into ethanol. strip my mind of seconds and maddened sirens l
ike they did the space between your bedframe and the wall
your bedsheets your drawers.
teach me how to grind wailing streets and shattered street-lamps
mortar and pestle into litigation like they did your nacreous body. teach
me to glow like napalm bid my family love when I’m transformed air a
scent of daikon and duck soup.
I realize that a smile a wave a kiss—
open palms in choking daylight are not a promise
if the skin is not a pillar & that outside my cracked window are
officers blinking twice every tick of my grandfather clock’s hand. I collect
their gunshots like gumdrops for my daughter
& watch ashes rise like shadows like ghosts in the glint
of my tallow candle. did you notice our neighbor who buys me pretzels and runs
the corner store has dust on his doormat? she remarked, crumbs in her hair.
I realize when I armor her eyes
from a sky brimming with blood hanging heavy like a cut arm
on my pillow I am lying that when she stares in her seersucker sundress at
the flashing lights of the looming Atlanta skyline she is raised to be a city
backspace rather than shift chooses to
chew crab shells in the dark than to go
on the highway buries bodies like they did
your trembling hands than bury traditions.
at dusk, I knit together stories:
a toy gun, a phone, a DVD.
a cigarette, a car, a backpack.
a twenty dollar bill, a bed,
a cloudy Monday in May.
I weave the bruises the breaths of nurses and cashiers of children and fathers into flames—
I thread their smothered names into moonbeams tumbling through my blinds
a gleaming lighthouse found by following the wrinkled lines of trembling stretched palms
a lullaby disguised in the throttling silence only formed in the mouths by those who know.
Grandfather,
lift my voice as I fist for a population that yearns to be
Heard.
“Grandfather teach me how to make my blood run clear” extends commiseration to the black community for the unlawful, brutal killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and too many more through exploring the narrative of a speaker who, haunted by the loss of her grandfather, spots the motif of injustice embedded in a system that perpetuates tranquility upon a restless public and is in search of advice and validation. There is no such thing as unadulterated innocence. The speaker expresses initial oblivion, desperation, repentance and calls for immediate reform.