Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead. —from One Writer’s Beginnings, by Eudora Welty

This spring is stubborn; most days, it won’t make way for warmth. The chill stays like water in a bad-draining tub.

Before she was more gone than here. Before she started snorting crushed pills. Before all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee.

But it was impossible to not hear the animals, because I looked at them and understood, instantly, and it was like looking at a sentence and understanding the words, all of it coming to me at once.

Sometimes he’ll tell me the same story three, even four times. Hearing him tell them makes me feel like his voice is a hand he’s reached out to me, like he’s rubbing my back

The dream of her was the glow of a spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming. It was the only way I could untether my spirit from myself, let it fly high as a kite in them fields. I had to, or being in jail for them five years woulda made me drop in that dirt and die.

she opens the windows even though the wet spring night seeps into the house like a fog.

so happy that my insides felt like a full ditch ridden with a thousand tadpoles.

My stomach turned like an animal in its burrow, again and again, seeking comfort and warmth before sleep.

Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants.

Saw past skin the color of unmilked coffee, eyes black, lips the color of plums, and saw me. Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.

He matched the sky, which hung low, a silver colander full to leak. It was drizzling.

a whip of longing, like a cut power line set to sparking, jumps behind my ribs.

There’s things that move a man. Like currents of water inside. Things he can’t help. Older I got, the more I found it true.

Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up. And it could be something simple as sex, or it could be something as complicated as falling in love, or it could be like going to jail with your brother, thinking you going to protect him.”

Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.

This the kind of world, Mama told me when I got my period when I was twelve, that makes fools of the living and saints of them once they dead. And devils them throughout.

When we pull off the highway and onto a back road, the sky is dark blue, turning its back to us, pulling a black sheet over its shoulder.

“It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.”

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time.

Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.

We hold hands and pretend at forgetting.