Kathy Lou Schultz
JACKSON LISTENS TO THE BIRDS

for Jackson born 2/5/07

Memphis is a huff of spring
grandiose pink blossoms about to pop
a rainstorm lurking in the palpable air
It’s you and me rounding the corners of Midtown
lush and nowhere to go, a soliloquy of hands
It’s the season of no conclusions
of orioles, blue jays, and doves
fighting sleep his eyelids close and open
close and open, sheltered in the trilling air
Jackson listens to the birds

Kathy Lou Schultz is the author of four collections of poems, most recently Biting Midge: Works in Prose (Belladona) and Some Vague Wife (Atelos). Her monograph, The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka, is part of the Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Series from Palgrave. Schultz’s articles have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly journals including Contemporary Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and Jacket2. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Memphis, where she directs the English Honors Program and teaches courses in African American and Afro-Diasporic literature, poetry and poetics, and modernism.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #5.