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.] 

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Terror

Related Posts

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.

Cloudy sunset over field.

Florida Poems

EDWARD SAMBRANO III
I will die in Portland on an overcast day, / The Willamette River mirroring clouds’ / Bleak forecast and strangers not forgetting— / Not this time—designer raincoats in their closets. / They will leave for work barely in time / To catch their railcars. It will happen / On a day like today.