No God in This Room
poems
Athena Dixon
Copyright @ 2018 Athena Dixon All rights reserved. Printed in the Unites States of America. Winged City Press Managing Editor: Teneice Durrant Cover Design: Teneice Durrant Cover Art: personal picture Argus House Press is an independent publisher of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. More information can be found at www.argushousepress.com
ISBN 978-1-64136-126-2
Acknowledgments “Macerating the Berries” appears in Emerge Literary Journal (Issue Two/April 2012) “The Killing Field”, “Upon News of Nine Deaths”, and “Ornithology” appear in Rising Phoenix Review (February 2016) “Sex in Four Movements” appears in Tawdry Bawdry (no longer available online) “Chick” appears in Pluck!: The Journal of Affilacian Arts and Culture (Issue One) “Is It Sweet?” appears in THIS Magazine (Issue BLK) “Cutting Board” appear in the Winter 2013 issue of OVS Magazine
Thank You: Albert and Sharon Dixon: thank you for allowing me to be exactly who I am. For surrounding me with music. For your sacrifices and your support. Evona Dixon: thank you for being the creative spirit I wish I could be. For being kind hearted and artistic and talented and funny and an amazing kid sister. Angie, Gabrielle, Ev, and Evelyn: thank you for helping me bring Linden Avenue to fruition. You ladies help me create a very necessary space for writers of all kinds. A special thanks to Angie for being my voice of reason and the big sister I’ve never had. Jameel Roberts: thank you for being my biggest challenger, motivational speaker, supporter, hype man, and friend. Thank you for sharing your musical brilliance with the world. Swain, Marisol, Phorllie, and Kym: thank you for dealing with my shenanigans. For being my drinking buddies and my partners in crime. You make work fun! Drunk gummies and guava drinks for everyone!
Dedication: For Mom, Dad, and Evona
Table of Contents Boxes of Andromeda 3 Sex in Four Movements 5 Chick 6 Is It Sweet? 7 The Circle 8 Macerating the Berries 9 Starlings 10 Upon Buying Fruit From a Migrant Worker 11 The Killing Field 12 Upon News of Nine Deaths 13 Ornithology 15 Cutting Board 16 OB/GYN 17 Peony (for virginity lost) 18 The Keeper 19
Boxes of Andromeda There are no such things as domestic goddesses anymore. Sundays aren’t filled with radio static and good R&B. No lemon Pledge/dust rag/ t-shirt remnants. There are no more altars. In my house there never were. My mother, hearty Midwesterner, swathed in sleeveless work shirts and steel toed boots was not delicate. She was not always clean. She chained to a rock of dust and soot and manual labor; chained to early morning piece work; and desperate need for overtime. My mother was a goddess of rough heels and unpainted toes. Nothing sweet about the sweat clinging to her armpits and forearms and breasts and back and a forehead creased and pinched and all things pained at the end of the day. Each night her head lolled against the back of the sofa, snapping back when she felt herself falling. Snapped back because the rock of dust and soot and manual labor never quite left her skin. Was not quite hidden by the plum lipstick puckering her mouth or the fleeting hints of perfume that lingered longer in the bathroom then it did on her flesh. But she was woman. She was god. Mule and spike and post and pine. 3
A cobble of things lifted and stored, but not delicate. A woman commanding space in circles manual labor afforded. That piece work allowed. That over time the overtime let her daughter know the joys of hands free of callous and a whole body. To know the sleep of falling. To know the snap of falling. To know the altar and the pearl.
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Sex in Four Movements I. The routine is ingrained now. First, the darkened drink of juice in the kitchen, the flush, the weighted half of bed. His hand cupped against her belly before it slips beneath her shirt. II. She spies the clock when he begins, calculating how long it will take for her hips to ache, how many bruises litter her neck at dawn. She wants to sleep. She crucifies herself, praying the bars of her arms prevent his fingers' wanderings. Her knees bent against her womb to block entry. III. It rarely works. Instead he shifts, carves a space in the center of the bed. A hole she can't escape from. She stomachs his kisses and paces her breathing to even. IV. She pretends he is tender, that he is intrigued by the softness of her skin. Somehow in those moments she feels small and opens beneath his bulk. She allows him to find the places that make her forget and in the not so dark of the city she gives in.
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Chick On Pike Street we slip and slide on blue black garbage bags made slick by green hoses. The boys try to impress you. Their flat stomachs collide with wet plastic, the suction welting their skin. You are the risk for them to catapult limbs across sopping grass. Pressing fingers into the flesh at your elbow, they hold you steady. I watch their eyes trace rivulets down the curve of your spine, the splay of your hips. You can make your body an alphabet. My flesh folds and flops. Does not move in a rhythm that makes these young men cry out. Spider fingered stretch marks palm the small of my back, veins wait to burst purple rivers along my legs. I know the way fat girls shrink, curl the mass of their bodies into a cocoon praying for big breasts and hips. I want to make the boys swoon. I want them to touch me, the peach fuzz of their upper lips coaxing my dimples from hiding. I wonder what their mouths taste like. I would eat them only to find out they were rotten at the center.
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Is it Sweet? These questions I’ve already answered: How to layer the creamer and sugar in your coffee in the grey ombre mug. How long it takes to gather the half glasses of soda and drain their contents. How long it takes you to strike and smoke a pack of cigarettes. I keep stepping in front of the memory of flea markets in summer. I keep remembering the clammy smell of shellfish in the open ended main house and how my stomach catapulted away from the ocean. I will never forget how that scent manhandled us down the aisle until we stopped at the Greek key ring you still wear. How that day we discovered the center spun and in our quiet times I’d hold your hand and flick the band with my thumb, spinning it and sending vibrations up your arm; each time your thumb stroking my palm like call and response. like ebb and flow, like the slosh against the rims of our lemon drinks, like the condensation in rivulets around our wrists.
And when that stranger approached us and asked if it was sweet we said yes. We said yes and laughed for years after, until all that was left of us was the taste of that day on our lips.
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The Circle for Justin
Of all the things I remembered after your death I remembered your eyelashes, dusky and black, settled against your cheeks. I saw them instead of the pea green uniform and flags at either end of the coffin. The lashes were sable and I wanted to touch them. I waited in line to glance at the box that seemed too small to hold your body. I imagined they cut off your knees to fit the box. You died near the gazebo. It glistened then with late Christmas lights, decorations for your death. Blink, flicker, fade. I pass there on my drive home. At the fork between my apartment and the funeral home, the squat brick building the ambulances tore from when your car crashed. There is a salon at the stoplight. I got my hair curled there before our first date. I wore a leopard print skirt and opaque tights. We ate chicken salad with walnuts in the small restaurant next to the lake. We never made it to the dance. You left me for Germany, the sound of the sea between us the last thing I heard from you before my mother called with the news. Tell me where in that circle you are: Between the white dust of the flea market? The path to Amish country? In the clops of their horses' hooves? In that stretch of road before the curve? Or the muffled noise of tires pushing miles beneath the sky?
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Macerating the Berries The simple act of sugaring strawberries: standing Saturday mornings over the spilling bowl, plucking each verdant top like a twist cap until the leaves crumbled in my hands leaving the smell of earth and growing things. I cupped each of them, invading the soft fruit with a knife until the white flesh mingled with red juice. Berry after berry, plucked and cut, gathered in a bowl until the moisture pooled at the bottom heavy and thick. Late those afternoons we stood in the kitchen backs against the cool glass block windows, dipping fingers into the syrup, fishing for the plump sections, sucking the liquid from each digit before diving in for more.
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Starlings We see them waiting, ink spots against the falling snow. Dark feathered starlings dive bomb the parking lot, rest on power lines. Your voice rustles them; inky blue bodies shift and settle. You let the silence linger. A pattern in the sound of passing cars. I don't want to reach for you. I watch you clean the snow from my car, open the door, and turn the engine. The bowling alley sign flickers against the fast darkening sky. The hollow pins crash.
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Upon Buying Fruit from a Migrant Worker Last autumn, we lined the furrows in the fields with burlap, bonneted the trees in the same to stop the frost from slipping into the seeds, ruining the crops. With me was the color of apples, the first buds of the strawberry plant. I knew the dirt. The way black clumps crumbled beneath my fingers, stuck under the ridges of my nails. How browning leaves needed to be clipped to stop rot. We cut away the fallen trees, split them between the woodpile behind our converted stable houses and the stack near the road for sale. I remember the sound of the saw against the bark, the clean slice of my flesh giving way.
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The Killing Field for Samira and Tamir Rice How then do you to expect her to live next to this fertile ground? This red clay, blood crimson, nourished earth with her son grown as root and weed and blossom still tender and green? Now rotting. So instead she removes herself. Ends the planting season which saw her planted in grief/in place/in stasis/ a star exploding unto itself until a black hole is all that’s left. She is a constellation. Then connect the dots between child and suspect man and boy. Mere seconds before eternity. Until the blood spilled in the field. Until she could see nothing of snow. Nothing but white noise and scream and tackle and blood and cuffs and white and snow and cold and home and fear and black and star and then explosion.
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Upon News of Nine Deaths We are unsure just how we created time travel. What we do know is that it cannot be used to return the dead. It cannot be used to sound warning during prayer. Or to shout back into the void to mind the bright light of the church doors opening. We know for sure it cannot put breath back into lungs or bullets into guns or blood back into veins. Time travel is a series of possibilities. Time travel is a series of realities. It is a litany of violence, a liturgy of names we repeat like prayer each morning we wake. Time is an affusion pouring reminders every twenty-eight hours that we move backwards towards another name carved into history. It says we are not safe in the confines of God. Or in a womb of water. Or the asphalt of cities. Or the snow of the Midwest. Or the stairways of our buildings. Or the margin of streets in summer. Time travel tells us we are living history and creating it in the same stride. We are in the museum of the now. We are not sure just how our voices change. Or how they morph into the tinny sounds of yesteryear where we sound like ourselves just muted. But we know the sounds of bombs and gunfire and waves on boat’s bow. We know
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the silence that comes with black skin. We know that time slows down and we are eternal.
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Ornithology for Sandra Bland They say in the mugshot you are dead. That you are lying on the floor, your hair spread downward. Your collarbone swollen. Your eyes vacant. That the curve of your body is arching from the utilitarian grey. That you are another cause for war. We tell the world to speak your name. But there are others who see your wings. A black beating, building beneath the distance in your eyes. A moment from breaking the shocking orange swallowing your sallow skin. And for the tiredness of death we don’t want to believe in the stiffness of your body being moved to position. Because it can never be that cruel. And even at the far edges of life there has to be some fairness. Because even nightmares are dreams and believing this cruelty is nothing short of madness. Is nothing short of normal. So we believe in the power of flight and in the shifting of your body to bird. A starling iridescent.
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Cutting Board I will keep these secret murders tucked inside my chest -each slice a tiny coffin for meat, blood, and bone-until a patchwork of scars pulsate across the surface, until I am cherry stained a warning/do not enter here lies a wild woman broken in and worn.
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OB/GYN The ultrasound tech assumes I am here for a checkup for the growing fetus inside me. Her face falls when I tell her it’s just a month of blood.
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Peony (for virginity lost) Neither speaks of her scalloped edges bracing the center bud, aching. They speak of taming until God makes way. But outside of tiny Bibles there’s no God in this room.
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The Keeper All year there have been insects. Flies in January and orange ladybugs in March. Now, the bees have come to die in my bedroom. Seven line the window seat. Their dried wings stick to humid, white paint. I leave them there, imagine they’ve used my home to escape autumn’s brittle crush, to buzz their last rites behind my Venetian blinds. They touch the soft spot beneath my collarbone make me remember the possibilities of first autumn evenings in magnolias, lips and fingers against my pulse. My memories, no longer sharp, fade with the changing season.
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Author Bio Athena Dixon is a poet and essayist and is founder and editor-in-chief of Linden Avenue Literary Journal. Her work has appeared in journals including Narratively, Great Lakes Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, and pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture, among others. Athena is a Callaloo fellow and has multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She resides in Philadelphia.
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