C.L. KNIGHT

BRASS

He showers and sings the green green grass of home while I spread his uncreased just-off-the-hanger shirt before me like an apron and piece by piece transfer brass from a sweaty shirt I found on the closet floor.

The shower door slides open warm moist air filters into the room. I fasten a brass button to each front pocket, initials and wings to the collar point, center the name plate over the right pocket, badge over the left, long pin through bound holes, then poked through cardboard to keep it straight.

He shaves, the razor comforts me stroking his skin like cats tongue. I feel the shift of intimacy as my fingers pull his wallet, keys, loose change, loose bullets, ragged rolaids, and scraps of license numbers, tag numbers, phone numbers, zone numbers from his pockets.

Short bursts from the faucet rinse his razor, white foam pauses in the drain. I adjust the velcro straps on a bulletproof vest, slide the kevlar panels into washed blue covers, layout clean underwear and socks.

I hear a slap of aftershave, snap of patent leather, chink of change, his key in the lock as he leaves, and an unspoken lingering that turns in the bed while stars fall to the floor beside me.

BRASS originally appeared in Slipstream

MOVIE

Now this is just a movie
subject to vagaries
of a Hollywood mind,
and there are resident
bad guys
and good guys
and innocent victims.
 

And the victims are children.
They are South African,
so far away,
so black.
I watch the wide screen,
the actors are just shadows
tracing anger and pain
like a finger in the dirt.
If the wind blows
or the projection light goes out,
they will be gone.
 

A tenuous reality
surrounds me in this
dark southern theatre.
Blond and black adults
discuss what should be done,
as the children
gather in the streets,
feet gripping the dust of Soweto.
They are still flickering light,
abstract, then guns explode in the air
and these children are
bleeding
running
dying.
Their faces emerge from the shadows.
Their fingers grip my hand.
Their faces
belong to the children I know
from Saxon Street.
In the morning, they will be waiting
at my classroom door.
I want the shooting to stop,
but I am just a white woman
at the movies.

MOVIE originally appeared in Footsteps
 

C.L. Knight is the associate director of Anhinga Press. Her poetry has appeared in Earth’s Daughters, The Ledge, Slipstream, the Comstock Review, the Tar River Review, and Louisiana Literature, and in the anthologies Off the Cuffs, Touched by Eros and North of Wakulla. She has exhibited her drawings, pottery, sculpture and computer images throughout the eastern United States. She was married to a police officer for 13 years.