-THE ONLINE HOME OF-
Deidre CreativeSoul
Sneak a Peek inside Border Crossing!
from the Preface
...I first began to assemble this collection over Mother’s Day weekend of 2014. I was on a plane heading back to New Orleans with a fresh draft of “Underworld” (p. 42), which is set in the basement of my grandparents’ house in Fairmount Heights, Maryland. It occurred to me that I had written quite a few poems about the neighborhoods on the border between Maryland and DC, where my family has lived for more than a century.
So I gathered up the poems I’d already written about the area, naïvely expecting to dust them for grammar errors and drop them into a basic layout. At last, I would have cashed in on that 10-year-old MFA degree that I’d suffered through two bitter Boston winters to obtain.
The structure was pretty straightforward: the first section, Retrograde, would take a look at some of the experiences that shaped me as I was growing up along this border; the second half, Return, would deal with my homecoming in my early 30s, revisiting some old issues and facing new ones.
But one poem, “Rift” (p. 32), threatened to derail the entire project. As the title implies, this poem – which I had first drafted way back in 2004 – exposed the gap between the child I had been and the woman I was trying to become. But ten years later, and largely on the other side of that gap, it was challenging to remember how that transitional moment felt. Several times, I considered just striking it from the book altogether. But my story seemed incomplete without it. And the months slid by…
Underworld
after "A Mother to Son"
take care, as you begin
to descend:
the first step wobbles
and will accelerate your slide
to the bottom if you lack
balance.
Otherwise, pockmarked concrete
roughly escorts naked palms
down the steep, narrow case to the rough
foundation where memories bounce
off low ceilings and dance
in shadows around the furnace.
a tumbling dryer conjures the essence
of an old woman trapped inside
her body in an upstairs bed until
echoes of her recitations disturb the girl
faking sleep inside you, afraid
to wake up inside a recurring nightmare
…life for me ain’t been no crystal stair…
and suddenly, you want to hang
crystals from the PVC pipes;
want to Google which color quartz
will absorb the pus trapped beneath old scars,
erase the fingerprint stains
from immature flesh and beam
your thoughts out of places so dark,
there ain’t neva been no light.
you are tired of picking
splinters, yanking tacks
like ticks from your bleeding
soles and wondering how she
managed to keep on climbing, turning
corners and reaching landings
on feet disfigured after walking miles
in someone else’s narrow shoes.
you duck to the height you stood
the day you discovered two abandoned bras
among the trash bags and spider webs –
still elastic enough to cap the mushrooms
blooming from the flooded plains below
your chin – and wish the washing machine
that has summoned you to this underworld
could bleach all the dirty laundry
you’ve collected in all the damp,
shadowy corners of which
this basement is neither first nor last.
Genesis
for Alvin Ailey and my neighbor,
Mrs. Shirley Childress Saxton
when the house lights darken
no one will notice
the red polish failing to halt
the runs in your borrowed pantyhose
or the lonely bus token tumbling
through the hole in your coat
but you will see
legs leaping through the void
lips stretching silence into melody
ancient fables that will outlive
this stage this building this field trip
years later
when your classmates’ value meals have been digested
their souvenir posters and T-shirts discarded
your void your silence will remember
will leap and stretch to breathe
words into another hungry soul
that will outlast even you
love offering
i got a hundred bank notes
to pour like rain
upon my inner child
cause my joy lives in her smile
she is my Best Friend Forever
so i lift her to my hip
and dance us through the streets
of every town where i plant my feet
poppa James gave her a new name
to override the shame
of sorrowful wandering
Setasha:
which is closer to Seshat
than anybody would expect
a Mississippi boy to get
princess of the Magulas:
all them goulash people
bleeding twelve-tribe
transatlantic gumbo
daughter of the holy ɔkra
returned from asamando
with ink-smeared palms
and a mouth full of metaphors
so i brought a fistful of cowries
to drop at her toeses
like the petals of roses
that abundance might greet us
while we chippin down di road
beating one more path
back to Mama Afrika
