Collin Kelley

Parallel Lines

My mother’s mother, the one I called Moom Moom so often as a baby that it became her nickname, dances around her kitchen to Blondie singing Heart of Glass on the radio. It’s 1979 and Debbie and the boys have sold out to disco, but the mainstream doesn’t care. Dancers scream whenever the DJ spins it at the clubs, that’s what my grandmother says as she teaches me The Hustle on cracked linoleum, her new husband claps along, can’t take his eyes off her. Moom Moom is re-married to a trucker, divorced my one-handed, alcoholic grandfather as soon as the nest emptied, tired of the gun in her face, waking up marinated in his drunken piss. She likes long hauls, seeing the world, while my mother turns bitter and adulterous, no sizzle in the bacon my father brings home. I stay up all night to watch Blondie on the Midnight Special, learn Debbie’s shawl dance with a ripped bed sheet, purloined heels, face smeared with lipstick, mother’s whereabouts unknown.

My Parents Unwittingly Take Me To See
The Color Purple At A Black Theater

I get filled with the spirit at Cinemas 3,
the only white child dancing in the aisle,
maybe He’s trying to tell me something,
or maybe it’s just my mortified parents,
shockingly pale moons floating in a sea
of what my mother calls the ny-gras,
while I earn my honorary black woman title,
bestowed on me by elated strangers,
I thrust my hands toward heaven, sing
until sweat circles my head like a crown,
and I like to think this is where I learned
compassion and acceptance,
under the tutelage of Shug and Celie,
when Oprah was just Sophia,
unashamed to hold dark hands,
my color obsolescent, the afternoon
a dark room becomes a church, and a woman
old enough to be my grandmother, takes me
into her arms, hands rough with time,
strokes my hair, shouts our glory,
this is the blessing, this is the blessing,
then whispers, He is working here today,
and for a moment I can hear Him whistling
through the seats, rustling the popcorn,
bouncing off the silver screen,
before my letters got returned to sender
or hidden under the floor, and before
this building was reduced to rubble,
the last place I knelt,
felt touched by your presence.
Dear God…

Funtown

– Stewart Avenue, Atlanta, GA

Abandoned putt-putt golf course
on a street that will eventually
become prime ho stroll

a picture of me at age five
hugging the flaking remains
of a dinosaur on the fourth green

pre-historic houses choked
with weeds, Astroturf buckling
and bleached, water feature

gone dry before I was born.
My parents say this photo
of me does not exist,

that I’ve confused this memory
with one of my Uncle Terry,
our last visit before he packed

up and moved to San Francisco
with his boyfriend, before AIDS
before memento mori meant

anything to him, or me. I am
certain I was there, squinting
in the glare, a double image

splitting us in half, the halo
of sun spots transferring
the life he would not finish

so seamlessly I misremember
where our lives intersect
synapses carving I was here.