white girl interrogates her recurring dreams
Marty McConnell
Bone garden, bone grove, bone farm, padlock
on both church doors. Speech
upon speech on the TV, sirens and the chatter
of blackbirds on cold wires. My love
is far away from me wearing a knit
hat. A man and woman I adore
are our only way to safety. I see
no boys being killed but am aware
that they are being killed and there鈥檚
a bucket in my hands that keeps
filling and filling, getting heavier
and heavier but never overflowing, just
filling. With what? My love is way
over there. We can see each other
but not touch. I know sooner
or later she will come over
here, I know it鈥檚 not for always
but this bucket. Full of ghost
bones, full of speeches, those boys
fraying pieces of hail on the marble rim
of the birdbath, over there, in the bone
garden. Starlings, starlings
in the bone farm. Then there is
a train. On it, I am aware
of my whiteness in contrast
to the other passengers and stand closer
to my friends, their brownness a comfort
I am embarrassed to feel. Where
are we going? The church
in which we find ourselves
has rooms inside of rooms. Still
I have this bucket. It is the circumference
of my hips. My love is in another part
of the house, I feel her living with the left
side of my head. Black boys
are dying, I say, dying
I say but I don鈥檛 have any mouth,
just this bucket. Just this bucket.
This poem is, as the title suggests, based on recurring dreams of mine in which churches, trains, and blackbirds appear. In the iteration of the dream that initiated this poem, I was the only white person and acutely aware of that fact, as well as of my physical proximity to my friends of color who were also on the train. On waking, the dream felt like an effective frame for interrogating the strange dislocation with being 鈥渙thered鈥� in a way that one is generally not鈥擨 am, for example, often 鈥渙thered鈥� in rooms of straight people, but I am less often the only white person, and the implicit power imbalance between those two situations is very different. The bucket image, which also appeared in the actual dream, felt to me symbolic of the way in which I am the repository for so much privilege that I have not yet wielded in an effective enough way. I'm also indebted to Phillip B. Williams for his brilliant revision advice that sent me deeper into the poem and saved it from getting booted from the manuscript.
is the author of wine for a shotgun (EM Press, 2013); when聽they say you can鈥檛 go home again, what they mean is you were never there, winner of聽the 2017 Michael Waters Poetry Prize (SIR Press, 2018); and Gathering Voices:聽Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop (YesYes Books, 2018). She is the聽co-creator of underbelly, an online magazine focused on the art and magic of聽poetry revision. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies聽including Best American Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, and 滨苍诲颈补苍补听搁别惫颈别飞. McConnell lives in Chicago with her wife, visual artist Lindsey Dorr-Niro.