Golden hour, a March afternoon,
daffodils opening their faces in the yard,
I walk to the bar for lunch, almost
forty-nine now, alone. Pick up
my grandmother’s little diamond
from the repair shop on the way.
It just fits my pinky, shinier than
I have ever seen it. The band
thread-thin but joined where it
was broken. Pass the antique place
where a man is pushing chairs closer,
anticipating rain. In the window,
a lacy postcard that says Easter.
In the bar, the bearded waiter wears
a carnelian Italian horn in one lobe,
a glittering spider in the other. I order
tea and a burger, slip my phone
inside my purse so I can listen.
On the stereo, “Gimme Shelter.”
When I was twenty-one, someone told me
her name was Merry Christmas, Merry
Clayton who was awoken near midnight
so she could lay down a vocal. “They told me
to sing rape, murder,” she said. Not
the usual fare for a gospel singer. But
in her curlers, straight from bed,
War, children, she sang, it’s just a shot
away. I’m listening. The song at first
just a major-key roadhouse tune
until, after the guitars weave their call
and response, Merry’s voice mixed in
too low begins to wail. It was building,
she explains, it was Vietnam. It was
Dr. King. It was seeing all those people
shot in the streets. The first time, she’s just
warming up. The second rape, murder,
she’s easily scaling the notes, but when she
sings It’s just a shot away for the second time,
on shot her voice begins to break.
And in the third she splits the afternoon:
when she gets to murder one more time
her voice cracks into a scream at the center,
a sound like a police whistle
or a bomb piercing the atmosphere,
and I am not yet born, it’s 1965,
the Edmund Pettus Bridge
in Selma rings with the thud
of clubs, the shriek of tear gas,
horses screaming, a woman screaming
who’s not playing, who didn’t come
out of her house in the middle of the night
to entertain some green British boys. No.
That note is flame, terror, black smoke,
grief impossible to turn away from,
rape, murder ———–—war, children
and back in the mix, you can hear a man
shout damn
and behind the bunting of rainbow flags
hanging over the barback mirror, time
smashes together hard enough to crack it
in America, in 2025.
Susan L. Miller is the author of Communion of Saints (Paraclete). Her work has also appeared in the anthologies Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry) and St. Peter’s B-List: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints (Ave Maria). She is art editor of Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and lives with her family in Brooklyn.
Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash
