Terrance Hayes
Ma and me ride a blue mule into the South where cockroaches
dream of the apocalypse, and weep each sunrise bright as grief.
And crushed, their insides are milky as moonlight banked in cloud.
Because between nightfall and morning, the roaches crawl all over
dominion in their second-hand shoes making deals with the angel
of exile, who does not call the Lord his master and is nobody’s slave.
I’d like to call him, father, the one wearing a vest of woven snakes,
but he will not answer, not in the storm which darkens our route,
not with the roach he keeps trapped in his mouth. Ma and me ride
a blue mule until its dumb heart gives out. She grips its tail and I
its ears and we drag it to the side of the road like a bag of garbage
on trash day, its muscles soft as cushion and its bones soft too
like coil gone lazy in a couch, and we leave it burning with all
the humanity fire strips away. A blue stench rides Ma and me
deep into a dream of the South where the roaches weep
like the mules of slaves, where they are quiet as cows waiting
for slaughter, and if their backs shine like jewels in the field,
the roaches on parade, it’s because they are bright in the rain
and filled with a wonder which cuts through them and the fields
they wander and the hands that pluck them from tobacco leaves
with the certainty of a blade. I want to live as the roach lives without
a head or body, free on both sides of the grave, like my father
beneath a charmed umbrella spitting on the Lord before he escapes.