Cameron Barnett

 

Emmett Till Haunts the Library in Money, MS 

a sooty shelf of unmoving paper with some gasbag
lady at the front desk. If you knew, there’d be too many
questions how I sneak past heaven’s gates some days
to nap against the silent stacks, feel the blood in my head
drip into the young adult fiction. Mamie always preached

good posture, so I sit straight at least. When I was black
I grew used to the shuffle of visibility, to the Move boy! and
the thousand yard stare over my head. Being ghost
isn’t all new or scary—no one to ask me what came out
of my lips sixty years ago. I might as well be ink
on closed pages, lost somewhere in the archives. You can’t judge

a book by its facts or flaps or back cover, but a black boy
is the title and the illustration staring you in the face, asking
to be seen or sampled but not smothered between the other
black boys, forgotten, dog-eared and ditched. I don’t love death
but I don’t mind reading the periodicals for faces like mine,
putting names to the ones I’ll welcome through the gates soon.