But for now the music swings from her lacquered radio

^{Ezzard Charles Drive, Cincinnati, Ohio, circa 1980}

Snuffed out candlewick shadow 
disappears in the shimmer
of her snuff cans. The silver
cylinders cradle the powder
she’s prone to pucker, her lower lip
smooth with the stuff. She takes
her time. This is her time. Her mind
                                    space.
Her words pinch in slow motion.  
Tho nobody’s home. & she ain’t
studin you. She knows when to 
leave her imaginings. No tobacco-
cancer concerns this eve.
It’s all banana pudding feet
in slippers, vanilla wafer-colored
                                   waves
and wigs. She’ll leave this realm
at sixty-five, much to her children
& husband’s surprise.

Copyright © 2024 by Yona Harvey. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 15, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“This poem began over twenty-five years ago in a Cave Canem workshop with the late Michael S. Harper. Harper had us working in syllabics, something I’d never done. I was trying to write about my birthplace and didn’t even know Ezzard Charles was a beloved boxer and Heavyweight Champion! Of course, Harper knew and shared that Charles’s name clued readers to the neighborhood and its people. Also, “grandmother poems” were getting dissed then (“tired,” “cliché,” “overdone,” etc.). I get it. But all my poems are grandmother poems; these women give me sound and life. Here, I aim for compression—a snapshot of my mother’s mother.”
—Yona Harvey