canvas: Make it yours. Make it pretty.
Carolyn Bryant is here and shit-faced
again and muttering that she couldn’t do a damn thing
to stop them, bacon burned, wheels off the
wagon, that if her husband had heard even a tint
of recanting he’d have slapped her silly. Of
course she’s here—moth pulled
to the flame, one kid jealous of another’s taffy.
Now that a white woman’s hands are all over this, she
wants in. Carolyn paces, paces, sits.
Ask the poet what gets colored in.
Ask the poet what gets colored in a
red
room.
Ask the poet who sits in a red room, drinking.
Most oil painters will not use pure black.
They build their black instead, from shades of coffee
and navy. When she
leans toward the painting she almost kisses
the tacky surface. There. She adjusts the spot-lamp, her
skin catching the glow off what has been killed.
Emmett Till is a fourteen-year-old boy,
quick to laugh and
to help his mother with the laundry, and she
offers driving lessons if they go to Omaha. But he is
determined to be Mississippi-bound. Does he say sorry?
Does he promise, next time? Before the chaos,
he tucks a pack of bubblegum in
his pocket. She brings him home to the windy
city so thousands can file by in their best church grays.
At the Biennial, the man’s T-shirt challenges those passing through.
BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE. They murmur over the bloom of a
wound, seeing red without seeing red.
Question the shovel, he says, that’d till this prairie.
WEAK OCEAN
The quake was born in Mineral, Virginia, and traveled north with a magnitude of 5.8. Cracks appeared in the Washington Monument. The cathedral lost two pinnacles. To explain the damage, seismologists will announce that we sit on only the thinnest layer of silts—“weak ocean sediments”—and beneath that, crystalline rock whose shaking energy creates an echo chamber of the soft mud. I drive to her house, ninety miles north of Mineral, and park where she used to grow snapdragons. I wait on the porch where geraniums stood sentry, nodding their incomplete heads. We walk the house together, straightening paintings. My job is to move dishtowels from the stove’s burners and check for mold in the fridge. She worries about getting things in order for “the girls.” No one knows who “the girls” are. What about the china? Her crystal flutes? The dining room is dusty, samovar hunkering in a corner. We peer through the cabinet’s leaded panes at teacups and gilded saucers, champagne coupes. Only when I open the door do they give in to gravity—stacks of porcelain that sag and swing, fractures vertebral, glass popping. She laughs, a kindness or symptom. Someone always lets the earthquake out.
THE SNIPER DANCE
We needed bacon and bread, so we went to Magruder’s. We needed gas, so we stopped at Exxon. Kids got on the school bus. We watched for a white Chevy Astro. Dear Policeman, the tarot card said, I am God. The woman shot in the parking lot at Seven Corners was an FBI analyst, the newspapers would tell us later. She’d studied mathematics. She’d once been held at machete point in Guatemala City. She coached skiing in Stuttgart and tennis in Okinawa. While teaching in Belgium, her house burned. She raised two children. Her chest was marked by a double mastectomy, still healing. She phoned her father and promised, We’re just going out to Home Depot and that’s it. Later, her husband remembered wet flicking the side of his face. The snipers took Interstate 66 and got locked in traffic, a gaze away from an off-duty officer. But they drove a Chevrolet Caprice, a dark blue sedan, and we were all looking for an Astro. Witnesses gave partial plates for a light-colored van. Our dance was discernible only in transition: casual gait; casual gait; casual gait; then the head ducked, swerve to the left, a bag hitched—to throw off his aim, wherever the sniper might be waiting.
KISS ME
Ruth Bader Ginsburg sits in the nineteenth row of my heart while onstage, a woman has been conscribed to the shape of a shrew. The actress has forty-carat eyes, an aquiline nose; her shoulders slight, her waist small enough. She is spanked over our hero’s knee. Everyone is laughing except the conductor, who must steady his baton, and the house manager, who has seen it before, and the actors directed instead to be aghast, agape, gawking, agog, whatever Cole Porter rhymes with dismayed, and Ginsburg, who adjusts the pearl clipped to her ear. She curls the program in her lap. This is tiring, attending theaters of the heart. She doesn’t relish it as Sandra Day O’Connor did, sipping prosecco at the intermission of Porgy & Bess. The gangsters soft-shoe, reminding us to brush up on our Shakespeare. The actress sings “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple.” Soon, Kate will be tamed. That’s how we know the ending is happy.
JEFFERSON, MIDNIGHT
In another version of this story, he is a naturalist who dabbled in politics. He reinvented the plow. He joined the American Philosophical Society’s Bone Committee and, while trying to prove the great Western lion, gave us our first giant sloth. He shipped a rotting moose to France to demonstrate the greatness of our mammals. He is a father of paleontology who didn’t believe extinction was part of God’s plan. He asked Lewis and Clark, should they encounter the mammoth, to capture one. For months his sea wall has been sinking, the Potomac’s mud flats sucking at support timbers. In 1918 and for six summers after, the Tidal Basin was chlorinated so this bank could become a beach. Whites only. Spiders who are drawn to rising heat populate the ceiling of Jefferson’s memorial. Once the sun sets, the temperature drops; they lose their grip and fall. Bodies bounce off my shoulders, bodies land in my hair. Guards call this the spider rain.
LINCOLN, MIDNIGHT
Never have I seen such majestic shins. He is
