Green Linden Press

Short History of the Black Man

He was pure color all the way to the bone, a quiet seed in an empty jar. High-yellow wife, a taste for bootleg gin, fingers like wintered twigs. Once told me, most every memory has a bird in it—inside the house, outside the house, soaring past restaurant windows where coloreds had their own special seats. This memory has a butterfly. A monarch he saw as a child and didn’t forget—one wing stuck inside the chrysalis, the urgent drag and jig. A trembling. It never got free. He was black his whole life. Don’t laugh. Let the truth of that sink in like a bullet. He lived like a bird flying straight to a window he thought was air.

(This poem is available in our store  
as a broadside signed by the author.)

Cracker

3. (often offensive) another term for poor white

And that must be why when mother kissed my lips goodnight, that salty taste of her stained me with stars. On her head, a crown of fire I longed to wear. Next to my father, black as black men can be, she was diamond white, though plain as a communion wafer. When great-grandmother, grown-up girl of two cotton- picking slaves, called her Cracker! my mother crumbled as if by fist, as if thrown to the ground for mice or footfalls.