(In memory of Sonya Massey)
Fill a Pyrex measuring cup with 1¾ cups of water, pour
into a pot. Tick, tick. an oven’s front burner blooms
The call
Eli, Eli somebody call Eli
The response
Somebody call Eli
Call
Eli, Eli somebody call Eli
Response (hand clapping)
Somebody call Eli
Call
Eli, Eli somebody call Eli
Response (foots stomping)
Somebody call Eli
Pour eight ounces of Krasdale Quick Oats into the belly and from the lip of that Pyrex
Springfield, Illinois Mental Illinois
Springfield Illness Mental Illness
Who suffers (from it)?
Sonya lived in the grown land of Lincoln and Lindsay (sometimey semi-slave state)
dialed two numbers (one she repeated) in what had been the land of blab and pay schools (without stump speeches) in what had been the soil of circuit riders and stovepipe hats in what had been the soil of rail splitters and catch wrestlers in what had been the land of ringed fingers and hung shingles. (for Abraham)
Sonya’s mind was a storefront church. (Mother AME? Pentecostal? …of G-d in Christ?) No matter: that night her pupils were blurry pulpits that thought they spotted a prowler
Sonya’s mind: a great gettin’ up
a mourning
a fare thee well…well, well
Sonya’s body a quiet basement where her children attended Sunday School
Yes, Jesus loves we, yes Jesus loves we ‘cause…? (That day’s lesson: 1st Samuel 17: Sonya—no—David verses Goliath.)
In Ephraim’s hill country, Elkanah had two wives. Her womb closed, Hannah was barren. Lord of hosts. She weeps (not eats) in Shiloh. She drinks (not drunk) in Shiloh. Eli watched her mouth (her lips’ brown personalities) and said “go in peace, maidservant, your petition granted, your affliction pinched.” First chapter of the first book of Samuel.
The call
Eli, Eli somebody call Eli
The response
Somebody call Eli
After the water has rumbled, knuckled and reached that boiling point, pour the cooked oats in a square bowl: add nutmeg bran stevia and walnuts. Let cool twenty minutes. seek spoon.
4:15: 4:15: 4:15:: it’s too early in the mourning, leave us be!
Honest Abe put down stakes in Springfield:: April 15, 1837; died in a rooming house in an a.m. rain with a D.C. theater in his hairline never knowing he’d been onstage, (because Booth was an actor using Abe’s head to execute his blocking, his bullet shattering a log cabin behind Lincoln’s right eye):: April 15, 1865; Federal Taxes started to come due:: April 15 (in) 1955.
Step 11: Refund or Amount you owe
40. If you have an amount on Line 32, add Lines 32 and 35, If you have an amount on Line 31, and the amount is less than Line 35, subtract Line 31 from Line 35… Sonya, this is the amount you owe. Your life. or $9,488. Whichever is cheaper. See Instructions::
Illinois illness: swollest state and local tax in the nation. 15% of Sonya’s household income due on April 15th. 15% of her household income entered her home where pea-green curtains were hung; 15% of her household income had a badge; 15% of her household income covered 10% of his take-home pay. Six of that fifteen percent paid for the Glock living on his hip—in eight-hour shifts; (3 out of her 9,500 bucks underwrote them hollow points.)
She lived in a world she didn’t choose
In sheer house coat and Pjs, Massey leafed through a stack of papers and her orange purse, asked for her Bible—a book harboring sixty others
Grayson:: What’s in a (sur) name (sur)? :: “son of the gray-haired one; son of the steward bailiff; son of the reeve; enforcer. village executioner. a grave’s son.”
stove check:
“don’t need a fire while we’re here.” (don’t need to fire while you’re there!)
She picked up a pot of boiling water
15% of her household income helped Grayson draw his weapon;
I rebuke you in the name of Jesus
Barrel of a gun: stiff/horizontal/lynch rope.
I rebuke you in the name of Jesus
Barrel of a Glock: a horizontal hanging
Her body and her sorry crouched behind her cluttered kitchen counter
A house divided against itself cannot cook
Her call
She’d punched three numbers
His response
He squeezed three rounds
Rather than escalate, he could have lowered the temperature (in that living/situation/room). Like a pot boiling on a stove, he could have turned his burner down. He could have stayed on his side of the island, instead of turning a calm conversation into a pond of momma blood
(nearby Lick Creek is just a catfish swole up with itself.)
He could have split that deadly second into peaceful pieces
centuries and sorrow sometimes echo in the blood
William Donnegan cobbler, conductor :: Underground Railroad :: bearded like Honest Abe (whom he’d once befriended). His Springfield neighborhood, all-white, including his wife (nine pints of Guinness and Jagermeister plumped her across-the-Atlantic blood). Well-known, well-heeled (his significant other’s other blood didn’t help) blind Donnegan became a white riot’s dark target. They slit his throat like an envelope: out spilled a red, 80-year-old letter. A clothesline (weighed down still by the echo of wet laundry) wrapped ‘round his neck again and again and again and again. Hung from a low tree, his feet/the earth came to an understanding: he could sneak-stand, breathe through the sinkhole in his gushing windpipe. He crawled into the following morning, dying in St. John’s Hospital—run by the sisters of St. Francis.
More than a century later (after a white, one-man riot) Sonya too succumbed at St. John’s. Could a pillow swim for more than a century? Could her body have made its way to Donnegan’s bed? Her spirit pawing for kin her mind never met? Her spirit knowing Donnegan’s last breath was curled, gasping at the foot of her death’s bed.
Sonya gave up her ghost at 1:20 a.m.: same time of my first earth cry. (Momma say) But no, I bloomed a human on eastern standard. (time). Massey died; Grayson the reason—murder(h)er. (central time not center mass.) Headshot. Black-and-White photo actors (Wilkes Booth?) use to get work. 8½ × 11. Headshot. A bullet sheriff’s use for human Charleston Chew; to snap chocolate; to shatter a dreamer’s pink nougat. Sonya’s mind had been interpreted. But, before afflicting her with his trigger sickness, shouldn’t Grayson have been die-agnosed?
The call
“Skywalker, may the (deadly) force (not) be with you.” Obi-Wan Youknowme
The response
May the deadly (not) be with you; but may the Lord, Sonya, as, in your white house coat, you now wander well beyond. the Death Star.
