POETRY

Liver and Onions

By Crystal Simone Smith     VOLUME 52.2
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Late Sunday morning, I drive hungover
   through autumn mountains riotous with color.

On one exposed hill, a tall white cross
   with a sign that reads—the offer still stands.

I take the Countryside Barbeque exit where
   southern churchgoers crowd for swine

their God called unclean and utterly forbade.
   On the menu, livermush of which I’m offered

a sample for pretending I knew not what it was.
   A soft, fried square, a salty, bitter nibble

that is first remembrance and then song.
   There should be some good things said

about not having much. Before cashmere
   sweaters, electric cars, organic food stores--

meals of beef liver God commanded
   the Israelites to sacrificially remove along

with the fat and kidneys. Organs he created
   to hold and filter poisons from the body.

But we had crowded into the unholy city
   living on prayer and low wage. A few dollars

bought large slices of red liver, yellow onion,
   a sack of white rice. The hand that fed us

waving a pointed finger in sermon, teaching us
   liver had iron and copper, good for the blood.


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CRYSTAL SIMONE SMITH is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Routes Home (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and Running Music (Longleaf Press, 2014). She is also the author of Wildflowers: Haiku, Senryu, and Haibun (2016). Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, Nimrod, Barrow Street, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, African American Review, and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change. She is an alumna of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the Yale Summer Writers Conference. She holds an M F A from Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Durham, N C, with her husband and two sons. She is an adjunct assistant professor of English at Elon University and Greensboro College and the Managing Editor of Backbone Press.


VOLUME 52.2