Sunken Place Sestina
       

Here at the hipster food hall
that fills Birmingham with gentrified spice,
a gaggle of tipsy coworkers sip wine
and munch manchego cheese—one brother,
the only one at this table, looks beyond
his body through the sky,

through clouds spreading like soft cheese, sky
opening like a great blue chasm. My sister says this hall
is a thing to love and to hate—love because it lets us taste beyond
biscuits and sweet tea to something new, Ethiopian spice
and the poke of our Hawaiian dreams. What bothers
her is the way people drip in here with an effervescent whine,

a desire to fill a table, eat charcuterie and drink wine
in a part of town that used to be just another patch of unappreciated sky,
home of the historic theatre and the poorer brother,
the man with shitstains on his shirt, streets full of rocks to haul
over the mountain, to fill their clean streets. Now, we spice
our own city with the good stuff, but are we seasoning beyond

the tastes of those who lived here first? Beyond
the means of the ungentrifiable? Now, the coworkers clink their wine
glasses. One of them snorts about the manchego's particular spice,
and the Black man shakes out an uneasy laugh. It's risky,
being the one outside the joke. Another spits something about He Who Shall
Not Be Named. The Black man sighs relief—even a brother

can appreciate Harry Potter. But can a brother
always negotiate this, this familiar loneliness, this beyond—
tokenism, this we're-friends-so-sorry-if-we-don't-catch-all
our racism before it leaves our teeth? They keep drinking their wine,
but I know that this man, although he laughs, is still up in that sky,
still flying far far away from this table, its cruel hospice—

maybe we're all just shucking and jiving until our time to die. We are auspicious
until proven black, until proven just another suspicious brother
without a right to fight, to live. Tonight, while we dine under an unfolding sky,
when the dusk makes way for the stars, for that light beyond
the sun, we feel heavy in our blackness. We drink barrels of wine.
We laugh, make masks of our own faces. We try to enthrall.

We add spice—call integration equality; call gentrification progress,
reduce our brothers to pix.elated dust, turn heartache into wine,
sink further and further beyond a blindingly bright sky.

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Copyright © 2019 Ashley M. Jones All rights reserved
from dark // thing
Pleiades Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission