JANE ALBERDESTON CORALIN

PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness

ISSN: 1543-0855

Issue 6 (2007)

- Lot’s Wife,
- Blood Storm, 1979,
- Love, 1979,
- A Small Man Seeks Redemption

Lot’s Wife

(On viewing Eastman Johnson’s “The Fugitive Slaves” [1862])

Sooner, our lightest load, sleeps.
His head jogs to the hard clump of horse hoof.
Shivering in his tiny body, he and his daddy fist
the tired reins. I am afraid my baby grows old with each step.

I promised my love John I wouldn’t look
back across the field still pining for picking,
two baskets of wash not done
and Sister Mary’s baby not born yet --

Dusk folds over everything;
my little family stands out clear as bushes
lit by an angry torch, against cotton aisles
grazed by careless fingers.

We step gingerly between them
as if they’d been pulled aside for our flight
their thorns tugging my skirts
like auction day brethren.

Blood Storm

(Amiri Baraka at HR-57, Washington DC, 1995)

You walk in hot,
hot with flu, 103* degrees of hot
and quick climbing contrapuntal
in your strut, hands fast and flailing,
flinging words with sweat and cool.
What did I know of your coming, black girl
new to jazz, girl living a long famine of truth
You step up with a right knee, smack,
smack a broken line,
your body stamping out a long-lost Morse code.
You throw your shoulders
against the band’s yielding refrain,
like a break in a line, your hips twist
bent as if your poem were a sax against your lips,
wail reaching towards the ceiling for legroom.

I didn’t know. I didn’t expect your beauty
coming, your own Newark song, blue-banded heart,
slit-gong tongue, hepcat and all your bones.
A shaman, you start your staccato
as if all of you were made of word,
tap the air, our ears, the wall with bop,
backbeat, timbale. I didn’t know if the rooms let out
a cigarette breath but there’s a smoky halo around you before
you start the long Whoooooo towards eeee
and I think of the dizzy ways we mourn.
I think of the fancy ways we kill. I think of the soup
of our birth, our wings and guns, all our dead language.
Our blood confetti storms, scattering.

You, Baba, how you would leave me
singing, shook, body in the hands of ghosts,
rolling, rocks in my soles, forgetting me
how to heel-toe. Right there in that moment, I loved you.
You with your eyes closed against the storm,
As if you could make that horn just be.

Love, 1979

(For Superman)

While the girls at Augsburg Elementary touted their forever and undying for Tony Danza and any of the five Jacksons, I had you, flush in your crocus-blue, your ballooning cape the color of a pricked finger. You were a crisp paper Goliath, less comic strip than Michaelangelo’s David. But I was not a poet back then, I knew no metaphors for your face.

I was at each of your births, from baby Moses on the Nile to the messiah cradled in hay, watching a star rise. You were there the day I stopped playing with Barbie, wanting love on rooftops and balconies. And still you stood by, glorious guardian on my wall, to watch me sleep. How I dreamed telephone booth weddings, nights soaring through cloud and dust, the city beneath us brimming like an anthill, my feet grazing the Empire’s lightning rod. And though some claimed they too loved, when the kryptonite got you, I got weak in the knees, watching your pain, industrial and dyed a peculiar shade of red, like the new kid who looked like me, his swelling lips bloodying the schoolyard bully’s fist.

You and I were so contraband: I had my Spanish, dancing in the prison of my family’s public silence. You had the truth hidden behind black rimmed glasses, those wing-tips you could not fly in.

So, when the theater in its small imagination chanted U.S.A, I didn’t get it, just didn’t while they kept shouting, you belonged to them, as if the acronym itself could rise you up like a stone from the garden crypt. Did you too hear their patriot voices singing? As if you were not an orphan, with your own mineral and dentil grammars, the things you would miss from your version of home, the careful scent of your mother’s jasmine, the recurring taste of your icicle sea.

I was no Lois, I knew they would never have you, you would never truly be theirs, scooped up by the pins and needles of their fear of all things different. One day they would notice, call you ‘stranger’, push you, you farm-raised boy, you shifty-eyed suspicion, you black question mark. They would never understand your incuse design, your marvelous wish.

You were not my grandmother’s Superman. Not a white boy from Kansas, but somehow a little like me, uncomfortable, alien, falling from the gathering sky like Chicken Little’s acorn or my father’s money from trees.

A Small Man Seeks Redemption

(Bishop on trial for handing over children to death squads, 1994 Rwanda genocide)

Yes, I turned them in. They weighed nothing.

At church picnics they bounced on my lap
greasy hands, faces dotted with cassava
I leant into their laughter, the way you lean into a cup
of something hot, inhaled the scent - milk gone bad.

Sundays I held their bodies

in a celebrant’s starched sleeves
dipped each child into the Kivu, another and one more
my arms poised like a long ebon skiff

What if they’d just died
in my arms under the white rutted sun
amid rinds of honeydew and paper cups
what might’ve the congregation spoken then?

My church walls could not hold them
what else could I do but turn them in to their fate
hands round their collapsible chests, pick one
pass her on, pick one up, hand him over
the efficiency, the clean relay, body upon body
like a bountiful net of fish

At the chaos, laughing boys beat the bushes
for babies hiding under bodies. I still hear
the messy blunt blows. sidelong strokes

I pray God plucks me from any accusation.

I have faith.

Citation Format:

Jane Alberdeston Coralin. “Lot’s Wife,” “Love, 1979,” “A Small Man Seeks Redemption,” PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 6, 2007