Paper Sleeves: A Brief Memoir of Yazoo Street
Maybe it’s none of my never mind, but can a word like “exalt” exalt? It’s hard bread Eliza carries, a baguette, and hard to believe that the non-sequiturial power of song’s shambolic portraiture sustained her half a century. It’s hard to call it a hard life. She carried bread in a paper sleeve down Yazoo Street where everybody knew her name and knew enough to look away. Yazoo Street circa whenever. Does a word like “circa” evoke whenever in the widow’s mind? Whenever in the widow’s mind it rains, I, William with the drunken head, and Eliza with the hard bread appear in a hallway halated by sallow light and bilirubin slow to clear. What the widow’s given to the town is the clever clapback rain and the enigmatic aura that shrouds each lost companion in mist that burns from puddles pooled in Yazoo Street. But the scandal and the talk of talk, Eliza in the widow’s doorway, and I, William with the drunken head humming the melodic sorrow, the dissonant sorrow that drowns in motorcars’ drones and itching gramophones. Eliza with the track marks on her forearms and bruises like little Pegasus tattoos as we scratch and scratch the song for the meaning of scandal. It isn’t hard to scandalize the provincial imagination of the citizens of rain-glazed Yazoo Street, feudal in their economy, cruel in their embarrassments. Appended to negative declarative syntax, they are their rumors— It’s none of my business, but… Exuberance, exuberance, how does a word accrue its power? Wanton, slattern, widow. I should dispel the exuberant rumor, the wanton rumor that I was once in love with her. In fact, I still am, though rain-glazed Yazoo Street is irrecoverable as the origins of Troy, as the many versions that were sacked and burned and rebuilt into Ilion of Epirus, record sleeves, and bitter rock n’ roll.
Cal Freeman (he/him) is the music editor of The Museum of Americana: A Literary Review and author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022). His writing has appeared in many journals including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, The Moth, Oxford American, River Styx, and Advanced Leisure. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North’s Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. Born and raised in Detroit, he teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. His chapbook of poems, Yelping the Tegmine, has just been released.