Smote. James Kimbrell

saved me from my youth

      I love kibbeh and the swamp

      I love the heat

      O hellish dome as soon as I could

      I packed my junk and was gone

      gone in my ragged out Plymouth Belvedere

      with its push button transmission

      and sawed-off seatbelts

      my face stinging like a stuck voodoo doll

      red with the turpentine curse of that place

      I especially did not love

      on that particular day the Sergeant Major in the meeting

      of non-commissioned officers

      scheduling guard drills around MLK’s birthday

      says shoot six more

      we’ll take the whole week off

       —oooh this sure is a tell-all!—

      well yes though I don’t dare tell C. Leigh

      after drill when we’re heading to his place

      in the old neighorhood

      where we’ll eat a free bucket of chicken because Monica still works at Popeye’s

      and we’re going to watch Prince videos

      and not drink beers

      because for whatever reason we’re both sober

      and on our way

      everyone stares us down

      like the only time they saw a black and a white guy

      in a car together was when

      they were cops

      and I tell C. Leigh a dream I have betimes

      I’m back at our old house on Hooker Street

      always a black family surprised to see whitey

      and I’m so white in this dream

      you can barely see me

      white as a polar bear’s pillow case

      white as the ear fuzz

      of the great Johnny Winter

      but they see me and I see them seeing me

      I say back then my bed was behind the table

      here’s the notch I cut with a steak knife

      when I was three

      and for the first time—eyes wide—they believe me

      the little girl her hand on her hip

      says let me guess whitebread

       grew up poor

       wants to do some good

       just what we need

       Starbucks!

      I say we were so poor I still get nervous in Starbucks

      boo fricking hoo she says you still white

       white as Gods white-ass golf balls

      I say shoot me already

      at which point her mother brings the gun

      when she pulls the trigger the confederate flag pops out

      the mother says just kidding you want some dinner

      and this time when she shoots

      the table is covered

      with turnips cornbread little cups

      of mayonnaise colored pudding

      what you looking at she says better eat your dinner

      and the three of us say an honest grace

      grateful uneasy

      Lord we say

       we need wings to match the other wings

       we don’t have

       we need a bubbling we can hold

       Yahweh Hot Rod Sky Talker

       talk to us Mister Master

       Cloud Cork of the Transcendent Cava

       Amen and Amen

      but when we open our eyes

      the food has vamoosed

      and we all cry out stumbling in that wilderness

      if we had soup we could have soup and crackers

      if we had crackers . . . but of course

      we don’t because love comes on like a weight

      and a claw and a sucker-punch

      and in the case of Mississippi

      gateway to this our under-country

      history is the dish that leaves us skinny

      petrified forest of narcotic tornadoes

      Scratch’s bullwhip

      devil’s dancefloor

      crackhead’s cruise ship

      backwoods Medusa with a kudzu afro

      whose green gaze

      sprouts branches from the fluted

      columns of Beauvoir

      O hold my hand brother

      before we return