Editor’s note: Line spacing becomes distorted on a mobile device, so I recommend reading these poems on a desktop computer. You can read Jamie Dickson’s Rooted Questionnaire here.
I. Tallahatchie Flux
Since Heraclitus tells us we can’t step into the same river twice, can I bathe in the Tallahatchie and come out clean? This is not the same mud that clung to young Emmett Till, the same water that bloated his body, that drug his blood into itself. What muddies the water today if not the bloodstain? Frat boys from Ole Miss recently pinged the heavy iron historical marker with their hunting rifles, denting and bulging it into a contortion recognizable only as destruction. They posed for pictures, kneeling beside it like a felled deer, like another trophy to grin over. These were not the same hands that beat Emmett, bound him, threw him into the soft current that changed the smiling child into corpse, the river no longer river, but ligature, blunt force weapon, generational trauma. The river now is not the same river, but the current has gone unchanged.
