i
By evening I-85 south was a glossy tongue
and the churning clouds over
Greenville swallowed the sunset,
a collision of archetypal pain
and the lightning of the unknowable
facts, the near future. Suci’s fourteen and terrified
of weather, I think, because she thinks
it means what happens outside happens
inside, too. Or, vice versa. Weather
in a house can low-pressure and go lower
and people don’t really know how
low until it’s your own lightning
and facts and no one in the house can breathe;
people squall each other, unknowable,
and tornado the plaster walls away;
she’s watched some of that weather
happen and so it’s probably
my fault that she’s as scared as she is of the sky.
ii
6 AM I drive alone through a sunrise-storm,
headed north near Anderson, a fog of tiny
twisters steams from the pavement and I aim
the car through NPR news of another racist
murder, this time worse, a massacre, really,
and the search for the shooter. My stupid shock.
I can’t believe I believe I can’t believe this.
I can’t believe I left a little brown girl, my daughter,
not two days ago, on the other side of South
Carolina, without a thought—a common-enough
thought in our family—of the day which is
every day when the room which is every room
becomes the room on the NPR morning
news and the stupidity of my shock lists itself
in all the eyes staring at all the shoes
and all the hands hanging at all the sides, the listless
-ness of people arriving too late, again.
The steam comes off this Southern road
like a fever and I finger my iPhone until McCoy
Tyner fingers the trilling behind Trane
and Garrison’s thumb threatens to blow out
the bass cones and, as much as it steams
like “Alabama,” I aim the car at the sound, “After the Rain.”
iii
Sunčana clutches her pillow and distracts us
both tracing Justin Timberlake’s career
backward across the low ceiling of clouds.
The deluge begins, again, the sky opens
as it promised it would. The semis flash hazards
and everything everywhere crawls slower
and closer. ’N Sync scrolls across the Bluetooth
readout, Suci sings along and I think about
my friend Jeff ’s neighbor, Terry, a Harlem barber
gentrified off Lenox Avenue and now living
with his wife and kids in the Bronx. One night
last summer Terry told me how he loves
to visit his family in South Carolina. Yeah? Yeah,
it’s not like up here, man, down there, say
we go out to eat, I sit in the restaurant with my gun
on my hip. I look around me, another man,
even a police, and I think, ok, you’ve got yours
and I’ve got mine. Now I can’t see what I’m aiming
this car at, I can’t see four inches,
all the eighteen wheelers have dissolved,
red sponges blink and stream
up the windshield. I’ve got my daughter back
with me in this mad fact near the future,
where she should be, and now here we are at least
for a little while. I mean, yes, we’re scared
but we’re alright. Unarmed in this minute, this life.
And I see Terry nod his chin up, and smile,
his thick arm extended, palm up, onto
the table, showing his tattoo:
a precision clippers, an edger, cord coiled around his arm.
You know, he says, down there in South
Carolina, it’s in the open, it’s they got there’s I got mine. And I feel free.
from Let it Be BrokeFind more by Ed Pavlic at the library
Copyright © 2020 Ed Pavlic
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.