The Brooms
– after One Impression by Yona Harvey
They insist that he is looking down on us from heaven
and yet, I can’t help but notice, standing at the front
of the church we are actually staring down at him, comely
in a casket’s cocoon, childlike in a black suit—
As we take our seats the pastor drips stoicism from his lips,
apparently feeling himself, he tries to go two for one on souls
for God, does an altar call and gets mine. My cousin having just
died, I wasn’t taking any chances with the death that day. Though
after the funeral it isn’t long before I have seller’s remorse,
and then, it is a long time until I feel like buying into anything
again—I tell myself if we had still been in Haiti, there wouldn’t
have been a funeral. Instead, a symbolic grave, instead
a burying up to the neck in superstitious earth, the zombi
being his disease, the zombi being the hearse tricked into
remaining while my cousin is freed, pulled from the dirt
like a stalk of bunchgrass, no rootedness, but a harvest
of him, a buying of his beige, his brownish-purple
back from the dead, from the spirit of the recently dust—
And yet, my family did not go late at night to the intersection
of two roads to cut a check, make payment. My cousin
did not lie on top of the tomb, but inside, unable to hear
no healer to sweep his body with a broom, to brush away
the negative, no bristles moving x, x, x to mark him as clean,
cleansed— And so, to keep the faith, I tell myself that in rooms
all across this land; across this world there are brooms, which
the grieving, hopeful use to sweep t, t, t, like little crosses, c,c,c
like crescent moons, stars of all stripes in that internal place
made pristine, as a ritual, sigil, sign, just in case someone is looking.
First Person Plural
We / not a boat people / rather / water
undammed / a waiting hurricane /ADAM
ADAMADAM bursting / sons & daughters
pouring over the walls / the best laid plans
Ready or not / Re:Fugees / No calm eye /
we wind whipping wasp nests under the eaves—
No warning / No breeze / Our team with no I
teeming across horizons like the eve
Nou / a new storm / each drop bearing a name
Evens / Fabienne / Junior /Widelene
& negotiating with that same / same
on shore / those amber waves of grain—
Cousin / what category of longing is this
to have brought us so far from genesis?
***
Photograph of Bryan Byrdlong by Cherline Bazile.
