My Sister, Who Died Young, Takes Up The Task

My Sister, Who Died Young, Takes Up The Task
by Jon Pineda

A basket of apples brown in our kitchen,
their warm scent is the scent of ripening,

and my sister, entering the room quietly,
takes a seat at the table, takes up the task

of peeling slowly away the blemished skins,
even half-rotten ones are salvaged carefully.

She makes sure to carve out the mealy flesh.
For this, I am grateful. I explain, this elegy

would love to save everything. She smiles at me,
and before long, the empty bowl she uses fills,

domed with thin slices she brushes into
the mouth of a steaming pot on the stove.

What can I do? I ask finally. Nothing,
she says, let me finish this one thing alone.

Stewing

Stewing        

 

Dilapidated conditions magnified sickness, and typhoid, dropsy, and tuberculosis ravaged the institution and resulted in a number of inmates' deaths... Laura Williams, a black woman in her early twenties convicted in 1887, died of tuberculosis one month before her sentence ended.  

 --Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons

I dream of hounds. Their teeth loose in my veins.

Their howls consume me. They growl and feast.

She whispers not to run. I can't refrain.

Nightmares of this cell stirring in my brain.

To survive I would suckle possums' teats.

I dream of hounds. Their teeth loose in my veins.

Sweat pours from my body. It's heavy rain.

My intestine rotting, rising, my tongue reeks.

She whispers not to run. I can't refrain.

Tuberculosis fevers stew my pain.

Curdle my stomach's bile. Vomit creeps.

I dream of hounds. Their teeth loose in my veins

Awake to my own barking. My voice strained.

The nurse's compress grips me like a leash.

She whispers not to run. I can't refrain.

She tells me to hush as I try to explain.

The stale air in this jail folds in, death's crease.

I dream of hounds. Their teeth loose in my veins.

She whispers do not run. I can't refrain.

-DaMaris B. Hill  

 

Used by permission.

 

Originally published in Reverie: Midwest African American Literature. Ed. Randal Horton. (2010). 5 September 2010. Print. (previously entitled Laura Dreams of Escape)

DaMaris B. Hill has a terminal degree in English-Creative Writing and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas.The majority of her poetry stresses connections. Her series of poems entitledboundlibertybelles are influenced by the research of Kali N. Gross in Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910. She is currently writing a novel about two parents' struggle to control their daughter's sexuality during the 1930s.  

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