Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

even though White people couldn’t get your work for free, they did everything they could to avoid hiring you and paying you for it.

the trusty shooters,

Makes them feel like real men to see fear.

Simile

Simile

Simile

Haha ewww

I was ten then, and had already begun to see things that other kids didn’t,

Leonie got her thirteen-year-old son a baby shower cake.

Simile

No one but Kayla looks young.

There’s no happiness here.

I know what he is saying, like the birds I hear honking and flying south in the winter, like any other animal.

Gloria

her pink MEMA cottage

Simile

then I forgot.

that’s when Given came back.

Given

Mama

River.

Given-not-Given,

Given that’s been dead fifteen years now,

this chemical figment.

Haha

this loving across color lines was one of the reasons we became friends so quickly.

“You ever see things?” I say.

Haha

Haha

Bishop

unaware of the ease of it.

The self-satisfied beauty of it. I

Most days, Pop is a younger man.

Jojo is stuck for me at five.

everything about him upright.

Mama

Marie-Therese

Mami Wata

Growing old with my mouth twisted bitter at the taste of what I’d been accorded in the feast of life:

“I think it runs in the blood, like silt in river water.

Tante Rosalie,

“Marie-Therese herself could hear.

she might hear a multitude of voices ringing from any living thing,

the clearest voices sang

Given

what the world sings.

Haha

brought report cards home with more As and Bs than Cs:

Now he never calls me by anything but my name, and every time he says it, it sounds like a slap.

Haha