Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

like a muddy puddle

when she laughed, the skin at the sides of her eyes looked like an elaborate fan.

Her lips, which were always so full and soft, especially when I was a girl, when she kissed my temple. My elbow. My hand. Even sometimes, after I had a bath, my toes. Now they’re nothing but differently colored skin in the sunken topography of her face.

Given said he was going up to the Kill to party with his White teammates, and Pop cautioned him against it: They look at you and see difference, son. Don’t matter what you see.

He rode with me to the house, and I left him sitting in the passenger seat as the sun softened and lit the edges of the sky, rising.

the only thing that spoke to me in that moment and told me what he said without words: I love you, boy. I love you.

straight and wispy as Misty’s. Misty dyed the tips of Leonie’s hair the same blond as hers a few weeks

Leonie’s car,

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

adults. But if there was nothing else, she said

had carved a rose that looked like a muddy puddle,

I just can’t read muddy puddle, even in a serious book line this one, and not think of Peppa Pig.

shaking his head, reaching under

That mean

The tears and the ocean and the blood could burn a hole through the nose. The saltwater woman, the woman Leonie crawls toward over the rocks as she says, “Mama, Mama,” looks at Leonie with so much understanding and forgiveness and love that I hear the song again; I know that singing. I have heard it from the golden place across the waters. A great mouth opens in me and wails; I am an empty stomach. The scaly bird lands on the windowsill and caws.

“That’s what I said,” Richie says, so low his voice could be the brush of my hand across my face, Pop’s finger along his eyebrow.

She bares her teeth in something like a smile, something like a rictus.

Rictus - A fixed grimace

I hear Pop through the door, hear his voice threading through the keyhole.

Reoccurring reference to Keyhole

The boy floats and wanders. Still stuck.

Until I see the boy laying, curled into the roots of a great live oak, looking half-dead and half-sleep, and all ghost. “Hey,” Richie says.

“There’s so many,” Richie says. His voice is molasses slow.

tignons,

A piece of cloth worn as a turban headdress by Creole women

the dead, to find Pop, holding Kayla. They shine bright as the ghosts in the dark.

Her eyes Michael’s, her nose Leonie’s, the set of her shoulders Pop’s, and the way she looks upward, like she is measuring the tree, all Mam.

But something about the way she stands, the way she takes all the pieces of everybody and holds them together, is all her. Kayla.

Kayla hums over my shoulder, says “Shhh” like I am the baby and she is the big brother, says “Shhh” like she remembers the sound of the water in Leonie’s womb, the sound of all water, and now she sings it. Home, they say. Home.