“Understand me. What I am here for is to tell you stories you may not want to hear. What I am here for is to rescue my dead. And to scare hell out of you now and then. I was raised Baptist, I know how to do that.” – Dorothy Allison

Emphasis mine.

**

Seriously Dangerous

The evening begins
with low whispers through kudzu,
then memories submerged
in a deep southern swamp.

When the morning comes,
will our darker brothers gather—
in hope, in church? They sing
and prophesy with the kind of truth

we like to deny. Seriously dangerous,
I have become my dreams
or, at least, my dream-self (with no
thanks to where no thanks are due).

So not-at-home in the modern world,
I twist memories ’til truth appears,
bleeds like a cut from a thorn on a rose
like that arching climber “Paul’s Scarlet,”

burns like a cross on a lawn deep in the night—
burns from a childhood
(like that cross without a savior),
surface where missing blacks

once disappeared beneath slime and muck
and old dryers now bob beside alligators.

.
first published in Poetry Friends