Donika Kelly
Whichever direction I walk is north,
cardinal. For years now, I have only walked
north. I have walked north into a sun lifting
the horizon like a seedling through soil.
I have walked north into a sun settling
like my great-grandma into dusk. I have
walked north with the chariot of sun sailing
across my face from ear to ear. For years now,
I have been an only child: my brother and sister,
their beautiful children, alive in the South—
to which I can never return. For years now,
I have been an orphan: my parents—neither
one of them themselves as I recall them—alive
in the South, to which I can never return.
*
In the South, to which I can never return,
I knew a loneliness of only-ness,
red field in which I stood but barely survived:
the till and plowing; the stick and seed; tending
and harvest. My great-grandma Juel, dead now
for some time, told me more than once a story:
her husband, Zach, called her into the garden,
pretended a hose was a snake—at his
pointing, she jumped into the long ropes
of his arms. At his laughter, she slapped hard
his chest. She told me the story at night.
We shared the bed they’d shared until he died.
She sounded, still, exasperated, like a wife—
neither of them, in the story, is alone.
*
Neither of them in this story is alone.
they were married for over sixty years,
longer than I’ve been alive or hope to live.
I know little of my great-grandpa Zach,
only history’s hearsay. A rough husband,
hard-fisted, slurred. The inevitability
of sons, rising against the drunken
horizon of their father—an act older
than the standardization of time.
I knew him only in his third form,
so gentle the cows came when he called,
so gentle he couldn’t bend anyone’s name
right but Juel Lee, and even that he stuttered.
Her name precious, near too heavy for the tongue
*
Our names precious, don’t heavy the tongue,
but bend and wrap, let the palate
move. Don’t we resonate, you and I,
valley and harbor? I wanted to see you
on the red dirt some part of me calls home.
I wanted to see you mirage in air
so thick with water and terpene it shimmers.
An ocean in the air in the place I called home;
the cows in the field; wood gone soft and sweet
with rot; the dirt full of iron and fire;
the ant colony aerating the ground,
the ant jaws the nearest danger we can’t see.
I wanted to take you there, but how could
I return if I’m always walking north?