The Day After Christmas, Wilmington, N.C. 2008
By Linda Kendall-Hagan
Our house sits on the corner of Fifth and Dock
Outside my door it’s the 1930’s
I deck the porch with the extra holly and garland I lifted from the Weiss garbage pail
I tie blue crinoline bows and think how they hung uppity blacks on the trees here
Thoughts and tying ribbon drives my heart
Beating hard
The rope around his neck tied too tight
One black man hung all night three years ago from the Fifth St. Bridge
His Vincent Van Gogh shoes dangling above the white sand in the railroad tracks below
Widening my nostrils heavy horse breathing-like
I can still smell the ashes of Tara drifting over the Great Dismal Swamp to rest on the buttoniers
bobbing on the lapels of the white boys at the Azalea Festival
Daytime, our steam sauna-laden backyard-air twinkling in the mist
Year of hours pass awakening the dawn of night
Broken by the streetlights in the mist, their light-streaming tentacles sharp as machetes lop off the thick southern evening just as the machetes once lopped off black limbs right on the corner where our house sits
Right where one-eyed Simon sits
begging every Sunday for a quarter or an extra hush puppy
Our backyard is stuffed with the kind of 1960 Volkswagen bus I always wanted
to pull a Michigan-Sedona-Haight-Ashbury sleep fest after smoking san-simeon in the mid-day sun
I dreamed of painting it with orange and blue paisleys being fucked by smiling dolphins with pretty pink bellies
their penises standing straight up poking through little rainbow stars.
And then there’s dented old SUV
Dr. Tom Smithers sleeps with his dirty-sweatband fishing hat on to cover his eyes from the flashing dew teeth hanging from the Spanish moss
his wife locks the door if he comes home too late from the Barbary Coast downtown saloon.
After hurricanes copperheads and rat snakes slither through the corn fields,
Their five hearts pumping like the ignorance in Wilmington