The Best of Callaloo: Poetry. A Special 25th Anniversary Issue || Honeysuckles
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Transcript of The Best of Callaloo: Poetry. A Special 25th Anniversary Issue || Honeysuckles
HoneysucklesAuthor(s): Karen MitchellSource: Callaloo, Vol. 24, No. 3, The Best of Callaloo: Poetry. A Special 25th Anniversary Issue(Summer, 2001), pp. 841-842Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300210 .
Accessed: 15/06/2014 14:44
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from Vol. 16, No. 3 (Summer 1993)
HONEYSUCKLES
by Karen Mitchell
Yes, it was time to get rid of them.... the honeysuckles, voluptuous, had pushed their collars to the sun, led the geraniums from the rock garden, over the property line
through one-eyed bricks, a queen's blood, purple and red trailing to Big Joe who sucked their nectar like a hawkmoth brilliant in daylight.
Even then, he would sell his fish babies to white women. Catfish smeared with
provocation and pismoclam; Big Joe eating blackberry pies and talking about some air-plane traveling place, rivers away from the concrete damn, the jeweled square that was always outdone
by the moon's raised palm ...
Uruguay or a port promising the Himalayas-yes, the Himalayas where Big Joe could be a starfish on top of a mountain
pointing East
Callaloo 24.3 (2001) 841-842
This content downloaded from 193.105.154.127 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 14:44:27 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
CALLALOO
while Negroes went North, Big Joe left when front yard nigger statues were rounded up for funeral pyres. Still, he came back to talk about Freedom Houses, riders, honeysuckles everywhere: Japanese weeds and trumpets the God-forbidden integration: Big Joe marching like a row of fevered cotton....
Yes, it was time to cut them down: the clusters fatigued from dry throats; the stems broken so easily by the wind's whisper: Big Joe pulled from pregnant water.
842
This content downloaded from 193.105.154.127 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 14:44:27 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions