Kelly Flores with Caspar the
Ghost, Halloween,
HELP Shelter, South Bronx, NY
1993
after Mary Ellen
Mark
In this impersonal
place,
spare, undecorated like
a
rent-by-the-hour,
twenty
bucks an hour, clean
sheets
and towels extra, maids
always
at your service, room; the
child
seems so small, smaller
than
she actually is, perched on
a
dresser table near the sound
off
picture on, TV, dressed as
a
clown, a player in a children's
opera,
punch 'n judy play, already
a
displaced person lacking
clear
direction, looking puzzled,
lost,
listening to whispered
secrets,
encoded advice from Casper
the
Friendly Ghost, emissary
from
another, more forgiving
world.
Higher Than Kites, Higher
Than the Moon
Faulkner would have
recognized
these guys as next door
neighbors
to the Snopes, refugees from
a
field study on the cause,
effect
and harm caused by rampant
inbreeding,
people who went on family
affairs in
a pickup that looked as if it
had spent
the War Years, the Punic War
Years,
buried in a pile of compost
and mud,
flatbed rusting through to
the main
frame, muffler long ago left
along side
the hardened ruts of what
passed for
main roads to Nowhere, a
place where
they and their kind lived,
carrying a
homemade coffin with them
wherever
they went that carried the
remains of
a significant other inside,
extra
pre-cuts for what fell out
over 'Shine
and roadkill feasts on
holidays, home
comings and funerals, tipping
over
out houses on the way home
for fun,
higher than kites, higher
than the moon.
The Napier Family
1989
after Shelby Lee
Adams
Their family portrait shows
only
three of sixteen offspring,
the boys
who survived into their
twenties for
a family shoot, not bothering
with
formalities like shirts, all
the better
to show off their grotesque
scars:
a belly so grotesquely
disfigured,
it is difficult to imagine
how it got
that way, a growth maybe
removed
by anesthetized-with-alcohol
home
surgery, cauterized with
boiling water
or maybe through acts of
violence
like the ones that removed so
many of
their kin from the picture:
the son shot
by the father, a daughter
poisoned by
relatives, another son shot
by a brother,
others by strangers, law
enforcement
agents, all these local
legends story
tellers dwell on,
concentrating on
the more amusing aspects of
their drunken
stunts: on the son who has
his address
tattooed on his knuckles and
hand so
the sheriffs will know whose
people
he belongs to, where to drop
him off
when the sentence is done or
sooner,
if the verdict was death, the
alcohol
black out permanent and the
next binge
begun, though it is the son
with a home-
styled haircut who thrusts
his head into
the shot at the last moment
that attracts
the most attention, a wicked
smile on his
profiled face, a knife scar
prominent
stretching all the way from
his lip the length
of his jaw tells all that you
will ever need
to know about the family
lineage; the ones
gone and the few who
remain.
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