I

Yellow peppers cooking in a cast-iron skillet
With gravy and pork chops.
Sweetie Elizabeth House, Betty Carole, Lana,
Grandmother, mother, granddaughter
Rolled together in the large double bed,
Mouths open in the dark,
The little corpses of empty shoes
Aligned on the floor.
We stand in the kitchen.
I laugh so hard I stagger
And put my hand on Sweetie's shoulder.
We talk about what colors become them:
Lana, fourteen, purplish-black like eggplant,
And Silvia, one.
Lana holds my daughter on her lap.
The curlicue of black braid
Touches the blonde crown of the baby's head.
The baby eats what molds, stinks, smells sweet.
We talk about how Nettie got so fat
And the fickleness of men.
The roots of Sweetie's hair are stiff
With pomade and the smoke of Kools.
Soon the three of them will drive away
In the big Pontiac, back to Detroit.

II

To Sweetie, who could never come inside
my real mother's house.

Close mother,
I remember you salt and sour
Like the seep of grease.
Missing you one place, I search another.
Somewhere I stop, waiting for you
Among the dark porches of grudging wood,
Among the dust sifting interminable, fine on front
      stoops,
Among the heaviness of minerals.
You are a sweet, ghostly narcotic,
A taste, a scrap, a bone to end things.
I look for you in the moonshine
Of white skin hoodoo,
Among the wisps of raffia that burn to nothing,
Hissing in the wind.

- Natalie Kenvin