Woman Dancing on Her Son’s Coffin

by Andy Young

from a black and white photograph at the House of Dance and Feathers, New Orleans, 1995

She is not
             in black not
             weeping, not leaning
against someone as she staggers,
                           drunk with grief, no—

She dances on top
                           of her son’s coffin
                           outside the Lafitte Projects
             where he was gunned down.
She dances and dances
                                        unbending, limbs thrashing
                           like Kali
                                        on Shiva’s ashen body.

Gray clothes—
                           are they sweats?—
sway in the sun-blasted noon,
                           her two living boys
             make music around her:
D-Boy gone
             who that killed D-Boy who
first told her the news? She can’t—
             some funneled shape
                           his horn won’t blow.

No lace,
             no shawl across her shoulders.
Bare-armed, back cocked,
                           ass out, she dances, yes—

             —another thud of percussion—

I, no                  she
                           grunts,
                                        pushing him out
ripping open at Charity,
                                        fluorescent lights
                                        backlighting his arched shape

             —bright slash of the trumpet—

he burns with fever,
                           laughs at ice
             tracing
             the pouting lips

                           late July, night blooming jasmine
                                        thick in the mouth

                           I grab another sliver
                                        —slap of snare—

—no, she does,
                                        it’s her boy,

a number now
                           pushing up the murder graph
                                        like a thermometer

                                                             oh mama mama

             Men hauling the casket bend
at the knees
                           not from weight
                                        but from bass thump,
from tuba’s
             fat momentum.

                           Her sweats shift
soft and loose
             as they play it loose and mean,
                           a threat in the throb
the trombone moans
                                                                   she’s gone

past shiver
             past flash of brass glint
                           & casket shine underneath her feet

                           she shakes her head—look:
                                                       she’s turning to look
                                                                   into everyone’s face.

ANDY YOUNG is a poet and essayist and is the co-founder of Meena, a bilingual Arabic-English literary journal. Her poetry collection All Night It Is Morning was published in 2014 by Di´logos Press. She teaches at Tulane University, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and is a free-lance writer for Heinemann’s Guided Reading program. Her work has appeared in places such as Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, New World Writing, and One, as well as in electronic and flamenco music and as elements in visual art. You can find her book here. “Far from Her in Egypt under Curfew” was selected as a Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition Winner in 2015.