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Matt W. Miller is author of The Wounded for the Water (Salmon Poetry), Club Icarus (University of North Texas Press), selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and Cameo Diner: Poems (Loom). He has published work in Birmingham Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Narrative, Crazyhorse, 32 Poems, Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, and other journals. He is winner of River Styx’s Microfiction Prize, Iron Horse Review’s Trifecta Poetry Prize, and The Poetry by the Sea Conference’s Sonnet Crown Contest. The recipient of poetry fellowships from Stanford University and The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Miller teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy and lives with his family in coastal New Hampshire where he surfs all winter long.

On My Mom Showing Me that Photo of Gram and Althea from the 50’s

Matt W. Miller

What I want to say is our sweet grandmothers

and our crazy great aunts went in blackface

to those minstrel shows, those weekend festivals,

fundraisers for Keith Academy, and then got

their pictures mapped by light, and also called

Brazil nuts nigger toes because that’s just

what was done then, all that anyone knew to do.

I want to say our grandmothers and our aunts

because I don’t want to say my grandmother or

my crazy great aunt. I want my wrong being wrong

in armies of wrong, safe in hate’s battalions, diluted

in the drench of blame, safe when I see photos

of them singing behind the dark, my mother

still a kid somewhere there laughing, not knowing

what bodies have been broken and sunk in rivers

from down the Tallahatchie to up the Merrimack.

Let me snuggle into a mob’s dissolution of fault,

be history blown to dust and not this sin of salt.

— Matt W. Miller

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