The World Is Round: Poems

Hurricane Beulah

39 hurrICane Beulah Chapter One: Counting Straws My grandmother is here visiting. This morning while she was still asleep on her back I crept up close and counted them all again. I’ve been studying Beulah Davenport’s chin hairs for years now, hoping to know something about her powers. She has nineteen chin hairs which are sometimes there and sometimes not. I stand in the doorway watching her in the bathroom mirror surrounded by Pop Leo’s things; his razor and cup always on the side of the face bowl. Eventually, she will smooth pearl-white lather down around her chin. Suddenly she is a tiny Black woman Santa, a caramel colored I Love Lucy in classic pose, all in one. I like to watch as her ninety-nineyear -old hands move sideways across and under the belly of her barely wrinkled face. She does not see me leaning into the door wishing she wouldn’t shave away her golden woman chin straw. This is my research material! I want to scream. She does not know that I believe these hairs hold the key to all her powers. She never sees me counting, pulling , on the tiny hairs beneath my own chin, wondering when, when can I count on being just like her? Chapter Two: The Shopping Spree -1This morning at breakfast we had an argument about putting the cans and bottles into the recycle bin instead of the trash can. She refuses to do it. I keep going behind her retrieving the shiny see-through things from the garbage. Yesterday she told me that only white folks save bottles and cans. She says Black 40 folks save the earth just by getting up in the morning and deciding to go on one more day. Yes ma’am, I answered. I tell her I want to buy her something new for her 100th birthday. She says there is nothing new under the sun. I ask her will she go to the mall with me to help me find it. She cuts off my sentence as soon as she hears the word mall. She says in her most amazed voice that she just heard on the radio that it’s Senior Citizens’ Day at the Salvation Army thrift store. She says, Can you believe it, everything with blue and yellow tags is 50% off! Already she is reaching for her pocketbook and slipping it on her arm and handing me my keys that I do not remember asking her for. -2I am sitting at a four-dollar desk at the Southside Salvation Army thrift store biding my time by writing poetry. It is badly stained and wobbly, not the poetry I hope, but the desk. Every now and then somebody walks by and kicks the legs of it like it is a car they might want to take home. Just in the nick of time, I manage to raise my writing hand in the air, then wait for the table to stop shaking, as they decide whether they want it or not. Eventually, I go back to my writing. I’ve only had to change tables three times. Every now and then I look up from my writing to find my grandmother teetering down a row of color-coordinated clothes. She is moving down row seven now like an old loggerhead trying to decide where best to lay her eggs. She is holding on to her walker, which along with her hearing aid she hates to use in public. At the same time she is pushing a rickety shopping cart. I don’t know how she is doing both these things at the same time but she is. She is definitely one part magic. Every time I ask her does she need my help she sucks her teeth real loud and moves on up the aisle away from me, blues singing something about, “Don’t treat me like I’m old, treat me like I can be recycled, remember.” 41 -3She is up in aisle seven carefully putting two- and three-dollar dresses into her push basket. Some of them I can see are expensive tweed and gabardine suits that I imagine rich ladies gained weight and outgrew. Some of them, I imagine, those same rich ladies might have worn up until their last day on earth. I imagine their children have brought these and others of their...