The Raw Root of Dark Sounds
These three poems excerpted from “Scorched Earth” reckon with a mother’s face, the devil’s music, and what miracles can happen on a plain day.
A LOUDER THING
What for Kenneka Jenkins and her mother and my mother
What is it about my mother’s face, a bright
burn when I think back, her teeth, her immaculate teeth
that I seldom saw or knew, her hair like braided
black licorice. I am thinking of my mother’s face,
because she is like the mother in the news whose
daughter was found dead, frozen inside a hotel freezer.
My mother is this mourning mother who begged
the staff to search for her daughter, but was denied.
Black mothers are often seen pleading for their children,
shown stern and wailing, held back somehow by police
or caution tape—
A Black mother just wants to see her baby’s body.
A Black mother just wants to cover her baby’s body
with a sheet on the street. A Black mother
leaves the coffin open for all the world to see,
and my mother is no different. She is worried
about seeing the last minutes of me: pre-ghost,
stumbling alone through empty hotel hallways,
failing to find balance, searching for a friend,
a center, anyone, to help me home. Yes.
I’ve gotten into a van with strangers.
I’ve taken drugs with people who did not care
how hard or fast I smoked or blew.
But what did I know of Hayden? What did I know
of that poem besides my mother’s hands, her fist,
her prayers and premonitions? What did I know
of her disembodied voice hovering over the seams
of my life like the vatic song the whip-poor-will
makes when it can sense a soul dispersing?
Still. My mother wants to know where I am,
who I am with, and when will I land.
I get frustrated by her insistence on my safety
and survival. What a shame I am. I’m sorry, Mom.
Some say Black love is different. Once,
I asked my mother why she always yelled
at me when I was little. She said I never listened
to her when she spoke to me in hushed tones
like a white mother would, meaning soft volume
is a privilege. Yeah, that’s right. I am using a stereotype
to say a louder thing. I am saying my mother
was screaming when she lost me in the mall once.
HELL’S BELLS
Wasn’t allowed to listen
to secular music. Mother said
it was the devil’s music.
Church said Satan was made
of music, glory of the Lord
inlaid in his pipes.
Before he was cast out, pastor said,
Satan led heaven’s choir.
Lucifer still sings, pastor said,
& we could hear him
on rock ’n’ roll records
backwards, hell-bent & warbled.
Sometimes when I’m bored
I research the Manson murders.
I often think about Sharon Tate’s
shredded pregnant body. One night,
I even looked up the pictures. Yes,
of course, it was beyond brutal.
I wanted to see complete damage.
The mess didn’t scare me.
Supposedly Sharon screamed
Mother! Mother! Mother!
Mother! Mother! Mother!
before & while they knifed her.
When I said I wasn’t scared
I’m not saying I wasn’t disgusted.
I’m saying copious amounts of blood
& horror look familiar to me,
maybe expected is a better word,
or, rather, that I wanted to be certain
I was alive. Okay, it was about control.
I’m grasping at what I know
& don’t know for precise meaning,
even now I think scare is not quite right,
which makes me think of Lowell’s
wedge-headed mother skunk
inside that empty cup of sour cream.
My first CD was Alanis Morissette.
I listened to her Jagged Little Pill
on repeat. I liked that secret song
about her breaking into her lover’s house
& dancing in the shower just like the raw root
of any dark sound: desperation.
During the whole song, she repeatedly
asks her lover for forgiveness
just like any long poem saying:
would you forgive me, love, for not being concise,
would you forgive me, love, is what I’m struggling to say,
would you forgive me, love, is all I am ever trying to say.
When my mother found
this silver disc she shattered it
in front of my face, yelling.
I don’t remember what.
I just recall the pattern in which
it broke like a loud little web.
I threw the mirrored shards
into the trash with my faces,
sliced & reeling. At church
I wouldn’t sing & my mother
would poke me in the arm.
I would try & lift my hands,
hoping to feel something
more than just trying to feel
something holy, a peace
I didn’t possess but grieved.
I reached above my head
for some slice of surrender.
How pure & wordless & magical
& vague & replete & blurred
it is to worship anything
at all, I sometimes think,
but God keeps nudging me.
My mother is still yelling at me,
& most of the Manson girls
are now old women professing Christ.
Is this what time does to all believers?
(Makes us heaven hungry, revert back?)
Remember buying a new CD—
I’m still clawing at that plastic crinkle,
my faith in the liner notes,
thanking everybody, even you
& you & mostly you. Yes,
you must believe, most of all,
I’m begging to be saved.
AFTER THE PLAIN DAY BECOMES MAGNIFICENT TO HER
If you're reading this on a smartphone, turn your phone sideways now.
Someone I know is about to receive
a marriage proposal. It’s January 30, 2021,
in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s cold. It’s Saturday.
It’s still the pandemic. The weather spits
freezing rain, almost hail, but sadder. Sloppier?
Outside my window bare winter branches
beckon the soft white bulb in the sky diffused
in low relief. This day could be so ordinary,
could just slip by like a blip with just my laundry
folded and a few answered emails, but someone
I know is getting good news today, and I, with a
small group of people wearing masks, will wait
in her backyard after she says yes, after the plain day
becomes magnificent to her. We will coo and ogle
at her sparkling ring like cockatoos. I will rub
my thumb at the back of my ring finger where my
wedding ring used to be, a sapphire heated to a deep
and gleaming purple. My thumb will rub that little
pillow of skin underneath the knuckle, ghosting
the loss and the feeling of cool metal there,
but ultimately thankful. I stopped wearing my ring
long before my divorce, a foreshadow and then
the real shadow I had to confront and welcome
and wade through on my knees in supplication.
But I still believe in love, which is why I am bringing
her flowers from Amelia’s, which is why she brought
me flowers from Amelia’s when my divorce was final.
The card read, Congratulations on taking a brave step!
I think it all takes courage: falling in love, staying in love,
leaving love that no longer serves you, loving yourself—
No, I mean really loving yourself, really looking at yourself
in the mirror and accepting everything you see there,
your whole beautifully flawed body, drinking yourself
in like a lake in love with its wateriness, getting verbal
with it—you yourself saying, I love you. I love you. I accept
you exactly as you are right now. You are so easy to love. You are
so lovable and wonderful. It’s astonishing, isn’t it? Loving
yourself like that. But just now two cardinals darted
outside of my window while I was making black tea
with a giant squeeze from half of a fat lemon. I was
taking a quick break from writing this poem, and I
remember researching that cardinals mate for life up and up a upnd up!
and I think that’s a good sign for today, especially up up and up up and
for sweet Emily and Ben, a sweet day to celebrate up and up and
your new rung in the ladder of love going up and up and
About the author
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collectionsScorched Earth (Simon & Schuster/Washington Square Press, 2025), I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, andEquilibrium(Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is the recipient of the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a 2019 Pushcart Prize, and has received scholarships and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and a 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (MFA) and Tennessee State University (BA). She is currently theGrace Hazard Conkling Writer-In-Residence at Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts.She is at work on a memoir-in-essays calledBegging to Be Saved.