Still Can't Do My Daughter's Hair by William Evans

Author:William Evans [Evans, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-943735-34-1
Publisher: Button Poetry
Published: 2017-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE HOMEOWNERS’ ASSOCIATION WON’T LET US GROW BLACKBERRIES IN THE BACKYARD

but I remember the summer when my voice

buried the boy I had been and I spent suns

in three acres of thorns at my grandmother’s

home, where the blackberries visited each July

just like her cancer. I held my weathered

and woven basket, the splintered fangs

invading my palms. My grandmother never

allowed me to pick the berries myself—

If the berries be red or purple, you just leave

them be. They ain’t ripe yet. and I knew

she meant that I was done hanging with the older

boys who lived around the corner, their car

loud and alive, a thicket of smoke rising

from the doors. Grandma knew the blade

of me, knew if I could not tongue the seeds

from my teeth, I would find something

sharper. Once, one of those boys disrespected

her, and she let the pies burn in the oven

while she went outside to mark him, her palms

still stained with the morning’s pickings.

That September, the cancer dragged grandma

to new hauntings. White men showed up

to her home in bulldozers and their engine

smoke swallowed the years. When they

poured the concrete over the fields, I knew

it was a tomb for the man I might have been,

for the fable that what we own belongs to us,

and even the splinters I held were not mine to keep.

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