She Closes Her Eyes
Mary Lou Williams
A fly scribbles its orbit.
Sun through my eyelids
blood-orange, shocks of white on black,
a keyboard in negative.
In this business, am I
the negative of a man?
The globe of my head lapses
no certain interval — I open to haze
cast in turquoise, my skin alive with summer.
Knowing not when nor resolve,
I will be stronger, still purer.
The bruise rises to the surface and is gone.
It says erase me,
the very opposite of reassurance.
Laton Carter’s Leaving (University of Chicago) received the William Stafford-Hazel Hall Book Award. Poems (on Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, and Nina Simone) have appeared in Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature and Sycamore Review (Chet Baker). His poem “The Starling” was recently selected by Dan Beachy-Quick for The Winter Anthology Prize for Poetry.