Meteorology
Tamara J. Madison
Photo by Georg Eiermann
for Nella Larsen
(lesser known writer of the Harlem Renaissance)
A pale sky
swallows a dark cloud,
spits; suspended,
I am
conceived.
Dixie’s contradiction:
sin without contrition,
yellowed never gold,
silver never sterling.
The coveted lining?
Never, only thinning shell
veined with fractures, cracks.
Quaked my bones,
fevered the marrow
never fitting, never splitting
always shorn, torn
never passing,
always contrasting
the criteria.
Behold me:
the eternally stifled, toiling
beneath a battered horizon,
the flanking gray,
neither cloud nor sky, though
brewing morass asunder,
thunder holding its breath,
lightning poised with
clenched teeth, bruised
the skin of the wind,
the cacophonous quiet, kept
never calm,
storm perfect.
Tamara J. Madison
Tamara J. Madison is an internationally traveled writer, poet, and performer. Her critical and creative works have been published in various journals, magazines, and anthologies including Poetry International, Extract, Web del Sol Review of Books, Tidal Basin Review, and aaduna. She has also been published in the anthologies, Temba Tupu (RedSea Press), Check the Rhyme (LitNoire Press) and SisterFire (HarperCollins). She is the author of Collard County, A Collection of Short Stories, and Kentucky Curdled, a poetry/essay collection and audiobook. Her album, Naked Voice, is Grand Prize Winner of the First Literary Recording Contest for Manzanita Quarterly and AUTHENTIC VOICEwork Records. Her most recent poetry collection, Threed This Road Not Damascus (Trio House Press), was short-listed under the title, Breast Poems, in the 2015 Willow Books Literature Award for poetry.