Looking at the Backyard Magnolia Tree

by DeeSoul Carson

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after Ella & Louis, “Summertime”

I think of those trumpets starting 
and want to cry. I can’t explain it. I don’t even 
got to hear them. Ella gets to crooning
like she’s reaching out to hold me 
& something fragile within
can’t take it. Gabby asks if I’d feel 
the same way if I saw Ella singing it live. 
I don’t know. I say that so often recently 
but I mean it. I want something, anything
to linger that long within me. I want to ache 
at the haunt of it. I want to love anyone so much 
it feels like the ghost of them is palming my heart
like a peach in August. Ella’s coaxing me
to hush & I'm trying to stay strong for her,
but I can feel the song not on my chest,
but in it, like my lungs are trying to crawl
from behind my ribcage. It’s summertime
& I’m on my grandma’s porch drinking
lemonade. My grandma is tending a cotton plant
on her fence. When I ask why she planted cotton,
of all things, she says it’s cause she had the seeds
& knew how to do it. It’s really that simple,
isn’t it? She could keep a thing alive & so she did. 
I’m trying. Ella’s telling me don’t you cry, oh, 
don’t you cry, but there’s so much I’m mourning
& I don’t know how to name. 
Louis blows that brass & the dying thing
within me stops to listen. It’s so simple,
so simple. You just gotta believe it first.

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DeeSoul Carson (He/They) is a poet and educator from San Diego, CA, currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. His work is featured or forthcoming in Voicemail Poems, Muzzle Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Offing, & elsewhere. A Stanford University alum, DeeSoul has received fellowships from The Watering Hole and New York University, where he is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com