Rachel Nelson

A Confederate Soldier Causes an Enslaved Woman to Drop Her Meal

After Kara Walker’s Before the Battle (Chickin’ Dumplin’) (1995)

Her hand has pulled away
from him. Her fingers
form the shape of a doe’s head 

as if to signal
someone outside of the frame.
Her pinkie lifts 

and it looks
like the deer has stopped to listen.
The soldier kneels—

one of his knees has been lost
in the black wilds of her skirt.
The bill of his cap narrows— 

thin as a bayonet,
a bird’s beak—
its point nested in the soft nook 

of her neck.
From his knees, the soldier
gives the woman’s breast 

a kiss. No sound
inks the space between them,
but she wears a bright word 

loudly. It cannot be shrouded
by the white shock
that encompasses the pair. 

She holds that deer
in her hand, keeps
its separate throat secret.

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Rachel Nelson is a Cave Canem fellow and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Muzzle Magazine, Pleiades and elsewhere. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.