When the Ghosts Come Ashore
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 || dougpaulcase@gmail.com
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