Nightstick
       

in Kentucky you are a Black girl, but don't know. you sleep
next to it. crooked bone, split-open head. patrolling through the night.
don't even know you should be trying to run away. it rests
in your night terrors, in a bureau between your grandmother's quilts,
with her thimbles & thread & dead white poems. don't think
for a moment your grandfather won't pull it out, make a cross of it
with your arms, gift you its weight & crime. do you believe?
what if he said its name was Justice? would that be too much?
if he was the only man your childhood saw hauled away in handcuffs,
pale & liver-spotted & stiff in limbs sharp enough to fold into the back
of a cruiser? you. this bruise of irony. the only two Blacks ever allowed
in his house. & at night he be singing you to sleep while it sits invisible,
sentry-like out of sight. he be humming hymns—i come to the garden alone
while the dew is still on the roses—knowing how much blood it has seen &
whose. he be holding you to himself like a secret & every song be a prayer
for your daddy's sunk-in head. you breathing one for his whole face
before you. bullying a shit-shaded boy's head is what it's made for,
he say, your papaw, while you hold it, not knowing enough about yourself
to understand the cannibal nature of chewing on his words with no riot
inside. no baton twirling in the air of your stomach. no notice of the grand
wizard & his wand when he appears in your nightmare. you be closed-eye
& it be there, Black as who it means to beat

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Copyright © 2018 Joy Priest All rights reserved
from Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets
The University Press of Kentucky
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission