#kevin young
An afternoon with Kevin Young’s “Aunties” sounds awfully good right now. The poem, from his collection Dear Darkness, appears most recently in Blue Laws, a selected and uncollected gathering that is an essential tour of Young’s work.
Aunties
There’s a way a womanwill not
relinquish
her pocketbook
even pulled
onstage, or called up
to the pulpit—
there’s a way only
your Auntie can make it
taste right—
rice & gravy
is a meal
if my late Great Aunt
Toota makes it—
Aunts cook like
there’s no tomorrow
& they’re right.
Too hot
is how my Aunt Tuddie
peppers everything,
her name given
by my father, four, seeing
her smiling in her crib.
There’s a barrel
full of rainwater
beside the house
that my infant father will fall
into, trying to see
himself—the bottom—
& there’s his sister
Margie yanking him out
by his hair grown long
as superstition. Never mind
the flyswatter they chase you
round the house
& into the yard with
ready to whup the daylights
out of you—
that’s only a threat—
Aunties will fix you
potato salad
& save
you some. Godmothers,
godsends,
Aunts smoke like
it’s going out of style—
& it is—
make even gold
teeth look right, shining,
saying I’ll be
John, with a sigh. Make way
out of no way—
keep the key
to the scale that weighed
the cotton, the cane
we raised more
than our share of—
If not them, then who
will win heaven?
holding tight
to their pocketbooks
at the pearly gates
just in case.
More on this book and author:
- Learn more about Blue Laws by Kevin Young.
- Browse other books by Kevin Young, including Stones, forthcoming in September 2021.
- Hear Kevin Young read poems from the first pandemic year, along with other contributors to the anthology Together in a Sudden Strangeness, via Left Bank Books on April 19.
- Share this poem and peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.
- To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.
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