Three Poems
Three Poems by Candace G. Wiley things to teach my son Tulsa, June 1, 1921 how to hold the line at first street. no escape how to tramp backyard gardens how to spot hiding places—attics, chicken coops, long tablecloths how to force-march men how to command your peers loot before you shoot how a torch makes the cursive motion of a silent e on every doorstep and window. no escape loot before you flame how to stand back from kerosene puddles like piss after a romp, wide and wary of the fire how to recruit the police niggers who escape will bring reinforcements from okmulgee never let nobody see you flinch, son how to hold your bile in front of the boys. no escape always grab something nice for your mom and sister how bullets can disguise themselves as rose, as man, as sleep shoot the dogs. take the horses how to recruit the national guard how to move a piano how to find the good jewelry how to include women—as drivers, browsers, to hold the line at first street how to use trucks, boxcars, boats, to make bodies disappear the righteous rain of turpentine incendiaries, little black birds dropping from the sky how to recognize blackface and not shoot your own how to hide it if you do how to make a rose bloom in the mind of a nigger who shaped himself greek as a sigh the magic of making a person a fiction like israelites or the middle passage how to turn a people into myth Sarah Page, Who schooled you in the Incendiary Arts? Trained you to wield helplessness? You, 17, full of hip-switch and giggle adrenaline-high with the judgment of a matchbook. Who taught you the Craft of Damsel? How to snatch breath from the air? He grabbed your arm, not knowing it was made of fire and fuel. It’s since been a century fraught with reverbed 911 screams. Cities still burn. Your comfort still kills. Dear Neighbor, Mysteriously, unsigned warnings began to appear on the doors of homes and in an Okmulgee, Oklahoma . . . newspaper. These warnings prophetically announced the dire consequences that would befall African Americans who remained in Oklahoma after June 1, 1921. I’m pinning this to your door because I know these words will be lost to history. Let me confess. You take money from my community. You take our jobs. My little girl grows too much for shoes. My boy looks like your pickaninny should. He asked for your boy’s hand-me-downs. You undermine everything I teach them about the White Race. They get nigger diseases like scabies and I don’t know why. My wife compares me to you. My mother does, too. In you, I see my failures and I hate us for it. The big boys downtown see it, too. They can smell it on me. Despite this, I still own you. The sun goes down on Greenwood June 1st. Candace G. Wiley was born in South Carolina and is co-founding director of The Watering Hole, a nonprofit that creates Harlem Renaissance–style spaces in the contemporary South, and she often writes in the mode of Afrofuturism, covering topics from black aliens to mutants to mermaids. Her work has been featured in Best American Poetry 2015, Prairie Schooner, the Texas Review, and Jasper Magazine, among others. Wiley is now living, writing, and helping direct The Watering Hole from her new home in Tulsa. Photo by Melissa Lukenbaugh Author’s note: The epigraph to the poem “Dear Neighbor” comes from Hannibal B. Johnson’s 1998 book, Black Wall Street. COURTESY OF THE TULSA HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND MUSEUM POETRY WORLDLIT.ORG 59 ...
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