The ground
I.
To gain the flowering shrubs
I gave my knee to the ground –
walked as though my knee
was meant to wind up for days.
I did not give my mother to the ground.
She’s eye-height now, but
I still had to give
the ground something
to get her out again,
to beg it to let me see her inside
the envelope of air. You know,
I pressed my palms
against the walls
so I could hold my knee just so
while walking up the stairs.
When she came out of the kiln remade,
I was surprised to see
she looked more like salt than ash –
my mama, who loved salt,
both given to the ground
in the way the dead always are
and given to some trees
that offer red seeds to the birds
before they burst with white flowers.
II.
When we were children
I gave the driveway a chunk
of my knee, playing basketball
with my brother.
White and gray pebbles pressed
all the way to the bone,
and my brother pressing a rag
to soak up the blood.
The bone as white as my teeth,
I wanted to touch it
but he held my hands folded up
and folded me up small to rest.
I imagine that I was bird-sized in his palm.
When we got the ashes
I wanted to touch them
to see whether something as white as chalk
could be as cold as it looked,
shocked that what was left of her
brown body wasn’t brown as well.
The hinge of the wooden box was ajar
already, a bent elbow, a welcoming wing,
open – my mama in the cold white chips,
and me, as when she was alive, not sure how close
I could get without breaking a rule.
BY RACHEL NELSON
To gain the flowering shrubs
I gave my knee to the ground –
walked as though my knee
was meant to wind up for days.
I did not give my mother to the ground.
She’s eye-height now, but
I still had to give
the ground something
to get her out again,
to beg it to let me see her inside
the envelope of air. You know,
I pressed my palms
against the walls
so I could hold my knee just so
while walking up the stairs.
When she came out of the kiln remade,
I was surprised to see
she looked more like salt than ash –
my mama, who loved salt,
both given to the ground
in the way the dead always are
and given to some trees
that offer red seeds to the birds
before they burst with white flowers.
II.
When we were children
I gave the driveway a chunk
of my knee, playing basketball
with my brother.
White and gray pebbles pressed
all the way to the bone,
and my brother pressing a rag
to soak up the blood.
The bone as white as my teeth,
I wanted to touch it
but he held my hands folded up
and folded me up small to rest.
I imagine that I was bird-sized in his palm.
When we got the ashes
I wanted to touch them
to see whether something as white as chalk
could be as cold as it looked,
shocked that what was left of her
brown body wasn’t brown as well.
The hinge of the wooden box was ajar
already, a bent elbow, a welcoming wing,
open – my mama in the cold white chips,
and me, as when she was alive, not sure how close
I could get without breaking a rule.
BY RACHEL NELSON
Rachel Nelson is a Cave Canem fellow and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, where she won a Hopwood award for playwriting. Her work has appeared in Callaloo as well as The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South.