In the middle of my lecture
on antebellum plantation life
abolition
Lydia Maria Child
and William Lloyd Garrison
pronged slave collars hung
with iron Christmas bells ringing
and Kara Walker’s oeuvre
a recasting of slavery
for the next generation
I finally vocalize a question
I’ve suppressed
while binge-watching episodes
of Say Yes to the Dress
An inquiry prompted
by southern belles
with visions of Scarlett
dancing through their heads
and modelling some confection
like the curtain dress admired by Rhett
Why
would any woman
stage her twenty-first century wedding
on a plantation
where masters slaked their lust
on the shivering bodies
of black boys and girls?
Out in the fields
blood seeps
from cowhided backs
shouldering rough cotton sacks
the ghosts of slaves
silent and watching
Artress Bethany White is the author of the collection of poems Fast Fat Girls in Pink Hot Pants (2012). She has received The Mona Van Duyn Scholarship in poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Mary Hambidge Distinguished Fellowship from the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts for her nonfiction. Recent poetry has appeared in Ecotone, Poet Lore, The Account, Harvard Review, and The New Guard and is forthcoming in Pleiades. New nonfiction appears in The Hopkins Review and Tupelo Quarterly. She is visiting assistant professor of American cultural studies at Albright College in Pennsylvania.
