Sylvia Fox

In Memory Of ___

rippling, hallucinatory sunsets like bonfires,

and oil slick black sand off the Gulf of Mexico 

under our fingernails as we dig play graves to bury each other 

inescapably in the gritty feeling of home. 

Every memory I have is flammable

and sounds like two things:

funerals and children’s games,

jokes and a cry for help,

thunderstorm gunshot

cicada wings cricket legs

gun hand hand head

wind in dry leaves an accident

suicide cars on the highway–

homesick is a violent streak in my molars like 

a screaming infected deep tissue rot.

My mouth, homesick, is just a graveyard, 

a history museum, an archive–

anywhere 

with space for ghosts or records 

or a written account of a mouth full of blood,

homesick, I grind my teeth in my sleep,

I smell smoke,

I’ve been putting oil in my hair for years,

swam in oceans sick with gasoline,

my sunsets are flammable, endless dry-brush horizons,

sick, home sounding like

the difference between an uncle and a funeral

is the direction he points the gun.

Americana

I am the granddaughter of a black man who nearly killed himself with a pistol, who pulled the dash open with his youngest daughter, my mother, in the passenger seat and said, I can’t take it anymore. Sometimes, between the worlds I hold in my body, I find only chains and broken contracts. These, and the hummingbird. I am in the passenger seat when my mother grips me into silence by my arm as we wait for the cop who’s just pulled us over, she tells me through her white knuckles, survive. We, from a long line of survivors, and she means quietly prostrate, yes sirs and no sirs. But I am the daughter of an immigrant now, have seen the hummingbird on two continents, looked straight down the barrel and dared the past, do it.