my mother’s breasts
The Field (for Lina Medina)
be bed stuy kreyol sprung from the well of penny
candies & bodega catechism be a rounded vowel
sound echoed off a known mattress a slippery
taste hooked & dangling in the nasal passage be
somebody’s waking thought be squirrels wild
running cross-country be block party speakers
steady Rock Steady be my sucking infant mouth
be door-knocker earrings & tired blue housedress
be harnessed slaveships be split calabash the
serrated & silenced edge be blue city sunken
onto itself prostheses slung over a rocking chair
silicone packed into daddy’s cotton be science’s
renegade swimming drunken & pickled in a
medical lab an Aria of turncoat cells that hop like
fleas amongst the bodies of my family’s feminine.
Daily, Papa tames the husks
of wild fields.
Inside his cough sits a chronic cotton bulb,
troubling his laughter.
Somewhere Mama hums la Soeta;
Lina feels the silver lull
of this cardinal telepathy,
the delicate pooling it slips into her belly.
The rag doll
housed in Lina’s revered arm-crook
is lone witness to how the breaking of a child
is much like the rending of mango skin.
how the thick unloading
of a field hand’s scrotum
is a chain deepening
into backyard pilings
17
BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE
how at a child’s bequest,
teeming hornets unfolded
from an oiled rag with a steady hand
can be radials of serendipity,
or lighthouses leading
your way out the field.
BRN-FALL-2012.indb 17
9/7/12 11:26 PM