Man and woman ballroom dancers on black background

POEMS BY ARIELLE TOWNSEND: The Project, 6 O’Clock News, Her Memoir

Last updated: April 1st, 2019

THE PROJECT

It is all whimsical at first

the clock’s jarring bells inundating the room

the smell of pine oak wafting from the table’s surface—a translucent incense.

Then it fades only to surprise you once again, clanking coolly behind your

cornea

It feels like it’s been there forever and still I can’t tell where it’s from; if

men danced, women danced, or both.

In pantaloons, trains or on ceramic floors

history doesn’t teach you how it felt,

there were no sounds of glittering laughter wafting up from the uninterested

painter’s stroke, stroke the clock went, now it’s 12.

Why can’t it stop, I want it to be 12:01 already!

It’s funny how beauty kills you slowly or is killed by the hammering of time

and by then we can’t tell if men loved, women loved or both.

If faces lush with the warmth of a lover’s kiss ever saw the hands that made

them,

the stroke that formed them, wrapping them in a timeless, fragile existence.

– Arielle Townsend

HER MEMOIR,

Over the thickness of her black skin my grandmother spreads her Avon bath oil and I watch, propped against the wall. “It’s to keep the mosquitoes away” she says, her skin shine competing with the oil dripping down her back. My body is disrupting the stream of light from the washroom so that shadows lie like splinters on the floor. But my grandmother, she doesn’t need the light to see. It’s been years since she’s been here, in this room, yet she manages to fit her Avon bottle in its place on the dresser, her fingers dancing over old perfume bottles, lotions and cigarettes.

Outside I can hear the sound of laughing men crashing dominoes on a hollow box. Their voices slide lazily through the windows, tumbling over each other and rising to a shrill climax.

My grandmother lifts off the bed and searches for her nightie. As she bends her neck over suitcases slumped on the floor, I imagine her mind sliding through memories like pages of an old book—each page decorated with greasy fingertips, spit and tears. The Darkness that sits on us now is so heavy it pricks my skin. But my grandmother, she doesn’t need the light to see.

– Arielle Townsend

6 O’CLOCK NEWS

Raise the flag proud and soaring

Cast its revolutionary shadow

on the dry bones of victory.

Who’s to tell me I can’t fight anymore?

That the cause has slipped in with the flanks of the wind?

Open and inhale, the stench of struggle still lingers on my skin.

It tastes of the sea salty air

And the sound of desperate cries is still heavy at the bottom of my belly.

I can’t let go.

I see pain behind the eyes of a 16-year-old child shaking from the chill of the

steel in his veins,

They say don’t fight it, let it ride the blood-drenched waves straight to your heart.

Feel it take your breath away. Yes. Hate kills.

And all the while we have no answers.

All we can do is walk with limp footprints on soft soil so that our mark is

invisible and our legends become monsters.

Justice says she hears our redemption song,

that she’s seen our staggering steps to regain consciousness, that the war is won.

So I’ll fall back and swipe the cold sweat from my brow

salute to  the lazy flag fluttering in the still winds

and dream.

– Arielle Townsend


Image: The dancers in ballroom via Shutterstock