You won’t admit it. The names alive are like the names/ In graves. – Terrance Hayes My brother is lead-chipped metal, pimp walk in blue prison jumpsuit. He is dead black skin. I am the smell of salt on his neck. I peel the dead skin from his body like a sunburn. Brother unearths us from the grave our father dug for our mothers. We are the soil formed from their murdered bodies. When we breathe again our names are different than the ones given to us. We speak for the first time. No one in the prison is awake to see us turn to seed in the palm of each other’s hands.
for Carl During my third visit to prison we play cards: Skipbo, Uno, Rummy, Spades, Phase Ten. My brother says, “Somebody took the instructions out the boxes a long time ago. Ain’t nothin’ here sacred.” We make the rules up the way we did as children. We shuffle the decades old decks, so soft they surrender without a sound. I’ve run out of dog-eared memories to reference in conversation, so, I’m thankful for the aging cards in need of shuffling, for our clumsy memory of the stated rules, for your homeboy and his old lady sliding into the seats next to us, for a commissary line so long, it skims the concrete walls with twenty bodies before our turn, when I say, “Order anything you want.” This is the visit you tell me about the twenty years you kept our father’s name on your waiting list, excluding the names of others, before acknowledging he would never show up. Five hours later, I hunch over my phone in the prison parking lot to look up the instructions to every game we played. On the back of the commissary receipt I write the scripture we’ll follow during all future visits: Use a standard deck of cards (no Jokers). Make a tally of the running score. Put down your sets and runs. The game continues until a player lays down all the cards in his hand.
When I visit my brother in prison every body is black or brown except the men with guns. I read once in an article on color theory black is not a color, it absorbs the visible spectrum and reflects nothing. A black object may look black, but still reflect light. Black is the absence of color. In the workshop the white men ask me, What’s the point of all the references to race in your poems? Aren’t you more than just black? Black’s existence as a color depends on the object it is transmitted through. Black is a color dependent on how the receiver takes in information about color. Black is only a color when the color agents are tangible objects. Like the weight of a boy’s body against asphalt, left in the street to burn his blackness into white light. Like the body of the author of this poem. Like the smell of metal on my brother’s hands as he reaches to touch my face for the first time in twenty-five-years.
I. That day the hurricane’s breath licked Florida’s thick back, the wind as hard as our father’s hands against our swollen legs as we lied to save us. Did you take it? Tell the truth. I didn’t know yet that no apology could fix not having said the right words to begin with. I was five. Should we have understood already which objects belonged to us and which did not? My brother and I sat in our father’s studio for hours after watching him sleep off the whiskey, lacing our small bodies into a tapestry of shame the color of a fresh bruise. Remember this he said to me as the lights shuttered off. II. He said to me when the lights shuttered off, Stay quiet. Lightening flickered and sparked against the ash gray sky. In the narrow hallway we lit and re-lit the shrinking wick of a dozen small candles long enough to see before losing sight again. Did I know this would be the last time I’d see my brother as himself before our father took him away? Would I remember this? I was thirteen. For hours, alone together in the dark we appeared and disappeared to each other. I finally understood what objects belonged to me and which did not. III. I learned my children belonged to me and they did not the day the shutters split and shattered against the house until the wind slowed to nothing but breath. Will the lights come back on? I’m scared. Wind had skinned the curtains back to window and bones. Are you listening to me anymore? The air was a wet blanket of ash through the window’s broken teeth. I was afraid to open the hallway door to see the damage. My children asked me again, Will the lights come back on? I was thirty-three. I didn’t know. I tried to remember what my brother had taught me. I told them, I’ll open the door knowing if the roof had caved in I would dig a hole through the earth big enough to save them.
Tiffany Melanson is a poet and arts educator with an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the author of the audio chapbook What Happens (EAT Poems), and her work has recently appeared in POETRY Magazine, Bridge Eight, and Compose Journal, among others. She teaches poetry and oral interpretation at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville, Florida, where she is faculty sponsor of Élan, a student literary magazine, and co-director of the Douglas Anderson Writers’ Festival.
Images from a book published in 1888 — Untersuchungen über Dämmerungserscheinungen: zur Erklärung der nach dem Krakatau-Ausbruch beobachteten atmosphärisch-optischen Störung, which roughly translates as “Studies on twilight phenomena: to explain the atmospheric-optical disturbance observed after the Krakatau eruption.” While most of the book is an exploration via text, by the German physicist Johann Kiessling, the final pages are given over to a wonderful series of chromolithographs from watercolour images by Eduard Pechuël-Loesche, a few of which are selected here. From Public Domain Review.
