Crying, and: Sister Thomasine

Crying

Convicts of all races frequently have teardrops tattooed directly below their eyes, giving them the appearance of permanently crying.

—Andrew Lichtenstein

He’s a poor white kid from nowhere,a little X in Anson County called Cairo,half ghost town: a few trailers,amnesiac farmsteads, forsaken croplands,

shanked into the Chesterfield County line,South Carolina. Doing his time hereat Huntersville, he’s only seventy or so miles from home,but home might as well be Cairo, Egypt.

He’ll never see his folks again.None of them can read nor write,the car seized up and chockedin the demented swales long ago.

He’s probably just old enough by a dayto fetch adult time in an adult camp.Bad luck. No guardian angel.No cross to lift him.

Wouldn’t know a crucifixwere it pounded through his heart.Scraps of black down stitch his lip and chin.He’d fall apart in his mama’s arms.

Off to himself, on the yard, at a picnic tableunder one of the big shedding oaks, with a cigarette,gazing at the evergreens on the other sideof Mount Holly-Huntersville Road

—the free side of steel,just a few feet beyond where he sits,smoke clouding about him.The guys wear their coats snapped,

hands pocketed. Turn their backsand lean into what’s ahead:maybe Christmas.Christmas is free to everyone.

This kid: collar hiked, one of those CastroHonor-Grade green caps pulled overhis square white forehead, blackbrow. Tattooed beneath his left eye

is a single blue teardrop,needled into him—in a Salisbury Streetshothouse? Deese’s speakeasy?A Sugartown crackhouse? No telling.

Or how he found his way into one of them.The bad shit has a way of democratizing itself.He says he doesn’t know why he did it.He doesn’t know why he’s done anything.

Sister Thomasine

In Catechism, Sister Thomasine taughtthat we had fashioned Christ’s crossin our venial little forges.

Hundred-handed, we were the originalmonstrous forms, banished from Earthby the Gods—no better than Pagans.

We were broomsticks, washerwomen.Look what you have done to Him,she gabbled. Look: pointing

up at the crucifix—Jesus famishedfor privacy—her blowfish white wrist,the nubbed fingerette—a birth defect—

no nail, not even skin, just bone—at its glaring tip dischargedfrom her voluminous black sleeve.

You may say fuck, she liked to remind us,but dasn’t say Jesus.She loathed the girls—Bold as brass—

the pretty little frills she’d never had.She would have murdered them,the floozies. They tinkled and wept.

Face like a catcher’s mitt;Leviathan breasts, Tweedledeeand Tweedledum, woozy

as a couple of Flavel Street drunks.She boxed the boys’ ears in the cloakroom,dangling the tiniest from hat racks,

chanting in spectral metrics,like the chorus in Medea,“Little Red Caboose.”

Even in His anguish, Jesus remainedcomposed, trying not to laugh,winningly handsome.