Doralee Brooks: Three Poems

Mercy Mercy Me

after John Murillo

WAMO’s Pork the Tork pushes Sherry Baby,
a big hit in 1963.
A neighbor admires how my mother’s dress—
new or borrowed—discreetly obscures her
expectant midriff. Won’t you come out tonight?
The North Side row house sits on a dead-end street
next door to the maternal grandparents
and a vacant lot away from the Allegheny river.
In the back, my grandmother’s sunflowers guard
tomatoes and cabbages.
I miss a lot of school, chew Aspergum like a rabbit.
Memory is a slide
down icy streets after flood.
Memory is how we stay, why we leave.
Memory is a drive
over a patch of nothing beneath the parkway.

I’m walking from the corner store on November 22,
a day I should be in school, wondering
why people are huddled outside.
Memory is an episode from “One Step Beyond,”
we watch Saturday afternoons on the console tv,
eating neckbones, greens, and rice.
A woman in a recurring dream keeps approaching
a strange house, ringing the bell.
One dream, someone opens the door, and it’s herself.

~~~

A Barber Cut with Carmen Jones

Carmen, the shop assistant, slender and kinetic as a twig in wind,
scrubs my hair. Says how she waxes herself, down there.
Your hair’s soft, she says.
Meeting Carmen here takes me to pictures
I’ve seen of Dorothy Dandridge.
Tragic mulatto—Donald Bogle chaptered her and Lena.
Dandridge, in his book, poses as Carmen Jones in gypsy skirt
and gold hoops, arches her foot,
exposes a café au lait thigh.
Sex talk was everywhere in barber shops growing up,
says Charles Blow—an unfortunate name for the author
of “Fire Shut up in my Bones”
who wears his head shaved.
Fluid, he calls his orientation.
Carmen caresses my fingers when she takes the tip.

~~~

Reading Raymond Carver

I’m reading Raymond Carver at the cluttered desk,
and the exposed brick walls chill like a cell
this wet Friday afternoon.

I left my energy at last night’s reading: Anne Waldman
singing—

“& manatee. . .” “manatee/humanity”

for sixty minutes that felt like twenty
even after the Latin dinner—

chorizo and black bean sopa, pumpkin empanadas

and all I could drink.

Carver’s final lines enclose like lids.

Any minute now, something will happen.

I’ll leave late for class, lay the book face down

and simmering.

~~~

Doralee Brooks is the author of the chapbook, When I Hold You Up to the Light, winner of the 2019 Cathy Smith Bowers prize and published by Main Street Rag. Her work has been published in journals and anthologies, and she is City of Asylum’s poet laureate 2022-2024.  

~~~

Acknowledgements:

Mercy Mercy Me from 20: A Carlow University MFA 20th Anniversary Anthology

A Barber Cut with Carmen Jones from When I Hold You Up to the Light, Main Street Rag 2020 and from Pittsburgh City Paper

Reading Raymond Carver from When I Hold you Up to the Light, Main Street Rag, 2020; and from Voices from the Attic: Carlow University