-
What the Memory Predicts: For Alexis
- Callaloo
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 23, Number 1, Winter 2000
- pp. 218-219
- 10.1353/cal.2000.0042
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Callaloo 23.1 (2000) 216-217
[Access article in PDF]
Sunday Lessons
Dawn Lundy Martin
Part 1: In the Family
Larger than what they hold.
Bulbous.
Too gentle.
They reach inside the mouth.
Guarded locked hidden
beneath tongue.
As if cure.
Undoing.
Hands pull against seam.
Part what resists.
Maze of thread-weave.
The tender rim.
Beneath skin, bones, teeth.
Un-finished.
When girl was lifted as skirts are.
Soiled and torn, ankles black,
bare, skinny.
Preference still.
Voice empty.
Saying this happened
and this and this.
How many bodies is it
from the basement
to the church
to singing hallelujah?
The mother's hand
holds the wrong tool,
undoes the cape,
tightens the tarp,
encloses fist,
wedges grip. [End Page 216]
Scars are ellipses on face.To puncture and to welt it.
Could tell those travels.
Direct at blood-beat angled as to cease it.
Wanting a single occasion,
leg-cramp
found wallet
still-birth
or just to be a boy.
Walks up the narrow staircase
to top of lighthouse,
waves crash the air tight
in fist after fist.
Longing for all that depth,
that eternal distance.
Erupts from the belly like the letter G.
Teeth come together in grit.
The bottom row pressed neat behind
the upper mount.
Tongue flexing
as if in fucking
or the razor intentional on flesh.
The body is so small.
How could--
I was a girl once, as free as a boy.
As certain as hot light in summer.
Desiring Daedalus's craft.
Dawn Lundy Martin is studying for the PhD degree in English literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has a Master's degree in English/creative writing from San Francisco State University. Dawn is working on her first collection of poems titled Other Americas.
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