Tangie Mitchell
tangie mitchell is a poet and editor from North Carolina. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and earned her undergraduate degree Spelman College. A Watering Hole Poetry Fellow and an Obsidian Foundation alum, her work has been featured in Poetry Wales, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, Exposition Review, Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor, and more. Her poetry has received support from The Cave Canem Foundation, The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Murphy Writing at Stockton University, and other arts institutions. She lives in New York City.
upon meeting my paternal grandmother, a dream
(or, what i have lost)
spring lake, north carolina, usa
the supermarket is aglow and swaying
to the beat of its own fluorescent hum.
which is to say light authors a sound
as buzzed and spatial as my grandmother’s
tuesday evening chortle, clouded
with cigarette smoke. at the swaying
store, i buy her mangoes and coconut
water with no worry of the price.
i fill this cart with fresh things for her,
a large-print sudoku book thrown in
at the checkout line. i want to save
what is left of her mind and body
give God no high-fructose reason
to take what i’ve only just received.
the cashier double bags the heaviest
of my groceries and i learn all the more
of careful preservation. the parking lot,
once full of fissures children would drop
their mothers’ hands to leap over, sealed
back to seamless asphalt and perfect
white lines. the abandoned strip mall
across the street now alive with business:
restaurants, boutiques, an accounting firm–
suites leased to folks full to the brim with their
doing. but nothing of this city has remained
unbound by change, a corset as difficult
as it is glamorous. i, too, am a cracked thing
repaired. an expansive emptiness repurposed
and made full again. sitting together in her
crowded den, the young and the restless
blaring on the television, i am as mended
as any sidestreet. i’ve surprised even myself
with this capacity for smoothness. the months
pass and bring with them a frigid air. now,
before i leave our home, my grandmother’s voice
floats through the house on a bed of haze.
“wear two jackets,” she says.
and i do.
i do.
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Image by Dapo Abideen from Pexels
© 2024 Iron Oak Editions
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© 2024 Iron Oak Editions
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