindly Uncle outfitted for service
dodges monochrome bullets.
They ping but do no harm.
He, too, is harmless.
This demi-charactère is rustic,
pas seriuex, un divertissement
without the usual shucking and jiving.
He’ll bow and yessir, hat in hand,
in a train’s cage, in the line of careless gunfire,
all the way through Dixie.

We make a sweet home.
I fix my mouth
to explain
the difference between
Uncle and Coon,
Mammy and Pickaninny.

I’ve been told of charity—
not letting the right hand know of the other.
I can pour until the blessing comes.

Then, one day my dignified body
will tell nothing at all.

The Florida Motel

American girls are better than cream
spills from the greasy jukebox
as the line cook, scratching
his muttonchops

with the edge of an egged-up spatula,
points to the motel where a girl could stay
if she didn’t mind a parking lot lit
with a couple of ghosts.

The Florida Motel is haunted
by a sexy adolescent in black spandex and yellow flip-flops.
You’ll find her sitting, bored on a slice of grass
like a dropped coin purse.

The other stalks the half-empty pool,
digging into dark with a splintered cane,
in front of a Mercury Grand Marquis
with a chocolate bowling-ball paint job.

He delivers lukewarm pickup lines
to unseen loiterers, tipping his derby down,
Mama, you so hot, got me
bout burnt to ash.

Leaping Fire in Princeville Park

Quinisha skinned a black matchbox to spark
the boil for Cajun crabs.

Hammers waited to crack the smoking shells,
and picks glittered for the slippery meat.

Cee-Cee Plankfoot’s South Carolina Shag
was a salty toe-drag. She slid to the beat.

With her polished face flashing in the fire
and shadows crawling through the cobwebs of fog,

these blues could be epic.
Call her, Ma. Let her sing,

No east, no west, no sleep, no rest,
just God in the sky and my soul in my chest.

Ghosts, looking like fireflies, flicked their
cigarette butts asking, Why we here?

Palatka, Florida

She patches wilted boxers,
disinfects a tattoo he can’t reach.

No city will be built here,
zoning restrictions won’t allow it,
and if they did, he’d hate to lose
a damn good bait-and-tackle
for some Yankee bullshit.

Mama told her not to have nothing,
don’t have nobody’s nothing
if you can’t keep it fed
and rubbed down on a cold night.

The water’s bad here, something like radioactive.
She can’t sleep for thinking about the water.

The oscillating fan shakes its rickety head.
She smoothes the raised black mane of a tattooed lion
and burns like Moses’s bush, fueled at four a.m.
by God-knows-what.

Holiday Spread

A key lime pie faced a glum pound cake.
The pineapple-upside-down Bundt with cherry eyes
ogled a turkey glistening with sweat.

Aunts Yvonne and Carmen paraded their best daughters
by the fuming food. One will be a dentist by May.
The other toed the ground, readjusted a snug Christmas-tree sweater,
and traced multiple X’s over the grinning picture of a black Santa.

Uncle Freddy’s black alligator-skin boots flashed with rain,
as he tapped his foot to Wilson Pickett.
His graying head, behind tinted shades, tilted against a wall.
He mouthed the words, Midnight mover and an all-night groover.
He frowned a bit and patted his thigh, Got to be a real soul pleaser.

Baby Boy, who everyone agreed had grown the most since November,
popped mini brownies, boasted of back-cracking
a Bobcat lineman and the freshman he might have given a concussion.
Beneath a peach collar, the tattoo on his neck ruffled its feathers.

As older cousins eyed envelopes of money
and wrestled for couch seats in front of the TV,
a tree slumped in the corner without lights.

Uncle Bubba’s Funeral

Mourners spilled into the dusty road,
jawing snuff and cackling
at the high-toned, Holy Ghost fuss
being made over a Micanopy pig farmer.

Still sleeping, Bubba looked
mean as hot grits, ready as ever to cut
a decent Christian any way but loose
with his good eye.

He weathered his black bones,
plowing a share of earth he didn’t own,
drank water-milk and ate molasses bread,
pacing his packed-dirt floor.

The spit-shined shoes and glinting silver coffin
don’t fit. I knew what he’d have said
about spending money
to outfit the dead.

You don’t take care of shoes when they worn out.
They’ll throw good money in a dead hog’s ass,
then be too broke to feed what they got.

Fairy Tale

While Audrey Hepburn brandishes a drooping
Technicolor bouquet of violets,
sagging peta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• I.
• II.
• Acknowledgments