From the Fishouse

No amount of hoodoo could convince
me that anything was wrong but the music.
I remember saying: What’s wrong

with this place? Nothing but country.
Still spinning the table-top jukebox,
even though the songs were the same

as the first time around. In Tennessee,
music travels faster than prayers
for a silent god, but no one wants

to hear Stevie Wonder. I was sure
simplicity would change Hank Williams
into Al Green; Curlee, Tennessee,

to Los Angeles. But it couldn’t, any more
than music dampens the smell
of Confederate grease, what my mother

called “Southern-fried anger.”
Or sweat-creased stares that had less
to do with my black father sitting next

to her. More with me, like a blind man
eating peas with a knife. In the old days,
funnels and oil-skin sacks inside white

hoods were the unfulfilled thirsts of dead
Confederate soldiers for the superstitious
here, white sheets the ghost-skin—cold

enough to make a black man leave town
by moonlight. Me saying This place sucks
didn’t help. My mother, dragging me

by my afro, away from the sweetest tea
I’d tasted didn’t help: still no Stevie.
Only an agreed-upon silence in the diner.