When the Ghosts Come Ashore Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Jacqui Germain

  Published by Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press

  Minneapolis, MN 55403

  http://buttonpoetry.com

  All Rights Reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Cover Image: Brianna McCarthy

  Cover Design: Doug Paul Case || [email protected]

  ISBN 978-1-943735-05-1

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Sankofa

  Blood

  For Years, the Only Thing I Knew to Compare My Skin to Was Dirt

  The Atlantic as it Welcomes the Ghosts

  St. Louis

  The Harvest

  How America Loves Ferguson Tweets More than the City of Ferguson (or any of the eighty-nine other municipalities in St. Louis)

  Rotted Fruit

  Questions for the Woman I Was Last Night, 1

  Nat Turner Goes Vacationing in D.C.

  How America Loves Chicago’s Ghosts More than the People Still Living in the City

  Questions for the Woman I Was Last Night, 3

  Conjuring: A Lesson in Words and Ghosts

  How the Atlantic Ocean Prepares for War

  The Split Rock Prays to Whatever Broke It

  Quentin Tarantino or Why I Do Not Trust You with My History or On Wearing a Gaudy Robe While Grabbing the Ass of a Naked Black Woman for a Magazine

  Things I Should Say to Myself in the Mirror or Things I Would Say to the City of St. Louis if it Could Hear Me

  Nat Turner Finds Out I’m Considering Not Going Back to School to Finish My Undergraduate Degree

  Bipolar Is Bored and Renames Itself

  Silk

  In Which the Girl Becomes a YouTube Clip

  After St. Louis, God

  Unbuttoned & Unbothered: On Imagining that Freedom Probably Feels Like Getting the Itis

  SANKOFA

  I wrote a poem once abo ut

  black boys disappearing right

  out of the like a shut

  mouth a stream

  of bullets right down

  its throat. All of t heir black

  boy eyes lik e b l a c k

  rocks staring at me right off

  the page like they wouldn’t

  sink if I dropped them all

  in a r i v e r. And I wonder if

  it’s healthy to keep all these

  ghosts in my pocket. All their

  hands that you can’t

  see but they push

  things around when you

  aren’t

  even looking. What the body

  becomes when it carries you and them.

  How your bones n e g o t i a t e

  weight and weightless,

  learn to manage the absence

  and the homecoming in every

  reunion. We black folks who bend

  words, folks who celebrate the ghosts

  that show up in our poems

  like a

  shout or sometimes a

  sweep of wind that carries you

  all the way to a tree branch

  or a potter’s field or the bottom

  of

  the Atlantic

  my g o d it’s crowded

  down

  h e r e

  like

  y

  o

  u

  wouldn’t believe. And I wonder

  if it’s healthy to h a v e them

  all sitting in my

  or my

  or eating dinner r i g h t

  next to my elbow

  like they always knew

  t h e y w o u l d f i n d

  a home here.

  BLOOD

  I build a revolution

  in my bedroom

  every time I masturbate.

  My own body conspires

  to assassinate both

  my rebel hands.

  No matter

  what I do, my history

  still tells itself wrong.

  My lips shape both

  casualties and

  freedom songs, but

  I still have sex like

  the dogs won’t bite if you

  have your church shoes on,

  like black Grandmas didn’t

  keep all their shotguns

  up underneath a mattress.

  FOR YEARS, THE ONLY THING I KNEW TO COMPARE MY SKIN TO WAS DIRT

  after the painting “In All (For You and I)” by Brianna McCarthy

  Girls, with all their blk

  skin and their blk

  hair and their blk

  eyes, got these bright orange kidneys,

  these clementine-colored lumps of flesh,

  got these blue-striped mountains

  wrapped around their foreheads,

  these tall, tall trees with grapefruit,

  with grapefruit-blood leaves

  draped down the front of their noses.

  Girls, with all their blk

  armpits and their blk

  elbows and their blk

  areolas, got these green and gold patterned breastplates

  carved right under their skin, right above their ribs,

  glowing just underneath all that blk, blk, blk.

  Girls, with all their blk

  shadows and their blk

  ears hearing blk

  things and their knees bending into blk

  things and their blk

  spines twisting and curving and holding and lifting all this blk-

  ness, got these long bowing, bending necks

  with yellow spiked arms coming out of them,

  and purple jagged teeth coming out the top

  and long turquoise legs coming out the bottom.

  THE ATLANTIC AS IT WELCOMES THE GHOSTS

  The blue ocean is a wrist snatched back.

  The blue ocean is a broken arm flapping back against the shore.

  The blue ocean is a twisted elbow

  trying to remember what its shoulder feels like.

  The blue ocean is a red, slapped cheek

  rippling with nausea and shock,

  seeping blood from its gums,

  tasting every name of every black body

  tossed over the edge of every ship,

  every letter stuck between the ocean’s teeth,

  all their bones collecting beneath its tongue

  like a basket of sour fruit.

  The welcome is a blue tongue pressed

  between sand and black teeth,

  seething at the wooden ships scraping across its back,

  flower-petal-ing black bodies in their drooling wake.

  The welcome is the sun baking the blue surface,

  boiling the ocean water til the bones are clean,

  letting the spirits shift up out of their terror

  and rise with the waves like steam.

  Dead black folk flying away look just like exhale,

  a warm sunlight ascension above a field of waves.

  But the bones stay & keep house

  & make home below the shore &

  here, the steam comes back to sleep.

  ST. LOUIS

  after Aziza Barnes

  So I walk into a bar, right?

  And everyone is dancing to their own

  kind of liquor and beat

  and that’s when I spot her,

  St. Louis, sitting at a corner stool

  drinking Schlafly and watching the scene.

  And my friend says, Yo, St. Louis!

  Yo, Chicago-knock-off city!

  Yo, Midwest-Mississippi-forgotten!

  Yo, empty bucket, clogged-gutter skyline!

  St. L
ouis looks over at us,

  and turns into a whole role of caution tape,

  and my friend goes,

  Yo, you blues’-bastard-child-singing-in-the-wrong-key!

  Yo, you public-housing-graveyard-in-cheap-makeup city!

  Yo, you gateway, archway, the biggest, bloodiest wide open exit wound!

  The whole bar gets the joke.

  St. Louis is not even a bullet,

  just the empty space that’s left.

  The bar’s laughter fills the hollow finger

  of burning air and stuffs the wound with noise.

  The room is full of wet lips and big teeth and thick smoke

  and I swear, I feel like shit.

  I walk towards her offering a fresh beer

  and a Sunday morning’s worth of apologies.

  St. Louis looks at me like the whole East side

  has gone up in flames. Again. And I realize

  I have brought the city a peace gift of lighter fluid

  instead of water. I want to say,

  I know you. I’ve been to East St. Louis, I know

  about the race riots. I know about the failed

  housing projects downtown, I watched a documentary.

  I read a book about the foreclosure crisis.

  I understand that poverty is two hands

  clamped over an entire neighborhood. I get that

  this is how you are fitted for handcuffs. Please.

  Don’t act like you don’t know me. I’m trying to help you.

  I’ve read the books. I wrote a paper on it.

  I know what Delmar looks like without the students there.

  I’ve walked through the North side and seen the buildings

  with only gums left. I know parts of you have only gums left.

  St. Louis is the Mississippi riverbank and she

  looks at me like I am the clumsy ship run aground in her thigh,

  trying desperately to make peace with the mud.

  She says to me, I have seen you before.

  You have “University” around your neck,

  though you wear all my things.

  You have washed in the river and still smell of bleach.

  They have taught you how to make molds of my mouth

  in plaster, but not how to let me speak.

  You use my bones as fodder in the classroom

  and ask nothing of my flesh.

  Even now, you pity my silence.

  You think I cannot speak,

  but I just choose not to speak to you.

  I do not know what little you have learned

  of my name, but I have known yours for a century.

  I recognized the tower before it was built.

  We always do.

  THE HARVEST

  If I were to die

  in police custody,

  their handcuffs would

  be my ex-lover’s

  mouth, my ex-lover’s mouth

  would be a series

  of teeth, the teeth rows

  of enamel fingers digging

  into my flesh, my flesh be a plot

  of land, the plot of land

  would be a map of bleeding

  artifacts, the bleeding

  be place-markers

  for buried collarbones,

  the buried seedlings, collarbones

  the white men planted,

  the seedlings the white men

  planted be the ghosts

  that call for the plow,

  the plow the fist that pulls

  the harvest, the harvest the coffee shop

  selling a Columbian village

  for $6 a cup, the harvest a history

  textbook falling asleep on itself in class,

  a Walgreens on every corner, the harvest

  every city we pretend the Dream

  survives in

  the harvest is their Dream rotting,

  the harvest is every

  Walgreens decaying

  with flame & smashed

  windows, is a bankrupt

  & rotting classroom,

  is burnt & rotting coffee,

  is rotted teeth, is sick

  & green with

  the harvest’s gifts

  refusing the tongue,

  to feed the body that

  consumes it, is the whole

  land spoiling itself to kill

  the fingers that dug it raw,

  the white teeth, the wide

  eyes, the blue badge

  that saw me & whistled,

  Shit. Look at her. I bet she

  tastes too sweet.

  HOW AMERICA LOVES FERGUSON TWEETS MORE THAN THE CITY OF FERGUSON (OR ANY OF THE EIGHTY-NINE OTHER MUNICIPALITIES IN ST. LOUIS)

  The camera-flash séance

  in the middle of West Florissant

  searches for ghosts

  in the street lamps,

  while black bodies mid-funeral,

  caped in tear gas

  contort into résumé

  bullet points.

  Our jaws broke open

  in grief make front page

  in an article that doesn’t mention

  St. Louis, but will

  win an award for how the photo

  makes taxidermy of our trauma.

  Thank god for the internet,

  how we’ve taught ourselves

  to play mortician with each

  new name we are given,

  to pinpoint a single

  faulty organ, mistake it

  for the whole body,

  neglect to even ask

  the bones for a name.

  Thank god for twitter,

  for the microphones

  and media equipment,

  for the scavengers’ descent

  onto a single street,

  for how they ate

  our terror and vomited

  a news story,

  for the blossoming

  of our messy grief

  on television screens

  for a few weeks.

  ROTTED FRUIT

  Somewhere, in some city in Kentucky,

  my brother is sitting in his apartment.

  I do not know what color the carpet is.

  I have no idea how his furniture is arranged.

  The year my brother stopped speaking to me,

  I lost my own name in the shower.

  I began looking for it in the mouths

  of people who did not care to spell it correctly.

  I had not yet learned how to retrieve it.

  I watched each letter cleave to their molars,

  spoil, stink, become the thing to wash out.

  This is how I learned to give my name away,

  to apologize in cursive for the first thing

  my mother gave me

  that wasn’t her own blood.

  Somewhere in some city south of Cincinnati,

  my brother is sitting in his apartment.

  I do not know what his kitchen cupboards look like.

  I have no idea what wall his TV is on.

  The year my brother’s face became a shut door,

  I grew two extra fists along my spine

  and made a list of all the things

  I had left on his doorstep.

  I stopped knocking. I traveled west.

  I spoke of my brother like a lost language,

  only said his name when the wind was just right

  and I knew it would carry the sound elsewhere.

  I found my name on the third floor of a dorm

  and buried his beneath the building.

  I rode my spine home every holiday

  and returned only with a string of knuckles.

  My parents spoke of the fingers as if they were

  not curled. My brother did not

  speak at all. He never even

  brought his hands home.

  Somewhere east of St. Louis,

  my brother is sitti
ng in his apartment.

  I have not seen it. I do not want to.

  I imagine his name has dug itself up by now,

  has finally gone back home. I have not

  said it aloud in years. My mouth is not a fist

  but neither is it an open palm.

  I have no taste for rotted fruit.

  I do not imagine his hands.

  They are not mine to peel open.

  QUESTIONS FOR THE WOMAN I WAS LAST NIGHT, 1

  after Kush Thompson, after Warsan Shire

  When you picked apart the white of his knuckles

  to see if his white was different from all the other

  white, did the black girl ghosts scare you?

  When you closed his palms and his lips

  closed your throat, did you see the audience

  of dark shoulders sitting by the stairs?

  When you sighed under the white crows of his supple

  fingers feasting in a flurry below your chest,

  did your moan lullaby the dead black girls to sleep?

  Once they were asleep, did his teeth

  feel like maybe they could pop your black