Ryan Lally

We who take the beaten track,
Trying to appease
Hearts near breaking with their lack,
We need elegies.
–– Countee Cullen, “Threnody for a Brown Girl”

Because I want to see your faces as more
Than a genre of pain and smoldering dreams,
I’ll hold my hand to your pulses and speak
Your resonances to the stars
That shined on all of us.
History calls us to slow burning embers
And the placid riots against the body,
The absolute zero of fact, so here it is:
We have darkened the native pathways
Of broken bodies and human life
And we have soaked our feet in dead gray coals
And become old and forgetful
With memory like a two lane road––repaved into disbelief.
You crave a fact:
Well, beneath my feet lay the unknown
Ashes of those who breathed smoke to protect white air.
We bottled our histories with silence
And bounced them in the boughs of young poplar trees
To whisper for the dead disposed.
Yes, it’s true, we need elegies
For us bodies still walking the masquerade,
The ones with bones collecting dust
On our mantles. Yes, it’s true too,
I cannot forget you.

 Issue 10, 2018, pg. 20

Frederick-Douglass Knowles II

He hung from an old hickory tree along the Mississippi
A uppity Nigguh seared in a Red Summer flame
His Oh Lawd! forsaken for a swig of moonshine
A sun god wrung for eyeballin’ the sun

A uppity Nigguh seared in a Red Summer flame
His innard ate earth under a disemboweled sky
A sun god wrung for eyeballin’ the sun
Charred loins stick-poked by children cloaked in Christianity

His innard ate earth under a disemboweled sky
Mothers cast quilts riverside to keep close eye
Charred loins stick-poked by children cloaked in Christianity
Minions mimicking their ghost-hooded inheritance

Mothers cast quilts riverside to keep close eye
A crow psalmed the blues to a metronome of cracked bone
Minions mimicking their ghost-hooded inheritance
While I gripped my shiv in the shallows of a stream

A crow psalmed the blues to a metronome of cracked bone
He hung from an old hickory tree along the Mississippi
While I gripped my shiv in the shallows of a stream
His Oh Lawd! forsaken for a swig of moonshine

Issue 10, 2018, pg. 19

Frederick-Douglass Knowles II

I enter Cedar Grove’s office
and extend the slit of sunlight
peering through a cracked door
lock eyes with an old sexton
inscribing names of fallen souls.
I stammer hello. Utter the silent
“K” in my last name. He flips
through an index of ancient files
brushes a layer of cumulus dust
from 1974, and engraves 56 R7 HK
onto the yellow surface of a Post-It.

I thank him for his time, slowly
exit his office and descend down
the hillside studying each pillar
in search of my father’s marker.
I pause in front of a pallid row
of ancient stone, flap the Post-It
over a cluster of ants, to unveil
the worn plaque of a Negroid
sailor. His last name mine.

Clouded tears recall the legacy
of an Airman recruit rigging chutes
for the USS Wright. A Native Son
swaying to Coltrane in Korean cafes
with cinnamon women, who never
choked on the plume of black smoke
sewn into his skin. Debating Truman’s
liberation of Yongsan that would churn
5 million Seouls into Korean dust.

Issue 10, 2018, pg. 18