Here at this condemned Pick-n-Save,
its picture windows cracked, streaked
with bird shit or white paint, flesh-
beige tape, dried by the sun, peeling
back, my dying mother bought stacks
of cheap dishes an earthquake shattered.
Amid glass, pack rat crap, horded headlines,
she slowly fell asleep, her body withered
by neglected diabetes, me coming back late
from the sex club, her bathrobe open, ex-
posing her belly, those black, curling hairs.
Far away within the dashboard, woodwinds
fade into the brass, a sort of understated
complicated pain, the body un-
important, impotent, urban
planners having decided
to rip all of this down. The sky seems
the same gray as the parking lot. That QuikFix
on the corner probably pulls in a few thousand
victims, at least, every week. My dope dealer,
a friendly, diabetic single mom, polishes
her station wagon, white suds spurting
from the sponge inside her fist.
Her windshield glitters, sun-
light trapped in tears. No-
thing can be felt, alone.
“Requiem” is from Christopher Davis’ third collection of poetry, A History of the Only War, published in 2005 by Four Way Books. His other books are The Tyrant of the Past and the Slave of the Future, which received the 1988 Associated Writing Programs Poetry Award, and The Patriot, published in 1998 by the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Harvard Review, The Journal, and in several anthologies. He is a professor of creative writing at UNC Charlotte.
*Photo courtesy of Gino Carteciano.