BOOK EXCERPT: BITTERING THE WOUND
This excerpt comes from St. Louis writer and poet Jacqui Germain’s award-winning debut collection “Bittering the Wound,” a first-person retelling of the August 2014 Ferguson uprising.
Self-Portrait Framed in Life Between Protests
I know it’s Thursday, but the Friday
is tonight & the Monday is tomorrow. Did you email the meetings? The minutes?
Have you emailed Wednesday is
tomorrow? At 6? PM? At the church with the chairs?
In the basement? After the raid, we moved the Tuesday to Saturday. Do you know how to get in?
After the raid, we have to be careful. Have you
slept, I mean, charged your phone?
Did you get my email? The email? About
Sunday, the next one. No, it’s the next one.
I know it’s Wednesday, but the Monday
is tomorrow & we had to push the Thursday
to Friday. The Thursday to Friday. You have
class then? What? What? Oh, I know,
my paper was due last week. It’s Thursday,
& we still don’t know the agenda. For Saturday,
did you pick up the food? Have you organized?
The? The? Yet? Is it tomorrow yet? Yesterday said
don’t forget the emails, the meeting Monday, Sunday &
the paper due at midnight. I sent you a message
on Facebook about coordinating rides, have you? Have
you? Yet? No? Where? It’s already Sunday & we need
to know by—
The Streetlights Christened Us Saved (or At Least Salvageable)
We start here, at the burnt-orange
streetlight, thrusting the night
into a rust-colored glaze.
All of August is elastic and overstretched,
jumbling the calendar’s chronology into a blur.
Last night’s string of hours hangs limp,
while tomorrow peels itself across the clock’s face.
We start overhead at the burnt-orange
streetlight and wander down to the slow parade
of marchers on the sidewalk, drifting
down West Florissant’s length, turning to cross
to the other sidewalk, and drifting back the other way
up the street again. Then another turn
at the far end, the same sidewalk, the same
debris, the same crack a hundred times,
the streetlights’ orange hum
battling the shadows’ hunger at every turn.
St. Louis’s muggy perfume glistens
on our shoulders, in the crook of our arms,
the folded flesh beneath our breasts—a sparse
baptism beneath a handful of electric angels
lighting our small, nightly planet.
Hundreds of bodies churning
the sidewalk’s dust to a rhythm,
pulling West Florissant around its own edges.
Here, a whole world in our midst. The gravity
of our heels spins the oceans, presses the tides
forward, shifts entire seasons according to our nightly pace.
A small universe blistering
with smoke and glass,
decade after decade congealing
beneath the streetlights, the burnt-orange
light biting through the night’s thick weight,
each fluorescent bulb sharp and persistent
as a single acrylic nail piercing a layer of weave
to disturb the scalp—a pointed green ornament,
generously bedazzled and fighting against the night
for its own color. The burnt-orange light turns the tender
head of flesh into a dome of fading embers
still simmering with color.
The whole street, laced
with a parade of dimly lit orbs
bobbing below the streetlights, circling
relentlessly under threat of arrest, dragging
the street’s tiny planet around its axis.
We understood the sunrise
as a distant blessing, the airy blue
morning hue such a strange, thin color
for the streetlights’ density
to surrender to. But it is only temporary.
We start here,
at the burnt-orange streetlight, and will end
there, on another night that doesn’t yet
know its own name.
Brick-Made and Steady
St. Louis. St. Louis. St. Lou-Lou-Lou. St. Louiiis-iiiiiis.
Saint! Saint! Saint Lou! She’s a saint, ain’t—
ain’t she? Saint of trees and rolling, wide green.
Saint of the lost-lost and goings. Shepherd of the Miss-Mississip-
Mississippi River’s exit and the Missouri River’s southern soup,
dark and thick as love’s messy wander, broad and swirling as a feast
flooding the void of an empty belly, blue-gray with migration
and so many feet and family grinding up the river toward something—
Saint Loouuuu! North-south Saint Louis, blue-green St. Lou.
St. Lou-St. Lou-St. Lou. A ho-hum hungry, beloved.
Beloved, beloved Midwest, wide and sprawling, grin-wide country,
pig-feet country, can’t pronounce the French street names country,
upper chin of the south, land of the loose-lipped r clutching its vowels close,
wild west and still middle best Saint Lou. My saint of loss and desire,
of growing and long-suffering beauty in her bricks,
in her humidity-soaked skin, brown and burned in the middle,
in the middle—my Saint, crowning above the country’s heart,
a birth sweet and bloodied. Pinched city at the state line
and fanning west with flight and flutter, brick-made
and steady as the seasons, which maybe isn’t saying much
nowadays, but St. Lou-St. Lou—my beloved—my bastard and my treasure.
St. Lou-Lou-Lou, my heart-sick, heart-hungry beacon
salivating at the moon’s dogged persistence, ready always
to bare its teeth at the sky’s heedless blue
and gather our dark brown lips, ready to spit and dance,
ready to flicker over language like a country spell
and deliver anyone’s sins back to them on beat, to a rhythm,
with a choir of shimmying jaws laughing at each note.
Louis moans and croons like only Louis knows how,
a saint with blue notes in its skin, tinted like an evening hue,
having flooded the evening with a nighttime of knuckles
braced against the horizon’s mouth for months and months
and months and yet still honeyed, still sweetened
with local flavor, spiced generously with home.
From “Bittering the Wound.” Copyright © 2022 by Jacqui Germain. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Autumn House Press, autumnhouse.org. Headshot image courtesy of Jacqui Germain.