Toombs, Georgia

There are many clues to where we are:
Pine trees lined like corn stalks, onions
and pecans fed on sand, cotton fields
colored like cranberry, flecked harsh
with childhood. The people, white,
withered, trail to baptisms

and sermons, pray for good harvests.
They recite Little Black Sambo
to their grandchildren, even
after the town library has banned it.
I pick at porch cracks under my feet,
imagine Vidalia fingers reaching
from the ground to encircle mine.

I, too, was grounded in grade school
for letting black girls braid my
hair, traipsing my fingers over their cheeks
and ears past my mother’s objections.
Those girls later told me, white people,
they only learn the chorus of the song.

Lullaby

I’m starting to figure me out, starting
to whisper, lullaby, lullaby, lullaby,
on the steps of this house, where I played
jacks with girls of the long ponytail
and absurd name, like Tami or Treni.
Absurd always ends in i, which is the end
of lullaby, and the beginning of irises,
which bloom this year with a fierceness.

I’m starting to hate my shoes, toe worn through,
and their scruff on the concrete in that open
vowel way, while the sinking sun splits
the roofs of houses into geometrics, trails
the iron fence like a tin cup along the ribs
of a jail cell or monkey bar. I watch it dip
into treetops, graze my thumb over the concrete
where, even now, I swear I see the chalk.