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

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