“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.
