VINYL POETRY

Volume 10, July 2014

BIRDIE
Airea D. MatthewsView Contributor’s Note

-Icity

-for Tameria Greene
January 2004-December 2012



Cyclicity (n.) the quality or state of being cyclic, as in: At the age of 13, after a brutal ripping, she told the court I’d rather be dead. A little more than a decade later, she hollowed her 8-year-old daughter in front of her other four children with a secondhand Salvation Army bread knife. The crime, reported at 2:30 am, occurred in the kitchen. The mother claims the girl was making a sandwich and the doorbell rang. She said everything happened so fast, so fast. Some kind of mercury broke in, sliced her daughter, fled. At the scene, police reported her breath smelled of metabolizing alcohol. The house was unkempt, kitchen counter strewn with burnt tin foil, shelves bare except for mayonnaise. When the police asked why there was no other evidence of a sandwich, she reached for the bloody knife on top of her refrigerator and screamed DON’’T YOU SEE THE BREAD ON THE FLOOR?



Basicity (n.) of or relating to a base or starting point, as in: Semeria Greene wrote a letter for the family judge deciding her guardianship in 2000, “People say I’m crazy because of things I do and I might do need to see someone or either get help because these streets thieve off sweet in alleys. I’m an alley but with a door now. With a shut door now.” When the process server issued a personal summons to Sharon Greene, Semeria’s mother, ordering her to pick up her daughter, Sharon cracked the door I DON’T HAVE TIME TO DEAL WITH THIS RIGHT NOW. Sharon slammed her front door. Sharon turned up her radio. Earth, Wind and Fire. Sharon closed her blinds.



Causticity (n.) capable of destroying or eating away by chemical action, as in: Many heroin users seek a high to ease the effects of the gully. Aptly called the poor man’s Prozac, heroin is often the drug of choice for sex workers and schizophrenics. In high doses, users report floating in a dream-like state, alienated from all that drove the needle’s plunge. Addicts will often doze off, unaware, after a fix. Veins will give in, collapse. Muscling begins. Dense fibers twitch causing bruising, blooming skin, abscesses and infections. At the scene, police noticed Tameria’s mother, Semeria, drifting in and out of sleep, while standing. One officer noted purple marks under her skin, tentacled tracks down her arms, two blank and black eyes.



Chronicity (n.) marked by long duration or frequent recurrence, as in: Semeria Greene would leave her children with extended family for long periods. She said she was running to work and would be right back. Relatives report she was a prostitute and would pick up the children days or weeks later. The Division of Youth and Family Services intervened on numerous occasions, including January 2004 when newborn, Tameria, was born with cocaine coursing under her translucent skin. Sharon Greene, Semeria’s mother, assumed temporary custody. Over the years, the children were placed in foster homes—repeatedly—but rapidly returned to their mother. In November 2012, Tameria was found with blackened dents from her mother’s teeth on her arms, legs and torso. She told her teacher MY MOMMY DID IT. After her death, one month later, Tameria’s younger brother disclosed MOMMY KILLED US A LOT, ’SPECIALLY TI-TI.



Synchronicity (n.) the experiences of two or more events as meaningfully related, where they are unlikely to be causally related, as in: Two nights before Tameria was killed, I dreamt of a haunted porcelain doll with three symmetrical holes where her heart would have been. She sat, slumped, buttering her forearm with her chin, at one end of a carved table in a city’s empty cafeteria. I sat at the other end, knitting my own sleeve. A clock, out of view, stopped. She stood and walked toward me, a covered dish on the flat of her fingerless hand. As she neared, she opened the lid with her teeth, exposing countless, disembodied eyes—some crimson, some burnt-umber, some crossed, some amber, all blinking, gleamless dim marble. She handed me the tureen and trekked the length toward her chair, backward, imploring WHEN THEY ARRIVE, FEED OUR GUESTS THEIR EYES SO THEY’LL SEE HOW I TASTE.