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In the driveway a grasshopper hops the hood clings as an ornament while I ride the passenger seat shotgun, wild woman throwing peyote dust,
turning my car into a cluster of white palomino clomping to pow-wow in the high desert.

My father on the day of his funeral
changed into a white bird. A seagull. He had never been to the edge, never too
far past sulfur brown in the creek, but I had
once seen what could have been a gull gliding above the Allegheny River, out of place in the gray over Pittsburgh.

It is the same coughed up sky I saw when my father’s red-brown skin stretched death-ash after living in coal mines, shaping dirtscapes for rich people; boulders, manure, bulbs’ stinking possibilities buried in hardened feces like cape castle walls made of human excrement. Millions of embedded hearts still pulse there

like mine does now as I lean — my body half out the window, screaming a fist at the grasshopper. It hugs the hood with all six feet, madman with helmet head bent to the wind. Wings press against abdomen,

protect the singing heart inside segmented armor-shell.
No need to flick it for choice of song, force of wind will knock the helmet off as we gain speed; it will tumble backward, splatter on the windshield,
become a dot.

— Sheila Carter-Jones

Sheila Carter-Jones lives on Observatory Hill. Her most recent chapbook is Blackberry Cobbler Song. Her new book, Three Birds Deep, was selected by Elizabeth Alexander as the 2011 winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Book Award for African American writers, forthcoming in 2012 from Lotus Press, Inc. Many writers featured in Chapter & Verse are guests of Prosody, produced by Jan Beatty and Ellen Wadey. Prosody airs every Saturday morning on 90.5 FM.