Woodworking with Ashes

For Jackson, Mississippi

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

~John F. Kennedy

My city walks with a limp—

stiffens its neck against the pole of a crossed flag

prodding clouds above a Mississippi elementary school.

My city chuckles and makes hate sound civil,

throws a penny to champion the skeleton army

of our people

shooting our people

to shackle our people.

Children don’t understand the words black and white.

Girls at church call me light-skinned

and scold each other if one calls me white

like this half-empty glass of history’s milk

that drips justification

as if heritage were an excuse to build an empire on a graveyard.

Toss the remnants like confetti; say hope’s cremation is ancestral celebration.

It’s like we’re interrupting a funeral with complacency’s birthday party,

feeding egos like fattened pigs,

bred and farmed and cherry-picked for plump and slaughter,

rolling in slop of brutality’s leftovers and sucking juice

from bigotry’s full-course meal.

The ghosts here trample progress graveside,

stomp cut flowers, drink crumbled concrete like shaved ice

by trashcan firelight, play cards with men who sleep

on air vents under skyscrapers,

give them a dollar to buy a bottle

and a coat to brave the night.

Culture is subject to murals and graffiti-boarded buildings,

the fabled demise of Capitol Empire, destruction’s petty ashes.

Preacher says it is hard to hope in ruins,

worship in the armpit of this city,

this adolescent giant anxious for manhood,

if masculinity means belonging

and belonging requires bullets and bail funds and blood.

Nobody pays the light bill in this ash-ridden house,

but at least there’s flame in the hearth.

The children play gunfight in the church gymnasium.

I can’t explain poison in the water fountain or bulging floorboards.

A seven-year-old girl gives me the finger in exchange

for a piggyback ride.

I tell her I am disappointed,

I tell her I love her

and she doesn’t know what she did wrong.

I wonder 

if any of us are even trying to build anymore.

If Jesus really was a carpenter,

the Devil must be stuffing my city into an urn.