Pica
By Erica Vital-Lazare

Removed from our works
the iron core taken into our mouths
the sweet clay feeding the belly
through our wounds, we are stripped
and stripping conduits, conductors burned loose
where we travel, we are pushed through the ore—
copper, magnesium, pools of sulphur, chromium split,
the magma flesh of dreams. pebbled earth.
hard root. The umbilicus boiled.
the tea, the cure.

187 Bray’s Camp, Georgia
by Erica Vital-Lazare

my grandfather’s house seated among the woods’ long drive darked & loamy
boughs a green bed, a coffin, the soil a river—a melting of silk and silt—and
my grandmother’s notions, the threads’ unbound wooden spool spilling cedar
into furrowed rows, fig and plum, my mother’s sister buried in the tangle
blackberry vine twining stone well, cold and deep, a portal, a way through,
an uncrooked cross
a vortex

Double Down blogger image credit: Danny Smucker

Erica Vital-Lazare is a professor of creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada. She is editor of the forthcoming series revisiting classic Black works in literature with McSweeney’s Press, Of the Diaspora, and co-producer of the photo-narrative installation Obsidian & Neon: Building Black Life and Identity in Las Vegas.

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Pica and 187 Bray's Camp, Georgia