Sugar sass that smartness, the pert reminder, tight smiled
Not Minnie, not Bruce; it’s Minnie Bruce,
she corrected with a shiv tongue ready to swing, stab
lovingly. Her hand glanced gently over a back, curled
around shoulders like feather boa, quips zinging
like the twin boomerangs that framed her mouth. Recall
the caramel twang of Southern sound, her frosted curls, red lips
in Central New York a layering of fresh mint and moss
over coarse salt and snow. Her love was an earring swing away,
Leslie’s owlish gaze aloft, a refraction of everything
like the massive silver ball at the front of their building,
a lost pearl, dragon’s eye, or some god’s buckshot polished by
hot wounding and the sandpaper turn of time.
Last memory: the quad, her clothes were gauzy, a pendant punctuating
a beaded rope. She reaches for a branch redolent with scent, a
book resting mutely on the bench below, arched with energy.
Her face is beeing among the flowers, hand grasping
the powdery branch like a lit match, eyes closed,
smile opening on a hinge of delight.
What blooming!
I am becoming content with life.
______
This poem shares two nugget memories of Minnie Bruce, panned from the years I was a postdoctoral fellow at Syracuse University (2007–11). If the phrase “Come over” captures the warmth and kinetic energy of her and Leslie’s home, the word “Overcome” testifies to the strength and spark she left behind as poet-activist and teacher. It is a legacy gentle and fierce by turns, like a lightning bug glowing amid a summer storm. —N.K.
Memento Mori by Alexa Garvoille
Fimmene, Fimmene by Jessica Rae Bergamino
Bayou La Terre by Stacey Balkun
Become, or whatever marriage is equal to is not nearly enough by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Never the Devil’s Advocate by Margaret Randall
