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    The Heiress/Ghost Acres
    The Heiress/Ghost Acres
    The Heiress/Ghost Acres
    Ebook118 pages1 hour

    The Heiress/Ghost Acres

    By Lightsey Darst

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    About this ebook

    In her most intimate poetry collection yet, Lightsey Darst considers the many facets of maternal power and whether it might guide us toward healing in the wake of history’s horrors. 

    In the nebulous space between collective and autobiographical memory lies family memory—the rituals and routines, places and plants, that bind us to the generations before. In The Heiress/Ghost Acres, Lightsey Darst examines her Southern ancestry and the legacy of white womanhood. As she navigates pandemic isolation and political upheaval, Darst reflects on how history—familial and national—shapes parenting, and interrogates that history in search of more ethical, transformative ways to mother. The Heiress/Ghost Acres points toward a tenable and connected future, one that acknowledges past evils while finding present, potent ways for love to counter violence.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCoffee House Press
    Release dateApr 11, 2023
    ISBN9781566896740
    The Heiress/Ghost Acres

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      Book preview

      The Heiress/Ghost Acres - Lightsey Darst

      THE HEIRESS

      This is no time for self-defense.

      My father seemed to think it was an important skill.

      My daughter’s sick again, she stumbles

      arms out desperate for me.

      I’ll nurse her though we’ve been weaning,

      two months pass and I’d nurse her,

      now it’s July and what would I give to nurse her again and be

      one of two who are as happy as god can make them.

      Oh what can I give them

      that I never had? Not money, earth, myself—

      there’s less and less of all three. Not safety. What then?

      This book begins with a body in need.

      And being it. Being me.

      Free the future from the past. Free the present

      from the distant future. Free the

      past to be young again, Rebecca standing in her garden

      whatever garden, whatever land—what she wanted

      perched in her hand and follow that

      to the present it makes, her happiness, truth, her justice.

      But why live in a dream.

      This demand of emotional accuracy while I’m

      figuring out where to get another $500.

      I’m going to go quit everything. Don’t call back.

      I want to appear, walk out a real person

      from my life. ETERNAL DRAMA

      I write above times for tours of my son’s school and when

      do I get to work out and what will I make

      for Thanksgiving and when

      will a center arise from these pieces?

      This year of realizations.

      They fall out of the walls like ancient bones,

      thaw from the glacier’s husk like the matted fur

      of the first woman. I go along picking them up,

      a beachcomber after a hurricane.

      I pocket drowned women’s wedding rings.

      Pull the real from the rhythmic waste of the past.

      I will do incredible things.

      A decade I tossed into the sea.

      Is this my life’s work? My life. A work.

      My life as a plastic. My mold.

      I am a forest, a focus, fierce.

      Work until ink-soaked paper blackens pants.

      A girl evangelist shows up at your door thinking

      she knows a truth that’s never been thought.

      Get down what you think you know

      as a place to start.

      She walks away, gleam of suffering on her skin.

      I know that walk, that sackcloth sway.

      She’s someone from your hometown, someone who

      maybe never had a substantial conversation with a Black woman.

      It’s not all about the future. It changed the world.

      By it I mean my children, of course.

      So I looked for the speaker and found myself in the mirror,

      turned myself in and spent the reward money, loosed

      a map of the cosmos and there was I. Pink dust. Pink

      meaning hot, a beginning; background

      radiation, sign of a one-time explosion.

      So it’s time to put it together.

      Without a second thought, without understanding,

      someone’s head crowning through your thighs.

      She’s coming on like rain.

      INFERNAL SELVES

      What comes first? The names of trees.

      Sycamore, red maple, tulip poplar, I always heard tulapoplar.

      The road in forks into bramble and branch.

      Old washing machine, rusted refrigerator—

      it’s been a hundred years since I’ve been here,

      so tell me: does the white oak

      still stand by the dead lake, its folds of bark

      hanging like an old woman’s labia?

      Does the bee tree thrum by the dry lake bed?

      The house across the field, the light went out

      the first year we lived there.

      I—narrowest of selves, a door open a crack.

      We the family, the living, they the past.

      Only time lies between them and us,

      time and the willingness to change. Only the willingness

      separates us from them and them from

      you, a room in which to stage this séance.

      Know your history.

      Know you come from a stone crop and go back there.

      Bole of the maple tree your mother planted may survive you.

      Their home has become ruin, become a biodynamic farm,

      become a Walmart with sweet blood dripping from

      the joists, blood that tastes of you.

      In this land they did wrong

      and though it’s burned into the ground

      so easy to follow their trace in the fields

      we must not go the same way.

      On the census of 1830

      in Jefferson County in the Florida territory,

      the nameless wife of one Hugh Duncan,

      age 20–29, born in North Carolina, she swarmed in her season.

      The X of her who lived burns down my blood.

      Hold the shroud three inches from your face and say,

      "I’m not dead,

      I’m Rebecca and I’m not dead yet."

      Everyone’s tragedy is a family tragedy.

      This world is not my home, said everyone

      in my mother’s family, my mother’s father’s family,

      people from Surry County, Virginia,

      kin to Eldridge Maddera, to Powhatan Sledge,

      who on the 1850 slave schedule

      reported nine slaves by sex and age, not name, and so it went

      all across Surry County,

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