After Sally Man’s photo, Deep South, Untitled (Scarred Tree)
I run my hands against the open throat slit.
It seems as if someone locked their arms around its trunk,
Proud to see their blade smothered in sycamore blood.
Its aged edges crumb beneath my fingernails
And I feel the recoil of a heart beat.
The intensity tightens my head like an ache,
Banging my brain into a memory that isn’t mine.
This wasn’t a mother or its nature.
But I press my fingers farther into the tender sore.
Like a small hand reaching for the ripest blackberry on the bush
Initiating me into an underworld, but my finger leaves a stain
of malignant blood.
So black its sour musk stretches every sense of me.
Connecting to every sense of its velvet bark, to dropping leaves,
To the corpses of men and women fallen in the same shadow
I stand in.
Forced to be strangled by its branches,
Forced to soften their frail bones against its roots,
Forced for it to age like a ripe blackberry and toughen
Into the southern skin.
