Big Foot Music (1975): For Glenn Goins 1954-1978
- Big Foot Music (1975)For Glenn Goins 1954–1978
Nobody vomits church basement like Glenn, his last supper was Sunday,
leftover hamhocks & cornflakes. What's so nasty
about funky food,
ashy kneecaps & rusty ankles? His last bowel movement was lumpy gravy, toilet paper on a stiff middle finger.
Testifying is contagious, upsets the stomach,
constipates. You
See. Jesus is his airplane. See
Jesus is hot grits on Al Green. [End Page 69]
See Richard
Pryor on fire.
Nobody hears as many
Amen as Glenn.
Even here, in the studio, the right arm rises
to shield his eyes as if
he sees something or someone other Funks don't.
Please
help him get rid of some of this. I know what you
can do.
Lord,
make him a plate. He looks queasy, about to faint.
If James Brown could just see him now,
giving up food for Funk, way down, P below D,
doing it to death,
body [End Page 70]
trembling like a witness, religious as the motion
of hips.
Thomas Sayers Ellis, an associate editor of Callaloo, is an instructor of African American literature and creative writing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He recently received the MFA in creative writing at Brown University, a few years after he co-founded the Dark Room Writers Collective. He is a co-editor of On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists and one of the emerging poets collected in Take Three. His work has also been published in Agni, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, The Harvard Review, and Ploughshares.
