On the football field - - - For Tito
Huddled together, they transform, a saint's flag, blue and white. Boys become
Catholic fists, set to pummel each other into the burning belief that comes from a
kind of flagellation. Somehow catechism and all its mysteries link to football
plays, ever the push forward, the faith that someone will catch and run. My
brother slides into his position, a defensive tackle. Though small, he is built
sturdy. He carries "The Beast" as his nickname. He devours, claws, tramples
down. In this game, the score is tight. 20 to 14, the other team just a touchdown
away from winning. Time ticks on. The boys lock up, foot soldiers on either
side. The jeers begin. That your mother over there? Jumping up and down,
looks just like a monkey. Another chimes in with sound. My brother's lurch
forward soon follows. Off sides. They line up again. Your sister is such a pretty
piece of ass. Those babies would be fun to shoot. My brother begins to cry
beneath his helmet. He is ten, if that, at the time. Where the fuck did you come
from with a nigger family? And then the spit, more spit, he cannot wipe away.
The play begun he sails to show them he is still steel. He tosses his whole body
into tackling, one boy after another. When the teams lock up, we off the field do
not know why, just see the play has stopped, the game is over and my brother is
jammed in the middle. We can not see the punches from both sides. All my
mother knows is my brother weeping off the field, throwing his helmet down
and saying, Never again. The coach will call, Boys will be boys. You can't let him
quit. We need him to which she responds,You can't protect him out there, and
he won't tell me what's happening. My son says he doesn't want to play. I
won't force him. That was not the end of the fights. I thought he would be a
priest someday, that gentle. The boys made him believe in something different,
that his fists had more power than God.
Appalachian scenes in a family's life
Cheryl has dropped the oranges,
but they do not thud against the tile.
Shadows above and below
cushion them silent in space.
do you believe in God?
Kelly turns the knobs with their triple folds of metal
hard into scald and light into frozen lake.
She has never known a tin-roof rain,
warm like piss but clean.
She turns the cold down and steps
into a shower of dull flame.
there are less and less birds
Jim Pete drives through the mountains:
Jutting cliffs cut against steel-spun nets
that hold boulders close. A thousand
glimmers of green rise and fall into a swoop
of valley. In his heavy truck, loaded
with Pepsi bounty, he measures the curves,
judges them well enough to fly and not.
all these flowers fastened to trees
dead to what grows
A thin mist glazes over Cheryl's eyes.
A figure, garbed in a thin house dress,
forms above the sun-glow of the fruit. Granny
has come to visit – she has been dead
for twenty years – a blood speck in her eye.
outside it has begun to rain
Her hand suds up the body with her own
soap. She glories in the proprietary,
title to a bar no other body has known.
A seductress caress, she rides it up and down.
Her silk-sud lover discovers
the lump before her hand.
child eyes grow into large, new moons,
eager to splash dark waters
Jim Pete parks the car, walks up the front door steps,
places his keys on a hook he will forget,
grabs a six-pack for the first hour.
A football game will flicker and drone soon.
He settles in to wait, a grandchild close
to fetch more beer, to play puppy for a sip.
remember when Kelly was here
Cheryl has dropped the oranges.
The summer birds pause their songs,
while in her ears a buzz
transforms into a splitting scream.
impossible happens every day
Beneath her armpit, in the rise
to the nipple, a rock nestles hard.
Her skin becomes steely,
holding in what she would wish out.
Her breath catches first on shower curtain
hooks, those pink and plastic rungs,
and then again on the doctor's tongue,
forming the words while she howls.
are boulders the cancers of mountains
Somewhere men must play football,
grip hard to bodies and pads like shields.
They must grunt and bellow, fly and fall,
shatter the field as if it was glass.
Jim Pete cannot find the game on television,
all of the world blurred. A face like his mother's,
like his daughter's, glints from static as he skims
the channels. No beer can clear the stations.
No Pepsi can sweeten the wait.
His wife has dropped the oranges,
and they have not hit the floor for months.
Kelly will never know a rain
other than that which seeps onto her casket.
The questions and visions all seem
like two streams pooling into murky water.
Jim Pete weeps, silent in front of the television,
everyone asleep.
Lately I've grown accustomed - From Amiri Baraka
to the prickle of ivy poison
needling its way across the skin
each time our thighs touch in the night.
You caress my face, a reflex of waking, but still
hellfire pinches and devil-shadows dance
at the points of my eyes.
You must know I believe
in angels. My father once considered laying his own
bone tracks for a train. A woman jumped before him.
This morning I found my wrists again,
but you held my hands.
Raina J. León, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in The Externalist, The Sixers Review, The Cherry Blossom Review, Natural Bridge, African American Review, OCHO, Spindle Magazine, Black Arts Quarterly, Poem.Memoir.Story, Womb, Boxcar Poetry Review, Salt Hill Journal, Xavier Review, MiPoesias, Torch, Poetic Voices without Borders, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade, Growing Up Girl: An Anthology of Voices from Marginalized Spaces, AntiMuse, Farmhouse Magazine, Furnace Review, Constellation Magazine and Tiger's Eye Journal among others. Her first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols, was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book Poetry Prize (2005) and the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize (2006). It was published in 2008.. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review. She headed the High School Literacy Project at the University of North Carolina and is currently teaching English and Spanish at an American high school in Germany. For more on Raina Leon, visit www.rainaleon.com.