…..
Tourist in My Hometown
…
when my mother puts my childhood
home in Richmond on the market, I return
to wander the lawn, magnolia blossoms
littered like crushed coffee cups
at the apartments under construction
in weeds near the Esso station,
where my best friend and I wriggled
under the chain link fence after men
left for the day, tiptoed up plywood stairs
to framed rooms, where we fingered idle
drills, table saws, nail guns,
blew smoke rings out roughed-in
windows, spied on everything
we would leave at the houses below –
the wire weave of porch screens
sieving the glow of television
families sparring and guffawing,
everything we wanted
in the humming edges
where the floodlights died away.
….
This poem is from the book Above the Fall Line by Clara Silverstein (Finishing Line Press) and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/above-the-fall-line-by-clara-silverstein/
Above the Fall Line takes an unflinching look at history–both personal and national–in a Southern city riven by social change. Poems step into Confederate trenches as well as schools resonating with Martin Luther King’s dream. Other poems reckon with a family haunted by loss. In this labyrinthine panorama, moments of clarity and grace shine through.
Clara Silverstein is the author of the historical novel Secrets in a House Divided, the memoir White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation, and four non-fiction books. Her poems have appeared in journals including Blackbird, the Paterson Literary Review, and at Boston City Hall. She teaches at Grub Street, and has worked as a journalist, an historian, and Program Director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center. Raised in Richmond, Virginia, she now lives in Boston.
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