It was her idea we’d write a poem for every person who wanted one outside the Tops in Buffalo
just days after the shooting. I hadn’t been inside a Tops since my mother died, a Texan I’d brought up north who never
quite adjusted, who complained about the avocados hard as hockey pucks, pestered the manager for never having catfish
or fresh tortillas. Get out of the poem, Mom, I think, this isn’t about you, but I’m human, therefore I associate. Tops I associate with
my mom, and I associate her with guns, too, at least the one she owned I fought with her to leave in Texas. When my brother was alive
he stole that gun and also her car and made it all the way to Mexico but still I associate them with Texas and I associate Texas with
my friend Vievee, who’d wept at the shooting, who wanted to do something. Which is why I’m sitting in the sun writing poems
on blank cards for passersby, something I’ve never done before, don’t know how to do. It’s as natural and innocent as a lemonade stand,
it’s radical and absurd. A woman named Dorrain comes by, I write my first poem for her. Our table is set up next to the chain link fence
surrounding the parking lot, the Tops locked up, photos and flowers and stuffed animals are pinned to the fence or piled on the ground.
Even the sidewalk is chalked with words. Vievee points out the single tree, white ribbons tied to it, do you see? she says,
her voice soft and vulnerable but she’s also a fighter. She’s writing a poem for a man named Grady. While he sits and watches, Vievee
draws him out. He witnessed the shooting, even talked with the killer, had sat on a bench with him the day before.
I’m so busy listening she has to nudge me to write a poem for Elena who’s walked up, and I freeze again. What am I doing?
I take a deep breath, try to say something true. Seagulls dive-bomb the abandoned trash in the lot, I write, a chill runs down my spine I don’t
tell anyone about, something to do with the candles and cop cars. Oh these days are dark, it’s still pandemic, every member of the family I was born into
now has died, friends and lovers too, though none were shot, and the climate broils, and there’s a war on. Sunlight blares all around us, cars blare by too, some
fast and loud, others slow and curious about the black woman and white woman sitting at a table scribbling what? I’m so tired.
It’s what you shouldn’t say in the middle of a poem. Tired of sitting at home quietly ceding to obsolescence and despair. Of keening
at this life, turning off the news and making dinner. My melanin-challenged skin is turning lobster pink. But I’m here for my friend, whose own heart is hurt
in some of the ways I can discern and some I can only keep a space for in my heart until I know more, can see better. Lora Jane says
it was shitty inside the Tops, run down, not enough cashiers. They never had what you needed and you always had to wait in line. I look down
at the ground. I feel like one of those albino roly-polys revealed from a lifted rock. We’ll start at this card table and whoever walks by it.
If there were a poem for every person who’d ever been alive, how many poems would there be? This one’s for Vievee.
