Excerpts from Minerva’s Sonnets

[Minerva Jackson was Dearfield’s] judge, jury and executioner. 
When she snapped her fingers you jumped 
—Dr. George Junne

Jane (1878)

My mother the copper rope and the slug
poisoned off its rusty timbre. Under 
the Missouri moonlight, her breast and fierce 
jowl, strict even in the pulped muscle of 
breathing. Night forgave our misgivings, mis- 
behaviors, miss of yolk into wood-smithed 
bowl, but mother kept tally of our faults

on an abacus caked with lard, and dug
in our backyard of beanfield and brush, her
daughters’ dual graves. While mother slept through pierced 
hours, my sister would shake, like a dove 
perturbed by wind-lustful rain, the sheets, mist 
gray, from me. We’d play. Hock. Spit lemon pith. 
Our inherited ugly locked in vaults.

Miss Matlock (1896)

Our inheritance, ugly and locked in the vaults 
behind our faces. My sister, left for California

and scuffed her good shoes following behind 
a man, his breath a vineyard of stunted grapes.

She sends letters to the school for me, describes
what it’s like to smile under sun spit shined

by the bay. I say Kansas City’s fine. The students
stuff their mouths with nursery rhymes,

regurgitate them at the drop of a dime or a storm’s 
flat-footed arrival. We don’t write of mother.

My sister, Mrs. Stokes, she signs in ink blue as
beardtongue, tells me to find a man that’ll take

me leagues, leaps and bounds from Missouri, 
a man that will learn me and keep me soft.

Mrs. Jackson (1905)

A man that has learned me and kept me soft, 
whisks me, like a vanilla dark cream, to 
Boulder. Our marital bed beside his dinner club. 
His vows a breeze over ear’s hot cartilage.

He’s smart. He owns. He reads. Up from Slavery 
making its daily migration from bedside 
to his hands, to satchel, to desk and again to

bedside. I don’t write to Mrs. Stokes the woes 
of the second wife: the sustaining of promised 
sweetness. The making, the warming of the sheets.

The dinners that must be set before his step 
greets the hall. The nod, the support, the deference.

We don’t write of mother, but she never bowed to anyone. 
Not even the God she claimed to love.

The Pitch (1909)

Not even the God O.T. claims to love 
could keep him from filing a desert claim.
Still, he asks anyway. A gesture, aimed 
at the mush below my heart—that rock dove
rotting beneath aorta. He speaks of
a homestead. Says he’s been dreaming the frame:
farm, dance hall, a field for cards and ballgame, 
a school to rival Tuskegee, a shove

unfurled from his deltoids, to further the race. 
Says Sadie, before she passed on or moved 
past plain’s view, couldn’t imagine this place—
three hundred twenty acres of Black faces’
owning. In his eyes, ambition unremoved.
He stares. Waits on me, to slide him my ace.

Darling Minerva (1941 / 1911)

                                             i run toward something   softer. a force
                                                                in my dream   two-fingered and reaching down
                                          the dry path to the platte         my stomach’s sweat-pearled rubble
                                               overcome with nausea         snagging in thick hair:

                                   the wings of a burrowing owl   fingernail and breath hitch
                                                              a desert omen         sweet oil siphoned from

                                                                  the town   a   gold-plussed tin. a prairie 
                                                  rattlesnake shedding   flush with precipitation 
                            prematurely its skin     i tell them   the rain follows the plow.
                                                             if they hold on   the pleasure waddles slowly behind the 
                                                                                                                                                           breech.

        it will be worth it     but they pack their bags   field sore fingers scum the center of
folded denim in mule trunk they leave for denver   five points. the apostates
                                                 they make wasteland   the crossroads. the shudder. the lips
                                                    of our town square.   the quitter’s moan.

Jane (1942)

Far from town square I moan a quitter’s moan.
My sister shakes my cough’s ebullient hand,

her hips anchored to my bedside. She strokes 
my face’s wrought lines with creams she taxied

from Fillmore to get me casket ready. If 
I look wrung enough she’ll indulge in talk

of our mother. Whisper that she wished we’d 
seen her before she passed. Austere steward of

Kansas City farm, accountant even of 
our distant actions. Despite following

Mrs. Stokes’s lead, I still ended up calcified
about the lungs. The slewfoot manager of

the gone and the ghost town. A life lived like 
our mother’s: the copper rope and the slug.