Do you remember flirting at the fish counter on Thursdays? At the Buford Highway Farmers Market—dark corners, concrete floors, & flags winking in an industrial breeze.
2 Their bread aisle, which wrapped horizons, tender clouds of challah, kaiser, croissants; rambutan in the produce section, large custard pies, & a seafood market—perpetually wet with a salt-brine stink, but you dressed up for it: low pumps & pearls on your ears, silky as molars.
3 My sister, cousins, & I—all child-hollers wailed between rows—but you stayed posed, perfectly unbothered, pushed the buggy slow. & when the fish man saw you, sung your sugared name like a soprano—Heyyy Miss Alice—you’d duet, a laughter bubbling up somewhere among the snapper, the whole cold aisle whizzing a tune.
2
I shoulda noticed how lonely it’d be to stop going. After your GM Cadillac gnarled into scrap metal. After the accident. After that stranger blinking satanic in red light.
2 After that, your constant companion became boxed & bulky—a CRT TV propped on a cheap stand in the corner of your room:
3 Joyce Meyer, T. D. Jakes, Kenneth Copeland warbling. The only tunes you’d tend to, till the thin veiled hours shook you into prayer, then you’d turn to QVC.
4 Did you miss how shopping sounded in you? Is it why you bought a leopard-print jacket that didn’t fit, made me promise to wear it, which I did—promise, flipping my fingers over the stiff denim, brown & bronze, dark spots flecked across the arms.
5 I loved it but didn’t
wear it in your lifetime.
3
The night you died, I sat in the dark outside my closet looking to where the jacket hung, waiting for sadness to talon from my throat.
2 I confess I couldn’t keep my promise till my early twenties—my sister asked me to take her to a rock concert, & I agreed, though you wouldn’t have liked their music, the two of us dressed 80s Madonna-chic, side ponies, mesh dresses & cheap pleather boots, & I decided then to wear the jacket, loved how it bridged the now with what was
3 before me—my sister & I, an act of curl-coiled joy in an emo crowd, sweat licking our brows. Perhaps this is why I wore that jacket—wanted to take you to places you would never know, wanted you close enough
to see, finally, joy: feet leaping, arms
leopard-stamped & reaching for sky.
Header image: Calling the sun to work, by Lindsay Adams, 2024. Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 in.
Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Forde has received a Pink Poetry Prize and a Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and she was a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Forde’s work has appeared in Poetry, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more.
