Dream Narrative with Mother and Others

I fall back on a memory decades old.
My mother slapping me
with the back of her hairbrush

for wetting it to groom myself.
Her hand fervidly pulled at the bristles
as if they were victims of drowning.

I swear I’d dried every shadow of dampness.
But no matter, for I thought back then
her swung hand was God’s vengeance

for my sixth-grade lust over a substitute teacher.
I believed back then no substitute
could possess the glamor that young woman did.

Tonight in the city’s falling dusk,
I shunned the overtures of a stripper
who offered what she named a friction dance.

She leaned into me, her skin the scent of a paradise lost.
Good friend, believe me: I’m solely here
to gawk the likes of her slinking down poles,

and for happy hour swill. So I turned her down.
And through a neon sneer she whispered
faggot, licked her fingers,

swept them across my cheek, then tapped
my lips, leaving trace evidence
that dared me to prove she was here at all.

*

She Speaks of Her Town — Parrish, Alabama

Her clothes hold the grainy scent of feedstores
and autumns yet to arrive. Sparrows

dive low across her yard where wind
troubles clover in a child’s hands.

Sidewalks thin into open country.
The damp air breathes with fumes

and wet rust, turns daylight stale.
Someone leaves a market stall

with a mess of collards bundled in newsprint.
A breeze pulls notes from chimes

hung from her eaves.
We watch a hawk fix a zone of vigilance,

wait to leap with a single note
through a clean orbit of hunger.

At night she tells me This is an ugly town
to miss a lover from, and hums

a hymn to the pulse of freight engines
miles off in the ambient distance.

A windfelled branch thumps
against her door, like a startled horse.

*

JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent book of poetry, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, Raleigh Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work.