​I saw it like a cloud over my mother’s  head
That  grazed her crown and tipped it crooked
after Nana made her dizzying exit through heaven’s
Misty Slim gates, and oh how that crown split open
and shattered, how that  cloud hazed over mother’s
hazels.  If the eyes are the windows to the soul then
I watched as she floated from her body to bring
light and love and laughter to this cloud that
unhinged it's dark jaw and swallowed the woman
that I raised whole.
I saw it as a black widow tucked
away in a garden, sewing a silver string
​meridian that sprouted from my sister and grew into her limbs, hooked into every finger and toe, spiked itself into the center
of her heart and wound itself every day
until she is buried deep inside of a rose
bush that calls for my blood. I scrape my
wrists against the thorns, give into the
sanguine temperament, watch as the blood
cascades down ice.
I saw it as the door to our sagging shed in the northern corner of our backyard that flew open to spite me, my body pushing against something larger than myself, larger than my family, the winter howl whipping my face. One day, the door broke from its hinges and knocked the wind out of my lungs, leaving me gasping for explanations and false promises, pressed my face into the ground like a makeshift grave. The door now lay unhinged against the shed, a gaping hole exposed, boxes filled with baby pictures and VHS tapes and Christmas decorations left to rot.

                                Now, I see it as the empty, invisible guest at my family’s dinner table, taking the space but not the shape of my father, sucking out all of the air in the room until I found myself staring at the enemy of my family, gaseous and ephemeral, fork and knife in his ghastly  hand, slamming his (always his) greedy fists on the table, screaming with the treble wished-bass-voice of my father, demanding more, more, MORE.
​​
J.T. Smith (He/They) is a poet and novelist based in Wilmington, North Carolina. They are a MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where their work deals with the gorgeous, complicated intersections of Blackness, queerness, and Southern identity.
header image: Chasing Lyo via Pexels