Why We Don’t Open the Closet

The Black bust
that you had to make,
part of another art elective
you hated, punching the clay,
squeezing the oil tubes,
till they oozed out their seams,
letting the brushes dry to ruin.
(The adjunct always shook his head, smiling
at such spirited sinning in the studio,
another indulgence allowed the boarders.)

Busy framing your brothers’
more benign portraits, I don’t recall
with which year-end cleanout it came home,
war trophy tucked under your arm.
Broad shoulders clad in a skimpy jersey,
Corn-rowed head broke back, wobbly poised
as if for a last-ditch layup.
Was this Iverson? Reed?
His nostril-less nose, unparted lips, tight-wrapped
in mummy swath, his mouth brown smeared,
in the rippling reproach of paper mache.
So plug-ugly fierce, we had to hide it
like all we hid about you
that we didn’t like or feared.
It’s all done
in the blackest hue,
now a piece of our night.
Enraged, his wide undrilled eyes appeal to your dark heaven,
a plaster ceiling blistered without a star.

Sharon Kennedy-Nolle’s poetry has appeared or is upcoming in Bluestem, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cider Press Review, Juked, Lips Poetry Magazine, MacGuffin, Round, Midwest Quarterly, and Pennsylvania English, among others, while her dissertation was published as Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).