William Miller
Bible Study, St. Augustine’s Church
On a cold Wednesday night, her
in the Treme, five of us sit across
the rector’s mahogany table,
a picture of the pope on the wall.
Strange to be here, and not here,
among black faces—only the pries
and I are white and old. Their story
is not my story, and Zechariah’s
mute tongue reminds one lady
of when blacks never spoke in
the company of Creoles or Cajuns,
though she had much to tell,
marvelous things inside her.
Another recalls the time when
bones were found beneath the streets,
slave bones without markers.
I was made mute in the Jim Crow south
reaching for a water fountain.
“Don’t touch,” my mother said,
that’s for coloreds!” She wouldn’t
let me ask why. The priest took a vow
of silence for a year and thought
he’d go insane but was glad when
he learned to listen to birds,
trees, the groundskeeper who knew
that every turn of the wind meant rain
or drought. We use our tongues freely
around this table.
Better to talk about the past
or it becomes a millstone around
our necks, not an angel
who delivers us.
Treasure Island
Three days before he died,
killed him with a service revolver
brought back from Germany,
my grandfather took me for a Sunday walk.
East Lake was still a family place then—
kids, kiddies rides, even swans floated
in the afternoon sun.
My grandfather gave me a book,
said he knew it wasn’t my birthday
but he might be called back before then,
“back into service…. I didn’t know then
he’d been busted out of the army for drinking
on duty, cursing out a superior officer,
other things. To me he was the man
in the photo album crammed with
post cards, snap shots of the war,
all beneath the red cover stamped
“82nd Airborne”. The book he gave me
was Treasure Island, a gift for the only
reader in a family one step from
the backwoods and coal hills.
I don’t remember all of it—pirates,
a pirate with one leg—but it was enough
to make me read another, more after that.
I didn’t understand why he shot himself
but learned he had nightmares about
“the stick people”, the living dead
he and his unit liberated from Dachau.
But my grandmother drank and cursed
the day she got a three-cornered flag,
hated the war that made him drink
then killed him, the war that stained
our family like blood never fully scrubbed
from a carpet. I didn’t understand and still don’t
but read to find out what happens next.
Is there buried gold or not? Did the pirates
die in vain—does everyone die in vain?
Books are scattered all around me, in piles
like a fort, jungle vines wrapped
around them. In this redoubt, the only line
of defense is words and more words,
never looking up from endless pages.
Trailer Park Eviction
Hard enough to be an abandoned child,
put in foster homes until she ran away,
drank wine, smoked crack, had a daughter
with more needs than her, eyes like
little blue whirlpools she drowned in daily—
hard enough to be her in a trailer
she didn’t pay the rent on for six months
running, the state as big and pitiless
as the father she tracked down and met
only once. He chased her from
the door with a baseball bat, said he’d
kill her if she ever came back, asked
for money again…. Yes. these things
were hard enough but not as hard as
the morning they took her daughter away:
a terrified face in the back window
of a car pulling away, her hands like tiny
puckers on the glass. All she had left
was a green purse and a pint of Thunderbird,
enough to fuel her pride and help her
walk away with some dignity past the cops
and the landlord. The other tenants
stood in their doorways dressed in t-shirts
and night gowns, cursed the law for her,
cheered her loudly on.
