Prick of the Spindle: Poetry: Zinz: Chalk Drawings

Chalk Drawings
by Jessica Zinz

Children danced on the bricks of my street
and made Four-Square blocks with egg chalk.
They traced crime scenes around one another,
changing colors throughout each of their bodies,
made hopscotch-runs with reaching, shaky lines
and left broken yokes in between the bricks.

My father built this road, set its original bricks.
He knew the dirt before it was made a street,
but ever since they placed these coloring lines,
there have been children with Crayola chalk
and others, standing over them, circling the bodies
until they were called home, one after another.

I recognized all of these drawings from another
day spent tagging the road, dressing up bricks,
pretending that gaps did not crack young bodies.
We tell our stories on the pages of these streets.
In bright colors, putting pressure on the chalk,
we write our own fiction novels and poetic lines.

If a car came through, they made chicken lines
across the road, testing the courage of one another.
Some of the children ran, abandoning their chalk,
losing these mediums between tires and bricks,
but there were some kids that stuck to the street,
forcing cars to go around the shadows of bodies.

On the sidewalk, a boy draws hearts for the bodies.
Giving them faces and smiles, he arches the lines
and connects them all like stars fallen to the street.
He has not looked up from his work to know another
child is numbering the dead, taking records on bricks.
Number 3 is backwards and written in bloody chalk.

A storm is going to come tonight to erase their chalk.
When the first drop of rain falls, they’ll leave the bodies
on the road and forget the last number on the bricks.
Water will take the color and walk in river lines
along the curb, wash away records, make space for another
child to lie down without seeing blood on the street.

My own children draw their lines on these red streets.
They write with the chalk bits left between the bricks
by another child, who grew tired of tracing still bodies.

Jessica Zinz is a Creative Writing major concentrating in poetry, with a minor in Environmental Art, at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. In the fall she will be acting as an editor for the Allegheny Review, Allegheny College's national undergraduate literary magazine, in which she has also published poetry. The mundane atmosphere of Meadville, her hometown, appears often in her work.