Fat drops of black note rain clouds burst
on Bronzeville sidewalks
Puddle in the concrete cracks like July
rainstorms and cymbal claps of thunder
Bronzeville sits mellow across south side el
tracks, sleeps humid in the hazy afternoons,
Waiting for the sunset
Waiting for the shadows that spill out blue
harmonies and those sweet, sweet syrupy
bass lines
Waiting for saxophone and harmonica, for
those ghosts of Bronzeville past
to fill the time between sun and blinding
sun with hot, hot jazz
In Bronzeville, notes can flex their muscles
on the scripted lines of music, can sing in
the stagnant summer air can blast through
window units and ceiling fans and circle
down in graceful concentric circles they can
breathe life into the sidewalk cracks.
Bronzeville blues own the twilight.
But somewhere surrounding twilight I find
the contrast between day and night
Find the cobwebs falling between the sun and
moon
Because the morning sun melts the melodies
and whispered memories of yesterday’s
neighborhood
and it’s the basketball drumming, asphalt
stomping, double dutch jumping beatboxing
schoolyard rhythms
that rule the day
that soak the sweaty white uniforms of summer
school at Holy Angels Catholic School
that roll knee socks down, that unbutton collars
that send fingers to braid and rebraid
and twist and kink Cierra’s wild hair
Cierra comes to me down a brown tile flight
of uneven steps at 9:15 every morning,
science and math book in tow.
our words skate these silvery cobwebs between
us, these fragile spaces where our
sun and moon eyes find each other, narrow
balance beams on which to stand, that
common ground we so desperately search for
we so surprisingly, easily find.
Cierra is fat boxy braids, is dark roast coffee
bean skin, is shy smile, bitten nails, ashy

knees and long, soft lashes
She is pencil and paper, eraser stubs and
crumbs kind of student,
Works and reworks her numbers
Her slow, cursive sentences until syntax is
subject-verb by the book
And 1, 2, 3 perfect.
We review times table facts, drawing grids of
stick-straight numbers—
Skinny 7s and droopy 5s, drilling and slipping,
drilling and slipping until we reach the 9’s.
Once, twice she tries to write her 9s table in
proper sequence but once, twice, rips up
her paper to start anew,
The eraser long since ground into its metal
casing.
So we start again and I show her that trick—
you know,
The one where you count down on your fingers
1 2 3 4 to see that 9x4 is 3 and 6, 36.
And we practice
9x2—“18” she says
9x3—she counts and folds her middle finger.
“27” she says
Again and again we count, mouthing numbers,
folding fingers
9x8—1 2 3 4 5 6 7…she trails off, folding her
fingers down into the shape of a gun
And I know our math drills are over.
“Do you know anyone that’s died?” She asks,
and in one breath, snaps those threads
between us,
Exposing the gulf that divides her experience
from mine
No one. Not the way she wants me to know
death, at least.
Her eyes widened to drown me in her disbelief,
blind me in her raw face of shock
And words
Words tumble out of her mouth—names and
places as verbal gravestones faster than my
imagination can run
“at the corner of ” “three times to the head
with” cousin, neighbor, friend
“baseball bat” “driveby” “drug deal” “chains”
cousin, neighbor, friend
Daddy.
And now Cierra’s eyes shut to blind me from this formless, noiseless memory
She clutches her stomach lets her braids fall
in her eyes
And the silence shrinks me down to my
proper place as a white girl with no street
sense
Without blood stains pock marking my childhood
And then she tells me.
Daddy—Daddy was in the bar causing trouble
3 men in the alleyway, they don’t like his face
they pull their guns but he’s too slow
shot once—to the arm
shot once to the belly—but he’s still breathing
so, shot once—to the legs
keep him from crawling.
She lives with grandmamma now
Mama ran off to Wisconsin
Mama ran off the streets at 13 left Crack baby
Cierra in the broad, wrinkled avenues of
Bronzeville,
In the Holy Angels School yard,
And now, in my small, insignificant hands.
And we notice the stench of midnight seeping
into the room,
the smell of black skies and streetlamps as the
moonlight of Bronzeville settles on our
minds
“My daddy had a gun when he died—did he
go to hell?”
God in Heaven, have mercy.
I stare into this gaping hole of catechism,
these stories from the street
My confirmation textbook failed to address
And I stagger under the enormity and scandal
of grace
As I search for words to answer her
and I want to tell her
How faith is more than deathbed confessionals
in bloody alleys
And sin is less than bullet holes
A grace so scandalous does not heal the streets
in one easy breath it strokes Cierra’s face
and holds her until one day she can slip
into it—like caterpillars into new skin—
and understands how this all fits—the night
and day, the dark alleys and white concrete,
the Jazz, Bronzeville, and Holy Angels.