After Richmond Burned

The sun rose, red as a welt

over the charred brick

facade of a ruined mill,

its windows gaping like eye sockets

above a business district

that would be rebuilt to take in

my great-grandfather from Bavaria,

who was swept up, black hat in hands,

at the unveiling of Robert E. Lee's statue.

He put a Rebel flag in his lapel

to trade with the wounded and the proud

until the Depression spit out his business,

sent him off the third-story balcony,

and my grandfather, shame-faced,

to the tobacco factory, suffocating humidity,

his breath an ember in his throat.

My mother stirred rationed sugar

into her tea—the bag always re-used—

with monogrammed silver spoons.

At my school, Afros bloomed

like strange mushrooms around me—

get lost, white girl,

in the asphalt heat on the playground;

keep going past the camellia bushes

in my mother's yard overgrown,

at supper every night, her face like concrete;

across the Huguenot Bridge, the metal railing where I fell

in love with the roar and vertigo of the James River;

the dance hall where I skulked in the raucousness

after my boyfriend left, wandered Broad Street,

chicken and ribs joints, vacant

lots where I wove through cones in driver's ed

until I learned enough to speed

away, camshaft churning everything

slammed inside

my car heading north.