This selection, chosen by guest editor JJ Rowan, is from an identity polyptych by Tameca L. Coleman (The Elephants 2021).
[ . . . testify . . . . ]
I only know I love him because of this memory:
I was witness to my father in the turn.
He’d been a ghost til then, hardened by military muscle
and work and cigarette smoke, a history marked
by his own father’s flying hands,
the same man who brought my brothers and I sweets and coins,
the same who took us crabbing and taught us
how to crack a crab leg and that the mustard tasted good.
Grandpa was soft while sober and when drunk,
wrathful as the Old Testament.
*
It was in that moment I saw him, no longer fuzzy
like the face from a dream that evaporates with sunlight.
I could see we had the same nose, the same
tendency for a dry and cracking lower lip.
He was soft like a child,
the ailing parts of his life beading
across his face, raining from his head.
There was a tension in his face like he was crying
or shitting.
Meca’Ayo (Tameca L Coleman) is a queer poetry-centric multi-genre writer, singer and artist who currently lives in Denver Colorado. Their writing and photography have been featured in literary magazines, art exhibits, journals, anthologies, and other venues and publications. Their first book, an identity polyptych, a multi-part, multi-genre work that explores familial estrangement, identity as a mixed-race Black person, and movement towards reconciliation, debuted from The Elephants on the Salish Sea Fall 2021.
JJ Rowan is a queer nonbinary poet and dancer whose writing and movement practices have developed largely out of collaborative approaches and the pursuit of deep connection. They are looking for the places where the written line and the lines of the moving body intersect, where genre blurs and remixes and reboots, and where style and role reach maximum fluidity and deeper capacity. Their chapbook, a simple verb, is available from Bloof Books. You can follow their handwriting and movement projects on Instagram.
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