House Nigga’s Clean Finish
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Racing toward the big house, I made a pactto bear off the moon’s open-mouthed gawp,
learn to make my own light from the glintof rot mouth, gristle and white-fat. Fire helps
make what don’t matter, matter less. Nothingto it, really: roots in a cup and the sea-deep sleep.
Master slaps and drinks and gnaws. Always do.Playing a sinchase I wasn’t made to run or win.
Master snags, lays his body’s burden across, slower underthis spell. He lull like Lazarus and I become Martha,
wail to Jesus and undress his bones. I dig my coffin-shaped nails through his temple, knife-free my scent
from his fingers, wrassle flesh from loin, haul his shellover my split back like ruined linen purged in coal,
ready for the sweet by-and-by under night’s godless cloak.At break of dawn when the bought niggas pray and ache
the absence of an ordinary lord, I remind their God:Had you ever been here, this Lazarus would not have died. [End Page 30]
Airea D. Matthews, a resident of Detroit, is the winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets for her manuscript collection entitled Simulacra, which Yale University Press will publish in 2017. She is both a Cave Canem and a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow. Her poetry and prose have appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, such as Best American Poetry 2015, Indiana Review, Muzzle, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Callaloo. In addition to serving as executive editor of the Offing, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, she is employed as the Assistant Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she earlier received the MFA in creative writing.
