South Side Diaspora
We hang
From the looped coffles
Dangling from the roof of the bus;
The cuffs’ metal jangles
Clank harmoniously in tandem,
Feet shuffle a rat a tat
As empty fingers fumble for a baseline
That isn’t there;
/
Our bodies, compact
With other black bodies,
Adrift, on course to the Loop
Where we disperse into black diaspora
Of the North and West.
/
A woman bites, crisp, an apple,
As the man next to her snivels and spits
Out the open window —
It catches on the glass;
We watch its web stretch with the wind.
/
This is our freedom:
The crash of teeth
Against raw skin;
The puckered promise
Of a hocked loogie.
/
Do you hear Kendrick
Bellowing from inside
That there boy’s headphones?
/
Stuck inside the belly of the beast!
Can you please pray for me?
/
This metal whale grinds and screeches
It bellows and groans as we tickle his ribs with our feet.
We are Jonah, plunged into darkness;
We are Tashtego, drowning;
We are swelling, sweltering strange fruit ripening
Among the spit-capillaries that line the windows.
/
A flood is coming,
Noah,
Load this, our ark, with bodies
He has not yet marveled at —
Forsaken, we are
Forsaken.
/
Get God on the phone!
Said it won’t be long —
/
He said,
/
Seven days from now
I will send rain on the earth
For forty days and forty nights,
And I will wipe from the face of the earth
Every living creature I have made.
/
Are we the children of the saved?
Or the bodies yet to be washed away?
Shall the lake turn black
As our water-logged skin?
Vigilante Africano steers silently,
Docking lakeside,
Northside —
Thirty-nine dead, upon arrival.
Where will the lake start
And the South Side end?
We sit, awaiting a judgment that will not come.
— Sara Hughes
