MFA Meeting, Re: Poet-HireAuthor(s): Crystal WilliamsSource: Callaloo, Vol. 24, No. 3, The Best of Callaloo: Poetry. A Special 25th Anniversary Issue(Summer, 2001), pp. 909-911Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300245 .

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from Vol. 23, No. 4 (Fall 2000)

MFA MEETING, RE: POET-HIRE

by Crystal Williams

I.

An up-date meeting has been called. Each student wants to know: who, when. Covertly we assess the prospects-silent circus' & ghosts rooting.

My ghosts are secret spirituals hummed in swamps. Marsh-life clings to my knee-trunks, pulls up-squeezes my torso, inches 'till my throat strains for this

aaaaaiiiiiiiaaaaaaayyyy. I say

we need another white man like we need another white man.

II.

At twenty-eight I am worth $75. With inflation it may be $500. No one knows, the math hasn't been done. People, I am told, no longer measure one another this way.

III.

The white boys haw at my swamp song; shift themselves as if they've got wedgies,

Callaloo 24.3 (2001) 909-911

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CALLALOO

long to rearrange their stuff; think I'm crazy, misguided, or worse: too shallow to understand the gravity of where we are; want to think I'm talking about quotas.

Of the ten writers in the department there are only two: one black, one chicana, I offer.

Yes, right, this is America, their eyes say.

Today historians ate dirt: Thomas Jefferson fucked Sally & her children. Some of the white-looking Jefferson heirs come from the black side, would be legally black, but they are not

speakers of tongue, are not kin.

The white boys shift their shit again.

IV.

In swamp, Moses' double barreled shot-gun aims at my back-

thinking. She's worth 40 thousand dollars dead-her eyes sound like: You here now so you better move 'cause I ain't lettin you take the whole of us down. Decide.

V.

At meeting end we've accomplished nothing, have frustrated ourselves with inevitability. I rise to leave with a tiring tongue & a body full of accommodation. There is no place else to tuck, stash, squirrel. Every nasty crevice I've got is exploding.

910

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CALLALOO

VI.

What I said was you need (a swamp-thing tamer) another white man (a god damned pruner of life) like you need (a possessor of tongues) another white man, (a frickin' translating ghost buster) (up in here) aaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaayyyy (for your own good) aaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaayyyy (understand?)

911

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