ISSUE 14 

Phillip Shabazz

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Appalachian

Here is the self you carry and the face the creek remembers.
They do not speak to each other, the way Blue Ridge
fog will not touch the valley floor, though it tries all morning.
Your brother's jaw is wired shut at the county hospital where
the nurses do not ask what happened because they already
know what happens here in houses set back from the road.
Your mother drives the pickup as if she is hauling something
that could spill. She will park and walk into that white room
and become a wife again, her whole body given back to
a vow made at eighteen in a church that has since burned down.
The scar will belong to her too. She will clean it, watch it,
and witness it pale into one more thing his skin holds.
You sit where lightning bugs begin to spark in the dark,
and the locust trees stand in their patience like a verdict.
The mountain does not lean away from you.
Somewhere below, the creek runs without you,
as water has always run, owing nothing to its source,
carrying what it cannot help but carry: the little
stones, the silt, the whole worn evidence
of having moved through here at all

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Geography of Surprise

I was drying my son’s foot when the wall came in.
The white towel he called the cloud lay in my hands,
his heel warmed in my palm. Then, the hurricane water
at the door decided for us what we were about to become.
I needed his other sock. Red-striped, white as a bird.
I set it down somewhere. The rafters were listening.
The lightning kept coming. I pocketed the matches
because the light was fading and I needed his sock,
I tried to find it. A propane tank hissed in the ditch.
The valve trembled, holding what it held, and waited
for the one wrong move. I dealt with it.
I had the sock, I had both of them,
I lifted his foot from the water and dried it in the cloud,
set him down, turned, and I told him we're okay.
I struck the match. The sulfur flare bit the dark.
My son’s face in the portrait, glass spider-webbed
by the wind, opened its mouth.
To scream? To swallow the flame? No, he was smiling.
I had been here before, a boy pretending to be asleep
while the father’s clutch tightens.
I knew the trick of it, how to turn into stone
inside the fist of what’s coming. I had not yet set him down.
The water was still deciding but leaned closer.
The valve held and waited for its single command.
I stood at the window with the cloud in my hands,
the sock here somewhere, the light almost gone,
and the glass shifted, a breath.
The room tilted, the match guttered.
The cloud slipped, the hurricane water lifted again.
I was still, I had not, and there was light...
The water came and took the cloud.

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