L.Renée’s three poems were selected as this year’s second place winner for The Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize.
the bone carrier
my granddaddy used
to tell his children
if somebody’ll bring
a bone, they’ll take
a bone,
which is to say
gossips always have
need for fresh meat
don’t matter which part,
or put another way
talk with bad intentions
calcifies like any good
femur, the longest
and strongest bone
in the human
body that fastens hip
joint to knee joint,
source of any good
juke joint gyrate
where a good girl
might’ve heard some bad
rhymes spinning off
the vinyl record
of some jive turkey’s
lips and let her hips
fall into the cradle
of that music
and let her knees
drop down beneath
that alter to praise
its fine symmetry,
how everything squares
perfectly when you add
moonshine and moonlight
and guitar strings
striking chords
so deeply in a body
so filled with aching
they feel like nerve-
endings firing
the kind of heat
you don’t know
if you can stand,
which makes you want
to stand with it
that much more,
hold the electric fantastic
in the fine circuits
of your diaphysis,
and maybe reach
for the bright plumage
of that jive cock’s neck
to stabilize the shaking
pulsing now through
your marrow,
which some unkind observer
might call stock tomorrow,
carrying your midnight
bone to a neighbor’s front
porch talkin bout how
your family’s good broth
done turned sour.
The Unmapped Place
Here where the ruby-throated cardinal
dips her beak in a cool blue pool,
then flies high to perch her soprano
on a leafy limb that boosts her trilling,
here where song can tell you what
to mourn and what to praise, where many
a day they be the same, grief and gratitude
long-distant cousins, where miracles aren’t
welded to stained glass but dive off
lapels framing the one white polyester
suit Mother Franklin sweats through every
first Sunday, singing beneath the sagging
church roof, the cave of her throat reaching
deeply into a pit of sorrows none of us can
see but know are there, pulling up notes
like buckets sloshing with well water,
well-watered tears that drench the ears
with sudden chills, the witnessing of not
knowing how she got over, how she made it
from one Sunday to another Sunday
in her right mind, when the worrying
over what she could afford to lose,
who she could not afford to lose,
consumed every waking thought,
until the words gurgled in that gulf
unintelligible shouts that grown folks
called catching the Holy Ghost,
hand made holy in the reaching,
the lowering down to the sunken place
that has no bottom, no boundary, no way
of knowing how close to the getting
over you are, your proximity to that
opening that lifts you high, the invisible
phantom limb suddenly a Go-Go Gadget
Hand boosting the body out and up,
slackened from the muck, the spiritual
body far-flung, sprung loose enough
to survey the impossibility of earth,
the red soles of brown feet that molded
red clay, how those souls birthed paths
with nothing more than blood and foot
calluses, blessed assurances, how the leaves
exhaled clearings from their native trees
rooted deep in dirt before well-built wells,
waiting for us to remember our way
back to to those kin, like Mother Franklin,
back to the unmapped place where they wait
dwelling on perches we still can sing from —
Tradition
By Saturday afternoon the stovetop needed rest,
but Mama said there’s no rest for the weary.
By then her hands had already pressed
spatulas into skillets of sizzling bacon,
cheesy scrambled eggs, and Granny Smiths
softening their sour peels in a pool
of butter, brown sugar, a cloud
of cinnamon and nutmeg crackling.
This was our tradition. Full bellies
after cleaning the apartment until it reeked
of Clorox bleach, until windows were Windexed
almost as transparent as air, but ours
tinged fake pine tart as if cardboard
trees hung bright green from the newly
glossed wood furniture. And still, her hands
pressed on, untangling my two-week-old braids
soiled with playground sweat, dandelion dust,
fuzzy wayward wisps left by an Ohio wind’s
kiss as I flung my blue-barretted head back
to predict the precise velocity
my hand needed to pummel a tetherball
so fast a sucka kid wouldn’t have time enough
to interfere with its perfect spiral,
like the curled hair I longed for. Mama scratched
my scalp clean with French-tipped nails
in the kitchen sink bubbles,
foaming away stories of my days
she always asked about. I sat in the back
of our 1987 Ford Mercury after Latchkey
and her long paralegal shifts, the navy box
on wheels barely putt-putted us home, exhaust
letting out black plumes of smoke and gasps
like gun shots. Mama pressed her foot
down on the pedal to carry us to the weekend
when she cranked up the boombox loud
enough to hear Mary J. Blige crooning
about “Real Love” over the hair dryer
and shellacked my fro with scoops of Royal
Crown petroleum: dressing down the full shaft
of my fluff, wielding the same oak-barreled
pressing comb my Grandmama heated on top
an old coal stove in the kitchen of her mining
camp shack telling my Mama, as my Mama tells me
now, to hold down my ear when she hovers near
my temples, so scorching brass teeth
don’t take a bite of my barely-worn skin.
L. Renée is a poet and nonfiction writer from Columbus, Ohio. She is a third-year MFA candidate at Indiana University, where she has served as Nonfiction Editor of Indiana Review and Associate Director of the Indiana University Writers’ Conference. Her work, nominated for Best New Poets and Pushcart Prize awards, has been anthologized in Women of Appalachia Project’s Women Speak: Volume 6. Her poems have also been published or forthcoming in Tin House Online, Appalachian Review, Obsidian, Poet Lore, the minnesota review, Southern Humanities Review, New Limestone Review, Sheila-na-gig Online and elsewhere.Her writing has received support from Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and Oak Spring Garden Foundation. L. Renée believes in Black joy, which she occasionally expresses on Instagram @lreneepoems