[Every War in Our House Started with a Song], and: Plantersville, South Carolina Gives an Oral Her-Story, and: Arrival, and: From a Voice

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• [Every War in Our House Started with a Song], and: Plantersville, South Carolina Gives an Oral Her-Story, and: Arrival, and: From a Voice
• Marlanda Dekine (bio)

[EVERY WAR IN OUR HOUSE STARTED WITH A SONG]

Every war in our house started with a song,Earth, Wind and Fire while I slept,olive-oiled crosses on my foreheadplaced there by my mama'sblue-black silhouette,

sliding in after dark. Daddy never came home on time.I'm from their quiet loving, mutedby vinyl scratching out "After the Love Has Gone."My daddy doesn't think I remember his lying,but I do.

In the dead-keeping ground, Ma buried her savings.If we had to leave him in our mile-of-cousins' town,pine trees between us, village roads connecting us,we'd be ready for her gods. [End Page 54]

PLANTERSVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA GIVES AN ORAL HER-STORY

His ma went to peoplewho coiled a jar into keeping youlike a child keeps a snail,to get Thelma fixed up with their boy.Oh, how she stood there smiling,her eyes shined like wet paint on a baby doll.

This is how he took her. The preacher man said,"Will you leave your sisters,be faithfulto him as long as you both shall live?"

Her blue sky became a lid filled with holesafter she said "I do."She says now she don't knowwhat she said. She woke up one daymarried and ironing that man's clothes,encircled in crystal.

With things getting out of hand,Ms. Lou planted a wall of wisteria vineswhere Old Gunn diedafter he fell from the church he was building.She added mud to that structureuntil they each were here.

She used old ways.Before they'd heard of marriage,their power was in the clay and water-filled orb, waiting to be listened to fora travailing song, a ring-shouting circle,rippling out a way things worked together. [End Page 55] A moon and a sun, a sun and a moon,a bear in the sky, rusty railroad spikesburied deep into the earth. They were a building,building their new home,strong as what folk call an ivory tower,darker and old as blooming morningglories, so much it could smother a lively oak.Blue and purple-like,they took themselves back. [End Page 56]

ARRIVAL

Air and marsh smell like family.My memory is from futures,dark and ancient songs I've re-membered.

Oh, how I praise what called me here

like water everywhere with black feet dancing.I can forget I was ever a machine led by hours.No longer a hired hand,

the headcount around me is a botanical gardenwhere we teach newcomers about our eyes.Each connects to our own ways of getting free.

The noise inside of my kneeshas everything to do withwhat tried to overtake my body.

I offer myself to the ones I know are real. [End Page 57]

FROM A VOICE

Darkness, welcome. I am forgetting stories to make new ones. My arm wound around watermelons without wounds, I find only seeds. Here, I am many selves. Our heartbeats under a sleeved sun made of mouths and clouds of hair, haloing my echoic mind, so I can reap what rain brings. In this unknown wilderness, I bloom.I am eating myself alive. [End Page 58]

Marlanda Dekine

MARLANDA DEKINE is from Plantersville, South Carolina. She is the author of Thresh & Hold (Hub City Press, 2022), Winner of the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize, and i am from a punch & a kiss ({unnamed}, LLC, 2017). She has received an Individual Artist Fellowship from The South Carolina Arts Commission, a Governor's Award from SC Humanities, a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship, a Tin House Own Path Scholarship, and other awards. Her poems have been published in Orion Magazine, Oxford American, Southern Cultures, and elsewhere. Dekine earned degrees from Furman University (BA in Psychology), the University of South Carolina (Master of Social Work), and Converse University (Master of Fine Arts in Poetry).

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