Vulgar Remedies: Poems

Dermatographia

19 Dermatographia Somewhere there’s a dress that clings like a Jackson night, late summer—strapless, black crepe, a crux where the past lingers like a Mississippi vowel drawn out of itself in my mother, 1963. She drawls, Hey, Sugar, steps into her date’s blue Cadillac. ß Soon they arrive at the dance, at the yellow lantanas corsaging the brick side of the high school. Pecan, black cypress. Soon her friend Jean shows up and swings an arm around her nude shoulders, digs her thumbnail into her back, above the black gown’s top hem. She’s remembered my mother’s skin condition which causes marks to linger, small scratches to rise to a red tattoo. On my mother’s back she scrawls the Z of Zorro. 20 ß Jean from the shotgun house with its fence of wire. Jean whose mother let the iron linger too long, seared dark steeples to her daughter’s plaid dresses. Jean whose father hanged himself in his carpenter’s red kerchief after fixing the back porch’s last loose step. ß My mother pulls away as her laugh snags like crepe. In the school’s bathroom mirror she turns, with her neck craned to look. She turns, though she can’t lose the letter. She turns as other girls enter, swinging the door. Her dark updo licked by the dimmed lights. ß Dear Zorro, Where the hell were you, anyway? Masked man, window-jumper. Where was the getaway horse, your long sword? 21 Excuse me, Sugar. Every woman turns as if away from the edge of her own smoking balcony. ß Say my mother now owns not a single evening gown—not black, not any. Say the hero was busy getting a DUI as his Cadillac burned in a cypress swamp, the mockingbirds reset to the pitch of metal. Say this, then, to the girl in black crepe, to the late summer fires: there’s a sting that, when it rises, will not quit. ...