Bull Dagger
an elegy for Brenda Delaine
By Treasure Williams (’00, ’01)

the rumor was…
it had happened to you at nursing school
but my grandmama said
your whole family was "funny."

your brothers, shirelle and june,
with their conspicuously feminine
names
were the most articulate men
in our small southern sphere.

they talked proper
knew about wine
and read the black poets.

my mama, unfulfilled
and frustrated artist that she was,
would go next door and drink
with them.
have loud shit talking arguments about
nancy wilson and
jesse jackson's affair,
and all that diana ross scandal.
it was '77, and I lived next door to
2 sissies and a bull dagger

Brenda Delaine
had lips
dyed charcoal
by pall mall's with no filter
she had cut her "good" hair short.
in the evenings,
I would jut my six-year-old knees
out of the back screen door,
sit on the low porch
and scratch the hard dust
beside me with sticks.

Brenda Delaine was there
smoking quietly,
people watching.

sometimes,
a pretty high yellow woman
would come out too.
ask me about school,
if I had a boy friend,
what did santa claus bring me.

mostly,
we would look at the street in front of us,
speak to miss virginia
who never spoke back
and often
turned her head
as far left as it could go
so as not to look our way.

From Pretty Little Weapons. Copyright © Treasure Williams. All rights reserved. Used with permission of the author.

Treasure Williams, a native of Meridian, Mississippi, is a Memphis based writer, freelance editor, journalist, M.C., and emerging poet. She is the Memphis editor of Drumvoices Revue. Her performance abilities have been showcased on various projects, most recently on the Airtight productions 1998 CD release Treasure and National Public Radio's All Things Considered. She works full time for the Memphis City Schools as a high school English instructor and has received an MFA from the University of Memphis's creative writing program. The selected poem is from her poetry manuscript, Pretty Little Weapons.

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