Avant Garde

I burn to turn a line, tight and funky,
The rhythm of some city in my mouth,
But there is only one time that speaks me:
Molasses days spent lonely in the South.
I got to know this place where I found friends
And learned irreverent love for those long dead.
I took them to my heart or home to bed.
Everything and nothing ever ends.

"You don't sound like you come from Arkansas."
"I thought she was some white girl on the phone,"
An uncle says; this makes my mother proud.
"I think you'd like this book; it's really weird."
". . . You cain't say nothin' nice don't talk at all."
"Eze-kiel connec-ted them dry bones."

Constance Merritt is the winner of the 2000 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry for A Protocol for Touch, her first collection of poems. Her poems have appeared in The Journal, The Malahat Review, Descant, and Prairie Schooner.

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