This episode was originally released on 07/18/2023.

Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

One mother of a player on my son’s lacrosse team would not sit in the bleachers during a game. Emma Pearl believed if she took a seat beside other parents, her parked body would jinx our children’s team and cause a loss. And thus, she opted instead to walk the periphery of the field, the entire game, even during halftime.

I understood. We all at some point perform passed-down rituals to impact the world in our favor — in some instances, to protect ourselves and loved ones from unwanted outcomes. With so much unpredictability around us, any effort to gain control over our so-called fate seems worth making, even the most irrational gestures.

Such rituals are culturally fastened to our personhood. I come from a people who do not split poles, who toss salt over their shoulders, and who constantly knock on wood. My elder aunt is adamant that I knock on the table every time my turn of hand at cards is completed.

When speaking about the dead, my uncle makes sure to hit his fisted hand on any object that looks grainy and some shade of brown. If I say something along the lines of, I’ve never broken a bone in my body, with visions of me falling off my bike, my family urges me to knock on wood and to stop testing fate.

One theory is that the practice of touching wood has its roots in the medieval belief that trees contained spirits that positively intervened when summoned. Today’s poem continues this faith, that we can somehow protect ourselves, by acting out instinctive customs against bad news or fateful tragedy.

A Funeral Ending with Beyoncé
by Karisma Price

                  for Tracie and Aryanna

When Tracie shows us her bloated
pointer finger, there is no ponderosa near so I
knock my chest until redness comes down
the palm and God sends me every animal
to pray with. She thinks she’ll die this time,
from the cat’s bite. The infection is spreading
to the shoulder, though it is only the finger
that shows her sickness, fat and tan as 
the belly of a roadrunner. Tracie decides Aryanna
and I should emcee her funeral: It will be in 
New Mexico under the watchful eyes of ponderosa
pines who’ll coat her casket with the scent
of vanilla. Frybread is to be waiting on every
chair and I imagine my mother there holding
my speech so the grease from the bread doesn’t
bleed through the index cards. She’ll remind me
that when her father died, everyone forgot
he was struck by lightning as a young man.
I’ll forget to tell her I’ve been recording 
our conversations so I can carry her
voice miles away from where she sleeps.
I stiffen at the thought of her death and knock
on the ponderosa, its bark redder than the amputated
finger Tracie made us promise to put in the pocket
of her dress—a lonely fire extinguisher that created
the fire. The mourners finish their bread and I jump
in the casket with her. Aryanna shakes 
her head as she turns on the stereo to play
“I Was Here.” Who would the living be
without the dead in the ground?

“A Funeral Ending With Beyoncé” by Karisma Price from I’M ALWAYS SO SERIOUS © 2023, Karisma Price. Used by permission of Sarabande Books.