Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Mia S. Willis

the new owners have painted the gutters black

my father remembers when this entire block
was a snarling maw of unrelenting forest
begging to be home to something darker than shadow

he and my mother tumbled their wrist bones smooth
spread concrete over freshly cut kudzu
draped naked bradford pear trunks in drywall

bargained with bushkiller over brick
hewed haven for each kind of honeysuckle
naturally the realtor’s rechristening omits all of this

and so these gutters end up black
without timbers pulping their spirits free
and siding disintegrating in solidarity

is mine a righteous anger
is blood the only proof of violence

how do i tell our wilderness what we let her become

heirloom.

the white tee that dem franchize boyz rapped about is
spades tournament crisp and folded in my father’s bureau¹

aaliyah’s more than a woman motorcycle jacket is
summer sun faded but still my sister’s size²

the pink mink that matched cam’ron’s flip phone is
paparazzi primed and haunting my father’s closet³

nelly’s bandaid homage to city spud is
disintegrating rubber stuck fast to our cheeks⁴

—

the man has everything except two daughters
which means there can be two daughters again until we say so
the man who has everything and his two daughters are all the same age
which means they can all die at the same time
the man meets an icon with his daughter’s name on a beach
which means we talk about them both like they are still here
southern grammar proof that the man had everything and two daughters
which means a scar is better than nothing

dirty magic.

i have not visited my sister
since she became a fixed point
at the mercy of prepositions
a life on the fulcrum of perpetual past
on the highway to someone else’s homegoing
offering half-true tales about another ghost
will i ever make it
to the stone altar she now calls home
the season my sister slipped her skin
my father stopped saying her name
buried the incantation as if to keep
the sun off a fragile ancient faith
i have started seeing road signs for dirty magic
since i began to approach her age
the way trees thin themselves between us
has me praying god stays gone until spring

***

Author photograph by Marcus Jackson