Do You Have a Family?
/Z. T. Corley
When asked about my family, why do I think of the spiders I have allowed to live? My mother
with a cigarette, a crown of smoke around her head. Tennessee in January. Flowers I’ve
trampled, nameless and numerous. The cities I claim but who don’t claim me. My grandmother
in a hospital bed. The vultures on the side of the road. South Carolina in June. The sound of
beads. The blackberries I ate. The urn on the mantel. Not my father, but the beer he let me
taste—the bitterness of it. Fireflies at night. Georgia in July. Rainbows on the ceiling. Grass
stains and mosquito bites. Leaves in my hair. All the ashes I won’t eat. The taste of cornbread.
My grandmother’s brown eyes—both ringed blue. The rabbits I chased. Dandelions in spring.
The butterflies I’ve held. Church on Sundays. My great-grandmother’s hands. The hot comb’s
hiss. Long dirt roads. A man—not my father—standing in the doorway like a dark pillar.
California in December. All the dresses I never wore. The worms I studied like paintings. The
stench of coffee. The scabs I’ve picked and who, like an estranged family, attempted to recover
themselves even while I scraped and gouged with fingernails sharper than the beak of a condor.
What was the question again?
Author’s Statement: This poem is written after Ama Codjoe's "A Family Woven Like Night Through Trees" and the title itself is lifted from her poem. Like the speaker in Codjoe's poem, mine cannot answer the question directly. "Do you have a family?" started off lineated, in an effort to echo Codjoe, but quickly became a prose poem instead. Leaving it as a block of text created an overwhelming effect: both the speaker and the reader are overwhelmed by the seemingly disparate images, fragments, and almost-memories, and must go back to the beginning in order to try to find an answer in the deluge.
Z. T. Corley is a Tennessee-based poet and a current student at Austin Peay State University. Her poetry explores themes of Blackness, memory, identity, desire, and loss.
