I Turned Around

TOWARD THE END of the breakfast shift, I was standing in line with a buddy at Hardee's, examining the menu, when suddenly I felt a sheet of sandpaper chafe my tricep.

Before I could turn around-

"You need to stay out of the sun," a stranger's voice twanged like a banjo. "You gittin too dark."

*

About five-and-a-half feet above the floor, it was the face of a White man, 70 -or-so years old. His teeth, riddled with holes, were the color of spoiled milk. If I would have leaned in closer, his breath would have stank. The sandpaper I'd felt was his right hand.

Is to touch, to possess?

He was grinning.

"You gittin a lot darker than your friend here," he said, as he held up MyFriendHere's buttery arm for comparison. MyFriendHere's plastered smile strained with disgust.

As the stranger released my arm, I beheld the full picture: the gray wisps impossibly stretched across his skull, the roughened palms of a lifetime working outside, his khaki skin creeping closer toward the color of dirt, the bent back leaning day-by-day closer to the ground. I beheld this man, an elder to my own parents, and looked into his shining eyes, blue and bright with the electricity of connection.

Something shot through me.

And so I said back to him, the only thing I could have possibly said:

"Yeah, yesterday we all spent a lot of time out in the sun."

And I turned around.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED #31: The Telling

31. Tell __i__

A: __'_ a __tt__ __g_r_
I: I mean there's ___ing __g_r_ and then there's-
A: I mean __g_r_
I: Well, how do you know?
A:
I:
A:
I:
A: Cause _'_ ___g_r_ _o_

Note to a 12 Year-Old Wordsmith at Henderson Middle School

Dear K_lly:

Your third eye sees things which others cain’t. Your pen reveals all to this world.

Who sees hair moving “like a golden sun… like 50 golden daisies?”

Who makes oceans turn into marbles? And eyes turn into oceans?

You do.

You are a poet.

What you have cannot be taught. Nor can it be purchased. What you have is Imagination.

Run wild with it, K_lly. Never let anyone steal it. It is what makes you special.

Write on. Write on. Write until your insides become the outside.

Write until it shakes.

Write until it shines.

Beware the Dog

I TRY TO SHARE ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS WELL AS disappointments in this space. Here's a minor downer.

Usually, I don't sweat rejection slips, but this particular one keeps growling at me from the nightstand. About a year ago, Cave Canem, America's premiere organization committed to the cultivation of new voices in Black poetry, sent out a call for poetry submissions about 'the Southern experience and its influence in contemporary poetry.'

Southern. Experience. Poetry. This has my name written all over it! I thought as I licked my submission envelope shut.

True, I expected that the anthology would attract a deluge of Black southern poets (and I personally know quite a few excellent ones), but I thought that surely, in my six page submission, that there would have been something that would have struck a sweet spot with the editor(s).

Apparently not.

The rejection letter was polite enough. In fact, the rejection made me respect Cave Canem all the more. But this is an occasion for some serious introspection: If I, a contemporary Black southern poet, can't cut it for an anthology focusing specifically on contemporary Black southern poetry, then that says something.

Loud. Even if I don't hear it, I can feel it.

Something's stirring...

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED #38: Big Tipper

............................................

Defying a myth, or

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED #38: BIG TIPPER

She was sweet. She was cute. So I said, What the heck?

38. Give a waiter/waitress a tip larger than the price of the food I ordered.