No matter where I’m living, I will always be three-fifths
Mississippi where memory’s just one long train whistle.
Whether I bask in moon-glow or cringe in a hornet’s nest,
I’m fastened to the backs of blacks living in hard, hard
houses, up from tobacco fields. In America’s windows,
a cross is the favored device though from my perilous perch
I cherish old photographs of bloodlines and salt wounds
that won’t fade. I place my calluses on the cold pane, believing
a man is a man, remembering this is why Malcolm is dead.
So why am I startled that we’re still so openly split apart?
Lynne Thompson’s Beg No Pardon won the Perugia Press Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award. Her poems and reviews have appeared in the Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry International, Sou’Wester and Ploughshares and in the anthology New Poets of the American West.
*Photo courtesy of quadelirus.