Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

Everything hurts.

A line sizzles from my toes to my belly and up to the back of my head,

And then it goes, and I’m static, still, a depression.

a ...

like Pop’s singing it.

after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things:

Now they’re nothing but differently colored skin in the sunken topography of her face.

“You love who you love. You do what you want.”

I know that my mother is dying.

Given

Pop cautioned him against it: They look at you and see difference, son. Don’t matter what you see. It’s about what they do,

Big Henry

Given ignored Pop. Late that winter, in February, he decided to go hunting with the White boys up in the Kill.

Michael’s cousin

Haha - uh-oh

Simile

Big Joseph had been sheriff for years:

You fucking idiot, he’d said. This ain’t the old days.

He was supposed to lose, Pa.

Hunting accident,

Hunting accident,

Hunting accident,

in court,

I wonder if Mama heard some humming from the cousin’s bad eye, some feelings of remorse in its wandering, but she looked through him, tears leaking down her face the whole time.

Marie-Therese—she

Tante Vangie.

Dream I can see Given again,

He tried to talk to me but I couldn’t hear him, and he just got more and more frustrated.

Spider-bound: web-blind.

Simile extended

the color of unmilked coffee,

Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.

Leonie won’t give him half to replace it.

So I said what I could.

all the animals I thought I could understand were quiet, subdued under the gathering spring rain.

Leonie’s forged car insurance papers.

the chemical burns I’d see later,

So much could be happening in those trees.

Her story may be sympathetic, but does she even know how mean she is to her kids, how she puts them in danger? Does she have any self-awareness? Question

Simile extended

the talk

Simile

light from the kitchen casting a glowing doormat.

Piece his paragraphs together like puzzles.

She’s so literary.

I was only five when he got arrested,

I was nineteen, and he was twenty-nine.

River

Philomène.

getting grown means learning

simple as sex,