The rickety window gives way to a hidden slat in the roof
You can levy off of the oak tree up the up, and up
You sit and watch the sky
The grackles flutter in their packs and as the
Ease of an evening smoke soothes you
You imagine that you are that lone bird
Who circles above
Watching this sleepy street
You wondered what your little body would feel like
Until it was you gliding on summer winds
Quarantine brought excavators and cranes
To the town’s pristine cul de sacs
You and the grackles float over the newly mounded dirt
In search of the dead armadillo
You follow the curve of the bayou
Suddenly, Oyster Creek gives way to a graveyard
There’s a woman there with flowers
You remember her Something
familiar about
her shaking hands
You’ve been here before
Except the houses that lined the block weren’t here Instead the fields were lined with pecan trees
cramped metal shacks
The people who lived here piled together
You and your grackle friends would
Perch in the rusted holes and watch the flies buzz
It smelled like sweet sugar and the sweat
Of a Texas summer
Men yelled and there were sugar
Clouds that would roll in when the sun set
You watched men dig holes deep into the earth
Until their straw hats disappeared into the black
Dumping bodies of sugar mill workers into these mass graves
You never liked human calls, they wailed like lost wolves
As twilight lingered you swore you would never forget how
Clear a sunset is reflected in the puddled marshes circling Bulls Bayou
Thick white clouds reflected pink in these pools
Like the world made of cotton candy
You imagined as a child
The boy who lived in the house with the green door carved
His name into the wet cement
A year after the Brazos spilled into public sidewalks
And drowned Malvina’s Little Boxes
The woman in the graveyard set her flowers down and kissed the gravestone
Her ring shines in the light, the same one her father wore As you lunge for the gleaming object you remember the girl with the ball of tin foil
She would run across the open field, before they put in the stones
Taunting you with her ball of light
When the bodies of her loved ones were unmarked
Unnamed
You settle into the dirt and pick at the white speck of leftover sugar-wind
Wondering why even in death they cannot escape
Imperial Prison
Drowned in white
The funeral director was buried among the masses
The land is said to be blessed by saints
Isidro the patron saint of farmers
About the Writer: Creator and former Editor of the award-winning magazine Shards through the University of Houston, Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman is a bi-racial Muslim writer and artist. She holds dual Bachelor’s degrees in Creative Writing and History. She is the Managing Editor of Defunkt Magazine. Her interests are Middle Eastern History, culture, linguistics, and biracial identity. She as a featured performer at The Museum of Fine Arts and Houston Grand Opera’s event “The Art of Intimacy” January 16, 2020. Her fiction, poetry, essays, interviews and translation publications can be found or are forthcoming in (Fiction) Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Scintilla Magazine, Paper Trains Journal, The Bayou Review: The Women’s Issue. (Essays, interviews, and translations) Glass Mountain, Volume 21, Dead Eyes Literary Magazine Volume .01, and Defunkt Magazine. Her visual Artistry can be found or is forthcoming in Cosumnes River Journal, Sonder Midwest Review, Wordpeace Magazine, and The Blue Minaret.
Houston Review Of Books 