Shotguns, 1987: (after the painting by John Biggers)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Shotguns, 1987(after the painting by John Biggers)
On the porches of cottages called “shotguns” because all their rooms open one into the next in a line from front to back, allowing the pellets of a shell shot through the front door unblocked passage through the back, stand five black women cradling dollhouse likenesses of their cottages,
their faces resolute as carved, African masks. The pots and tubs beside them herald the purity of the practical, domestic acts of soap preparation, the cooking of pork, infant bathing and even the catching of evil. The cottages’ clapboard siding resonates with the corrugated surfaces of washboards
or the rungs of ladders ascending the rows of gables stacked above the women in luminously outlined triangles simultaneously two and three-dimensional, all the way to the outstretched wings of birds, far below which, on grandma’s quilt, lie railroad tracks shimmering in the numinous geometry of the angels. [End Page 115]
Larry Thomas is currently Poet Laureate of Texas. He is author of ten collections of poems, the most recent being The Circus and The Skin of Light (forthcoming from Dalton Publishing).
