Terror

By TOMMYE BLOUNT

 

“Made of cotton Jeans, red cotton cord
and one cotton tassel. Price, each $5.00″

from Catalogue of Official Robes and Banners, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

Inside the discourse, our course—the walk
in the tattle, the footwork goose stepped

by robed men winged in silk-lined capes.
A white hood is a whitehood, neighborhood

watch, citizens arrested by terror—a tremble
in the trees (as in from the root) of someone

off their route. Think of the children; the babies 
cradled in the arms of darkness, black 

milk at the corners of their rattled pink mouths 
fighting to suck at the air for life; a bitch

with a black tongue too busy lapping 
up her pups to see us coming.

 

 

Tommye Blount is the author of the chapbook What Are We Not For and the debut full-length collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue. Born and raised in Detroit, Tommye now lives in Novi, Michigan.

[Purchase Issue 24 here.] 

Terror

Related Posts

overgrown cemetary

March 2023 Poetry Feature: New Poems by Our Contributors

RICHARD MICHELSON
The wedding in the cemetery featured scripture, loud / music, two rabbis, and the bride dressed in a shroud / my grandfather tells me. / He’s inching toward the heart / of his lecture, while I’m composing till death do us part.

Image of a foggy evergreen forest

Evergreen

KEI LIM
At the tip of the mountain where / we scattered your ashes, then hers, / your father holds me / for the first time since I changed my name. / He gives me his old pocket knife— / the one meant for you with the hemlock handle.

an image of train tracks, seen through a window. reflection is faintly seen

Addis Ababa Beté

ABIGAIL MENGESHA
Steel kicks in this belly. // Girls with threadbare braids / weave between motor beasts and cement bags. // Tin roofs give way to glass columns. / Stretching as if to pet the clouds. // In the corners: cafés. // Where macchiatos are served / with a side of newspapers.