Post-
imperial
colonial
independence
industrial
corporate
combat
nuclear
coital
fertile
apocalypse
humanity
void
question
search
answer
fact
truth
modern
schism
impact
autopsy
riot
post
racial
Intake Evaluation Notes Pt. 1
Patient only revisits the past when directly questioned. Resists emotional engagement
with memories.
This is what I remember: sugar coated
cornflakes; cornflake coated jello; the essentially
identical faces of my cousins; mist like cotton
from a hemorrhaging cushion spread on the
Black Forest floor; Nintendo 64; pink lotion
heavy on my foster mother’s knuckles,
plastic runners heavy on my grandmother’s
carpet; the certain heaviness of balancing
a body on your hips like a spinning plate;
a certain stretch of 7th Street; a certain look
in a man’s unblinking eye; a certain dress I wear
if I want that man to buy me a drink; the
almost-a-bruise plum of that dress, the
almost-a-plum shape of the bruise he’ll
leave on me, almost going to Paris;
one miscarriage; champagne, vodka
and gin; Dorothy, Rita and Marilyn;
the moist hand of shame
stiff on my nape as if
I were a girl again, as if
shame were my father steering me
across a crowded street and never holding
my hand; going and staying blonde;
a bullet in the night followed by two more;
a window burst open on a linoleum floor;
a chalk outline flowering in the night;
a deluge of red and whirling lights.
Prayer at the Shrine of Mary Turner
The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, Baltimore, MD
Hail Mary
Holy Mother
Patron saint of the waxing
bellies of black women
suspended by their
ankles—diesel fuel
anointed
consecrated in flame women
would be avengers
of slain husbands
comforter of we who
wash their bodies
and settle accounts,
gripper of our hunched
shoulders: grant us safe
passage cross the
Folson
Brooklyn
Bay bridges
of this nation.
Grant us justice in its chilly
halls. Shield the pulpy skulls
of our children
from the soles
of the mob. Steel
our resolve so
if we must be
gutted
bullet riddled
split sternum
to navel
we will feel the cool
touch of your hand
through the tightening
ropes
and know
grace.
Amen
“Intake Evaluation Notes Pt. 1” originally appeared in Little Patuxent Review. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Tafisha A. Edwards is the author of The Bloodlet, winner of Phantom Books’ 2016 Breitling Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Phantom, Bodega Magazine, Fjords Review, and The Little Patuxent Review. Edwards is the Assistant Poetry Editor at Gigantic Sequins, a graduate of the University of Maryland’s Jiminéz-Porter Writers’ House, a Cave Canem Graduate fellow, and a former educator with the American Poetry Museum. She is the recipient of a Zoland Poetry Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center and has received scholarships to The Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and The Minnesota Northwoods Writers’ Conference.