“If my body be a long poem / then I want it to go wherever it needs. / I lick dirty verbs in my teeth and feast. / I go back to the buffet with my dirty plate, / because I want my body to say all it has to say / and not be sorry for the saying. Of. It.” — Excerpt from Tiana Clark’s “Indeed Hotter for Me Are the Joys of the Lord”
L. Renée is a third-year MFA candidate at Indiana University, where she has served as Nonfiction Editor of Indiana Review and Associate Director of the Indiana University Writers’ Conference. Her poems have been published or forthcoming in Tin House Online, Poet Lore, the minnesota review, Appalachian Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere.
Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. L. Renée, what poems have you brought for us today?
Genealogical Trip to Pulaski, Virginia
The mayfly swarm undulates like the perfect hip
roll, mottled bodies plow brown bodies midair.
Wings fade as fine gossamer in June sun
buoyed by a buzz too quick to be caught
by my eye, which doesn’t want to bear the witnessing:
how nature persists in getting on with it, publicly —
life, sex, death in the span of a day.
I turn away, overcome by shame. I look through
my Ford’s cracked glass at white mile markers blurring
a black highway. Why does our making always begin
in denial? When I find my great-great grandmother,
Frances Houndshell in Census records, branded
mulatto and a mother at age 9, I do not wince. I practice
numbness, focus only on getting back to the alpha mama
who owned her own body, her own name, somewhere
off the coast of Ghana or Nigeria, maybe,
where her breath, not her sweat, was enough
currency. In Virginia, it’s common to see the dead
mayflies skip across pavement like flat rocks tossed
sidearmed at a stream’s surface, then lodged
in sidewalk cracks, among orphaned pebbles,
sticks and sprigs of grass. I’d rather look
at uncountable rows of tobacco leaves
which leave me breathless, dizzy even. All those
green ears flap like an elephant’s hello, hang woody
scents heavy through my car vents like next-of-kin
hugs hugged only at family reunions. In death,
female mayfly lips freeze into an ‘O’ as if readying
a whistle, as if leaving evidence of ‘no,’ after the males
give chase, grab their tiny legs, drag them to the ground,
after the mount. It happens like this. Whole lives
purposed for labor and procreation. Night collects
her bounty. By daybreak, bodies pile by the hundreds
on windowsills, in porch corners, in the middle of a passage
pedestrians stroll between a jail and courthouse.
The nice white genealogist at the local library tells me
Frances’ age must be wrong, an error in reporting.
But I know a nymph can be snatched from her skin,
molt and molt until she becomes something new,
gains wings, if only for a brief view of the dust
she will soon call home.
Ars Poetica: As Archaeologist
I scout for the wreckage:
Bone embedded in soil,
pot shard shaped once by
human hands, now smooth calcium
nestled deep inside earth’s
muddy pocket. My hands submit
to their memorized posture:
The constant cupping,
wrists ladling sand
like life-saving soup,
dumping this bounty
into a sieved bowl
that betrays inconspicuous
grains, revealing, eventually,
some lithic totem,
some evidence I existed before
my first breath, before reaching
for my first wound. I long
for the brown specks
that camouflaged my primordial
skin before I learned skin lured
predators, before I adapted
to this world’s fear. A steady
sun beats down on my digging,
but my limbs refuse rest.
Excavation is its own kind
of gift: The ordering, classifying
naming what history forgets.
negroes auctus weather, block auction
after Nikky Finney’s “Auction Block of Negro Weather”
take off running
swell & surge converge
tender half- whisper wailing
mouth sunk below
[bellow] a world with vortex
drowning forests human
fingers millions divvied up skilled
skin Black Beloveds
lightning’s waiting arms whirling
[a whip] unravels high Goodbyes
deluge super children women bank
gold snatched teeth pulled sweet
stem worn luck shuts what
comes under fat clouds holding
wet hands running [from] into air
Black dots growing wings blind trails
back where cotton rows squall long
hurry cane winds zipper flying open
vanes [veins] every republic dares eyes
look the promise stolen between
starlight & trembling lungs a love some
left crying red-blooded tears [that]
ran & ran a nation infested hate water
everywhere cataclysmic on easy conquerors
the eyes keep coming [run]
You've been listening to the poetry of L. Renée on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.
