Ezekiel's Daughter

I sent my boy out
because I missed his voice.

I missed his voice
and watched Suzie swat the boy as he stood
outside the open louvers
allowing flies from the street’s filth to
breeze into the parlor.

The flies drifted into the golden plaster rosettes
as the boy listened
as I heard
“I got strawberries”
“I got blueberries”
the cries of the street
vendors of the morning.

The cries of the morning circled me like flies
as I sat at table with my chicory
with my cream kissed oatmeal
and no bread

“No bread today” the boy said
returned now standing at my side.
“The bread boy’s run off”

The bread nigger’s run off and I slap him—
my boy—
less he get similar ideas
to fly away.

3/13/1847: Brown, the enslaved bread seller, made his escape in 1847. pic.twitter.com/PvzuLCvC60

— Freedom On The Move (@fotmproject) April 11, 2018

Freeport is aflame
Rivulets of blue run from the jailhouse
to the general store
where my hands were bound
for being so Black
that my color swallowed all of their fears.
Steams of red race from the sugarcane
to the brickyards to the steamboats at the docks
limiting my escape
because freedom is a flame
with no respect for fairness.

On January nineteenth, the temperature was chilly but dry
That morning, the pecan trees were arthritic brown fingers
that pointed in every direction
even ones that led nowhere but open
water. The pine around the farm had been thinned
by his own hands that fall. They offered no cover. The overcast
sky was shackle-grey. So dark that when Cato raised his wrists
he could not see the ugly chain that usually connected
his left to his right. And so released, he too slipped
into the misty land between bound
and free.