Published in Issue 62.4: Fall 2023
Fall 2023 | Rachel Nelson Reads "Diseases of American Slavery (the earth)" – MQR Sound
Rachel Nelson reads "Diseases of American Slavery (the earth)" for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions".
Read the text for this piece on the MQR website.
The earth will try to reclaim you.
It will begin with moss
— its fuzzy teeth
that soften the side of stone as if making a meal
of hard bread.
Green unfurled on your skin
like a rash of tobacco covers a field.
—A softly splotched
compass slying
across maple trees —
The white spots lifted on limbs
like an answer
to a question about whether God
wants you back.
—Were you meant to be vibrant?
A verdant net cast over your greening limbs?
Or were you meant to be plain
as a field of tassels announcing a bounty
someone else will call heaven sent?
Rachel Nelson is a Cave Canem fellow and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, where she won a Hopwood Prize for playwriting. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, the museum of americana, Muzzle Magazine, Pleiades, Thrush, and elsewhere. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
