Terror

By TOMMYE BLOUNT

 

“Made of cotton Jeans, red cotton cord
and one cotton tassel. Price, each $5.00″

from Catalogue of Official Robes and Banners, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

Inside the discourse, our course—the walk
in the tattle, the footwork goose stepped

by robed men winged in silk-lined capes.
A white hood is a whitehood, neighborhood

watch, citizens arrested by terror—a tremble
in the trees (as in from the root) of someone

off their route. Think of the children; the babies 
cradled in the arms of darkness, black 

milk at the corners of their rattled pink mouths 
fighting to suck at the air for life; a bitch

with a black tongue too busy lapping 
up her pups to see us coming.

 

 

Tommye Blount is the author of the chapbook What Are We Not For and the debut full-length collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue. Born and raised in Detroit, Tommye now lives in Novi, Michigan.

[Purchase Issue 24 here.] 

Terror

Related Posts

Tripas Book Cover

Excerpt from Tripas

BRANDON SOM
One grandmother with Vicks, one with Tiger Balm, rubbed / fires of camphor & mint, old poultices, / into my chest: their palms kneading & wet with salve, / its menthols, to strip the chaff & rattle in a night wheeze. Can you / hear their lullabies?

Blue cover of There is Still Singing in the Afterlife

Four Poems by JinJin Xu

JINJIN XU
my mother, my father. / Her skinny blue wrists, his ear caressing a cigarette. In the beginning, / it is already too late, but there is hunger & no time / to waste. All they need are six hands, three mouths, a clockwork / yearning for locks of their own, windows square & fresh.

black and white photo of a slim man's body, arm outstretched from the bbody

LitFest 2025 Excerpts: Video Poems by Paisley Rekdal

PAISLEY REKDAL
On the seventh day / of the seventh month, magpies / bridge in a cluster of black and white // the Sky King crosses to meet his Queen, time tracked / by the close-knit wheeling / of stars. I watch. You come // to me tonight, drunk on wine / and cards, nails ridged black / with opium