Rain Prud’homme-Cranford – Poetry
Dust Bowl Blues
for JCM
Black thorn pierce naked foot bleed red overhead black crow blue tinged wings trip on broken branch
Broken branch no spring bud magnolias to bruise broken in Billie’s hair broken notes slip past lips trembling like timpani
Trembling timpani rumble call thunder come down memory like sermon brimstone trembling dredge lake sludge corpse rotting this is what we buried
Broken branch trembling like timpani under wary perched black crow tinged blue as bruise and this black thorn bleeds red on Oklahoma dust
40
I taste ashes smoke
burnt, crumbling, singed—
leave tongue lips blackened
Muscle biceps, triceps tired
of holding up this ceiling
give like rotten rain-worn
bridge under weight from century
of crossing—
I duck my head
make room for sky
Lips still smoldering
embers on my tongue
this is what loneliness
tastes like at 8×5
Each year measured in
silver lengths, etched lines
stretched braille ridges
turning Spirograph
mandala memory patterns
I stand center as to
say this place matters—
Follow intersecting shapes
with flattened fingertips
learn equations in pattern
lose place count by 8s
back by 5—leave 3
Three:
one for the world below me
two for the world around me
three for the world above me
How many offerings
before I shatter
this charred chrysalis
8×5
Loom
this solid form
broke
s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d
forth across worn loom and
waited
fingers crooked with age of wanting
to point
with sureness
for a future without
rivets,
took to its surface
covering the dried hide in
mosaic pattern appliqué beads
whose bright colors belie
ache in hands
worn raw and shadowed
displaced spirit
standing on sideline waiting to be
corporal
again wrapped in loom-worked skin
solid dressings for
strange
knowledge left hanging from
southern tree
removed to silent schoolyard
where death taught
f/r/a/c/t/i/o/n/s
in the lengths of hair and
bible : verses
Rain Prud’homme-Cranford Goméz Ph.D., won the First Book Award in Poetry for Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory, (Mongrel Empire Press 2012) from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas (2009). Critical work has appeared in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, The Southern Literary Journal, Louisiana Folklife, Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond (LSU P), and Yellow Medicine Review. Her creative work can be found in various journals including Tidal Basin Review, Natural Bridge, Sing: Indigenous Poetry of the Americas, Mas Tequila Review, and many others. A “TriRacially Fluffy and Fabulous” Louisiana méstiza, (Louisiana Creole/Choctaw-Biloxi/Mvskogean descent paternally and Canadian Métis, CelticAmerican ancestry maternally), growing up along the Gulf south —issues of Indigenous-Creole homelands drive both her academic and creative works.
As Us 