By Rachel Eliza Griffiths

for Miss Lucille

It ain’t about your Christ having his way.
It ain’t about pews glistening under

the gone-breath of my child. It ain’t about black
people knowing more about true home-going.

It’s about the gray-dove touching skin
that can’t feel silk. Nothing’s amazing

about grace or dying. How young
is silence?

It’s about a mother, stitching close
a child’s eyelids. It’s about throwing

out a broken tube of new red lipstick.
It’s about what I had to give her,

which that flying nigger took, calmly
as a dollar bill in a gutter. Picked dreams
off my eyes.

How many houses grief need?
There’s room in that casket for me. I said loved.
There’s straw

under Hagar’s cheeks. Somewhere
between her neck & shoulder blade

I could fit.