Letter to Mildred from Outside Little Rock Regional High School
Today my soul is stricture. It's 103 here and the only shadow I find is shame. I, the descendant of a confederate soldier, have inherited a bitter bounty. The heat presses on this place like a shroud. At the Visitor's Center a woman explained that this is still a working high school, adding in her sweet southern drawl that it's nearly ninety percent black now. What they could not keep out they fled from. We've come so far she says and I picture them, one by one sowing For Sale signs on lawns, carefully tucking heirlooms in to boxes, walking their forty years across the desert waiting for a sign.
The sunlight here lays waste to language. From fragment, run on, they reconstruct informal divisions. I am interloper, dangling on the jagged edges of judgment. This is the stale playground of the past. My ancestors played here. My history is a broken bowl, try as I might to tread carefully around the shards; they always slither into the soft soles of my feet as I wander this American desert.
Bridget Gage-Dixon
Today my soul is stricture. It's 103 here and the only shadow I find is shame. I, the descendant of a confederate soldier, have inherited a bitter bounty. The heat presses on this place like a shroud. At the Visitor's Center a woman explained that this is still a working high school, adding in her sweet southern drawl that it's nearly ninety percent black now. What they could not keep out they fled from. We've come so far she says and I picture them, one by one sowing For Sale signs on lawns, carefully tucking heirlooms in to boxes, walking their forty years across the desert waiting for a sign.
The sunlight here lays waste to language. From fragment, run on, they reconstruct informal divisions. I am interloper, dangling on the jagged edges of judgment. This is the stale playground of the past. My ancestors played here. My history is a broken bowl, try as I might to tread carefully around the shards; they always slither into the soft soles of my feet as I wander this American desert.
Bridget Gage-Dixon
