V E R S E and I M A G E

[with 3 poems by Crystal Simone Smith]

First day of kindergarten – we pick Amelia up from the bus stop. Glassy-eyed. She climbs into the carseat and takes off her mask but won’t say a thing. Or can’t. We paw through her backpack to find Tammy, well-worn fox companion – nuzzle, no words. We search her face for psychic trauma. “How was school?” “Are you OK?” Silent nods.

I drop them off and drive to fetch her brother from middle school. When we return Amelia and Granny are playing Candyland. Audible levity. After the rematch Amelia hops over to me. “Play, Pappy.”

Hummingbirds in the Andes descend into protective torpor every cold night. Their heart rate drops from 200 to 30. When sun reaches them next morning it takes 30 minutes for the little engine to rev back up. You can watch the brief shiver, flexing feathers, accelerating vibration of their chest. The tiny eyes pop open and they fly.

Amelia wants to ride her scooter to the mailbox, fly through August heat and sweat to chase the rainbow soccer ball across the yard, run and kick and score. When we take her home at suppertime, Mom meets us in the driveway, hugs her bouncing vibrating child, says, “My, your hair is wet.”

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Eastern Horsemint, Mondarda punctata

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It Took a Village

It took a village to raise me
+++++and when my best friend’s
++++++++++islander mother shouted

in her broken tongue for me to ge’ toff
+++++the building roof, I listened –
++++++++++saved moon rock scavenging

for a safer day. It was a sort of lovespeak.
+++++I was no different than her own
++++++++++bouquet of fatherless children –

a brood of six, all hues and ages. She had lived,
+++++had become religious and arthritic,
++++++++++grimacing as she peeled the smooth,

maroon skin from mangos she offered,
+++++and I’d scoff down
++++++++++before I scaled a tree

to peer at the building – a colossal dollhouse
+++++or real live stirring.
++++++++++and when she stood,

crying and talking to the sun,
+++++I looked away. I knew
++++++++++she was talking to God.

Crystal Simone Smith

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Uncloudy Day

At the tenth year’s dark mark
+++++the clouds are white as bones

and the sky is the sky
+++++where the ocean stand
+++++after the last splattering of night,
a horizon so convincing even
+++++the cynic can glimpse the other side.

For so long I resented the swallowing earth,
held every pinch of darkness –

+++++a co-worker’s harmless but sharp remark:
++++++++++Exhume a body after a year
++++++++++and it’s basically human soup.

my mother stood stove-side once,
+++++her eyes filled with a clumsy glee
+++++as she spoke of fourth Sundays.
Her mother fried chicken after church.

The preacher might come.
All other days they ate beans and ham hocks.

+++++She gave it a name, uncloudy day,
a day that is just so, you are unbroken
+++++by memories where you stand
gazing at the sky, unfisted and glad.

Crystal Simone Smith

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Can a poem be a shovel, stabbing the earth to turn over what’s hidden and dark, to bring up a spadeful that smells also of fecundity and life? Dig, demand these poems of Crystal Simone Smith, into the heart of things, weeds and flowers worthy and alive, discover them all. Dig to the roots.

Perhaps a few poems can dig into our hearts and make us one family.

Amber Flora Thomas writes, “Has freedom made us lazy, we might wonder as we read these incredible poems in Smith’s Down to Earth? Are we tourists in our lives, troubled by a history of enslavement? The voices and stories of black lives penetrate these questions in this collection of poems that don’t coddle or pull away from our earthly struggles to find hope and meaning in our human work. Down to Earth is an asking, a plea to take comfort in the stories and people who anchor our living.”

These three selections are from Down to Earth, Longleaf Press at Methodist University, Fayetteville, NC, © 2021.

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Still Becoming

+++++~after Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

Age forty plus & I still consider
what I can become.

The slave wage of an adjunct is a choice,
the gatekeepers say.

So I teach the slave narrative
to white, affluent students.

A lesson they’ll never find use for – how to
escape bondage without it killing you.

I drive thirty miles with the sun rising in the east.
Every morning I speed – a lesson

taken from oppression – never offer
overtime without the compensating penny.

Often I pass a pulled-over brother struggling
to gaze into the cop’s face through riotous rays.

Those days especially, I consider a career change
or at least, how I can be a better citizen.

The narrative being, we are all keepers
with our iPhones and droids on standby.

I could become the viral documenter
of what can still become of a man

freed a century & fifty plus years
under the same magnificent sun.

Crystal Simone Smith

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Crystal Simone Smith holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Durham, NC with her husband and two sons where she teaches English Composition and Creative Writing. She is the Managing Editor of Backbone Press. Her other books are Routes Home (Finishing Line Press, 2013), Running Music (Longleaf Press, 2014), and Wildflowers: Haiku, Senryu, and Haibun (2016).

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