Nikki Ummel

tenderness

—after Derrick Harriell’s “Homecoming King”

my aunt mary suffers

cataracts and can only

listen to otis redding

during the day / at night

she’s captive to her son’s fists

thick fingers at her throat

three years ago / still

won’t replace the tv he slapped

across her face / each night

she strings together

words spit or swallowed

the threats coaxed forth by the push

of syringe / says she wishes him dead

yet watched his court hearing / says love is

a shitty mind fuck

i promise i’ve a point

last month my cousin left

his prison cell / less than a week

back in rehab / he tells me

it hurts to be hated / he swears

it was the child molesters the groomers

the sick fucks that made him machete

a birthday piñata at pioneer park / a modern

liberator if only i could see what he saw /

i’d do it too / and last week he asked me

to help him find a girlfriend / and two days

ago he calls from jail / oxy plucked

by his p.o. from his pocket /

he needs bail money or as he called it

get-me-out-quick cash

my aunt wakes every night

drenched sheets sweaty bedspread

cancer twisting her face / the same places

her son bruised / fingertips still present

when she looks in the mirror after

splashing herself two a.m. awake

my cousin wants to know

why i’m not married / no kids

says he wants to be an uncle

to hold a baby for the first time

and sometimes i call my aunt

and she let’s it ring / stays still

a pillow over her head / sometimes

my cousin calls me / and i hang up before

he tries a little tenderness

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Statement of Homage

When I read Derrick Harriell’s newest collection, Come Kingdom, I knew this collection would revolutionize the way I wrote poetry. This poem in particular, “Homecoming King,” was such a tender and poignant portrayal of family, the intensity of love, that I knew I had to write my own version of it. My family, like Harriell’s, is complex and ugly, strung together by love and circumstance. This has always been hard to write about for me, and in the past, when I have, my family members have bristled. How to speak my truth, our truth, my version of our truth, without alienating and harming the very people I write about? This is still in process for me, but reading Come Kingdom, and especially “Homecoming King,” helped me see the deft hand we, as poets, can apply to writing about our families and our truths.

My Aunt Mary recently passed away, succumbing to the cancer mentioned in my piece, and her son, my cousin, Rome, was informed by his prison guards. This is real life. This is my family. This is my pain and joy and love and loss. I am grateful for Harriell’s work and words and access to difficult and tender things, and I hope to someday write with the skill and poignancy that he delivers.

Derrick Harriell

Derrick Harriell is the Ottilie Schillig Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. His previous collections of poems include Come Kingdom, Stripper in Wonderland, Cotton, and Ropes, which won the 2014 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Book Award.

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