William Kelley Woolfitt teaches creative writing and American literature at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee. He is the author of two forthcoming chapbooks: The Salvager’s Arts (poetry), co-winner of the Keystone Prize, and The Boy with Fire in His Mouth (fiction), winner of the Epiphany Editions contest. His poems and stories appear in Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, New Ohio Review, Appalachian Heritage, The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, River Styx, Water Stone Review, Tin House's Flash Fridays feature, Virginia Quarterly Review’s Instapoetry Series, and elsewhere. ---------
In the Reformatory, Billie Holiday Refuses to Sing
—1947: Federal Woman’s Reformatory at Alderson, West Virginia
Her fans send heaps of letters and cards.
She would toss all that mail into the air,
make a vanity of wind, a blizzard
She would toss all that mail into the air,
make a vanity of wind, a blizzard
in her room. But the guards send back
any envelope not from immediate family,
and hers are dead. And they rifle through
and hers are dead. And they rifle through
her packages, keep the pears, and lacy
gowns, and gin in rhinestone flasks.
gowns, and gin in rhinestone flasks.
She scans the lady warden’s flyer.
Talent night, good fun for all.
She doesn’t give a damn about
the amateur show, refuses to sing
about juke joints, a rotten lover
who wastes his paycheck, black
bodies hanging like scuppernongs.
bodies hanging like scuppernongs.
She insists she’s here for punishment,
for tomato worms and weeds,
the pig parlor, the kitchen sink,
these toilsome nights they lock her
in the cottage, lonely and foul as a tomb.
While she serves, it’s her time to refrain.
Her feelings and her voice are a queen’s
best jewels and muskrat furs
saved in mothballs, packed away.
After a Long Day of Teaching at Armstrong Manual Training School,
Angelina Grimke Presses a Daisy in Her Scrapbook: a Rondeau
—1914: Washington, D.C.
Away from her students, she retreats to the room
beneath the stairs in her father’s house—it’s her room
of concentration, walling out the inkwells, chalk,
recitations, bells, his footsteps, pipe smoke, loose talk.
Here’s her copybook, where she touched husk of yellow moon,
rubbed the smooth bark of brown girl trees. Here, she beats gloom
like unruly dough back into the pan, feels the hairy roots
of the daisy she plucked from wet soil, its supple stalk
and yolk-colored eye. She could use this in a verse,
radiating white petals and leaves shaped like spoons.
Other words pull at her like a kite. She recalls the news,
Washington Bee’s front page: another black man locked
in jail, sprung by the mob, whipped and hung by the flock
of townsfolk who jeered, threw bricks, stole his watch and shoes.
She chews a nail, plans another use for verse.