Still Life with Young Black Woman’s Face Etched into a School Desk

Abstract

Still Life with Young Black Woman’s Face Etched into a School Desk Cortney Lamar Charleston (bio) Everything is everythingWhat is meant to be, will beAfter winter, must come springChange, it comes eventually —Lauryn Hill Locks, felled like piano wires of rain over brown eyes—this is what I remember most clearly. And her name, true, either Iman, spelled like a declaration, or Yman,spelled like a question, and one to which I must admit that I don’t know: not much, not a thing at all. We are, or were, just a bit too young to fathom even a fraction of the Lord’s rationale for the workings of the world. During weekday mass, we said our prayers as taught and went back to class, our uniforms ironed onto our very personalities, hurriedly, with wrinkles setting into awkward creases. This is to say we knew when to obey,which was almost always, and we knew when to act out of our skin, in those thin moments, when, in the instinctof young color, we clapped our hands to the beat, sang along to what some right-winger would label obscenity—being kids first, and being satisfied with what that meant for three or four minutes at a time. About her life, I didn’t know much or why. Her grandmother was her guardian, arching over her like the vaults of a church. I filed that into a manila folder, how a social worker might, except [End Page 151] I wouldn’t truly know, not deep into the bloody business of life back then, though there were always the gun songs blazing in the night like a waste of a good guitar. There werealways the car alarms and the sirens and the sneaker prints stamped into the sidewalk near 83rd & Yates: a running stride.As they say, everything is everything, or it was, before it came apart at the fringes beyond our reaching hands, like dreadhairs gone astray at the tips from touching too much water. To think, she could be a ghost now by any number of means, for any reason, good or not. Accidentally, like a pregnancy, or planned, like a pregnancy, and me, filled with so much blood, aging color, making a declaration spelled, maybe, like her name: I, man. She: what? Another girl gone, a whisper in the alley? Reclusive musician? Public defender, perhaps? I want to believe she’s somewhere watching the nightly newsright now, asking a question spelled like her name might be, the air empty of any answer, her mind wandering, wonderingwhat happened to the sweet little boy with the gap in his teeth, if everything is everything. Like it was. Like it ain’t and neverreally been because the wheels on that yellow bus went round and round, not stopping even on a drop-off. Because the sixty seconds from that door to the next one were our only allowed outside, all times otherwise spent locked inside: school, house, or hallelujah. So, have mercy on us. Hope we were meant to be. [End Page 152] Cortney Lamar Charleston Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Cave Canem fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee based in Jersey City, New Jersey. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Eleven Eleven, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Iowa Review, the Journal, Pleiades, Rattle, Spillway, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Copyright © 2016 Middlebury College Publications