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  • Three Views of a Souvenir:A Bop
  • Susan B. A. Somers-Willett (bio)

In a Waco market, tourists riffle through a box of you, lightfanning over black bodies cocked as gamebirds. They do not askhow to look but how much? Your shape emerges in onepostcard only over time, like an eye softens to darkness.This is the barbeque we had last night my pictureis to the left with a cross over it Your son Joe

       Southern trees bear strange fruit       Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Though the day smoldered, he must have shone there, goldenin the broken wood, his head a wick heavy with coal oil as the flashpanignited to ash, and on the black-bright canvas that was hisskin was written the complaint men's faces made as they clamored,white brims and silver shovels, stock chain, and the one black eyeforced open that would bring Jesse Washington to me.

       Southern trees bear strange fruit       Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

A postcard has two sides: a place the sender has been,and the place his remembrance will go. Recto: Jesse's stuntedarms curl over the fathers and sons still for the camera, thirty-sixraging knots for eyes. Verso: a son writes home to his father in scriptlike flame. This image has a glass twin which speaks its namein reverse. I look in its box to find a shining hall of mirrors.

       Southern trees bear strange fruit       Blood on the leaves and blood at the root [End Page 16]

Susan B. A. Somers-Willett

Susan B. A. Somers-Willett is the author of two award-winning books of poetry, Quiver (University of Georgia Press, 2009) and Roam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2006) and a book of criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2009). Her writing has been featured by several journals, including Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, and the New Yorker's Book Bench. Her collaborative documentary poetry series "Women of Troy" aired on PRI and BBC radio affiliates and received a 2010 Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media.

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