Family Outing
By Linda Susan Jackson (2002-’03)

Because she was homesick for the smell
of Virginia tobacco and pit-roasted hog;
because she longed to hear her big brother
scratch out blues on his box; because
she craved the feel of corn silk
and had six stair-step children
before she was twenty-five,
she went to the funerals of strangers. 

Twice a week, she'd dress up her five daughters
and the one son, fill a paper bag with saltines
smeared with peanut butter,
the oldest daughter, my mother,
carried, and out they'd go, roaming
the streets in search of a small cluster
of people, darkly dressed, and a hearse
in front of any building.

They grew as professional mourners,
learning funerals the way other children
learn the opera: funerals are opera - 
grand affairs, perfumed buxom women,
stalwart-faced men and reserved seating
where they'd sit quietly, hands in laps,
crying on cue to Precious Lord
or any deep orchestral chord.

Copyright © Linda Susan Jackson. Originally published in Rivendell 3 (Spring 2004), used with permission of the author.

Linda Susan Jackson's first book of poetry, What Yellow Sounds Like, was published by Tia Chucha Press in 2007. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Vitelline Blues and A History of Beauty both published by Black-eyed Susan Publishing. An Assistant Professor and Deputy Chair of the English Department at Medgar Evers College, she is a Cave Canem graduate fellow who has published poems in a variety of anthologies and journals such as Gathering Ground, Brilliant Corners, Crab Orchard Review and Rivendell, among others, and has been featured on From the Fishouse audio archive.

Copyright © 1997-2008 by Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

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