Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

Curtain Call
(Tuskegee Airman Harry Stewart Jr. on a train en route to Mississippi for boot camp in April of 1943)

In the dining car, so no whites—or the off whites
of their eyes—would catch me inhaling skillet fried
chicken and mashed potatoes, and after we’d pulled
into the nation’s Capital and I’d been part of a more-
perfect-Union-Station yuckup with two childhood buddies

the staff mummied me in a green curtain where I discovered
Washington was a southern city—potted ham in a national
sandwich—between Baltimore and Arlington. Just moments
from my beige face, the conductor, barked: colored car,
boy! My white chums, after barking back, offered to

sit with me where skin splits. But here beside the bus-
boy station, a forkful of potatoes clouding my mouth,
I thought about how I was a homebody headed to
Mississippi to train to whiteout Hitler’s way of thinking
but right then I was forced to gnash the heil in this new

vicinity. (I’d never experienced second-class sitting-sin-
ship.) Before Camp Upton, I’d only scooted far as Harlem,
blossomed chummy with Italians, Irish, Jews and Poles.
But I inhaled that dinner and dashed from behind the
curtain. (Back home I’d heard ‘bout the back of the

bus; but the colored car was in front of this train, where
my uniform sat through a three-day buffet of soot and
smoke.) That night, we screeched into Atlanta and I
dunked my elbows and some Borax soap into my outfit
after that prep course in no-home-basic. Train        ing.

David Mills has published three full-length poetry collections: The Sudden Country, The Dream Detective, and Boneyarn — the sole book of poems about slavery in Manhattan, where the oldest and largest slave cemetery in the country is located. Boneyarn won the North American Book Award. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, The Common, Boog City, Brooklyn Rail, Rattapallax, Poetry Daily, Evergreen Review, and Fence. He has also received fellowships, grants, and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Breadloaf, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Schomburg Center, The American Antiquarian Society, the Lannan Foundation, and the Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize. He lived in Langston Hughes’s landmark Harlem home for three years (was a recipient of the Langston Hughes Society Award) and wrote the audio script for Macarthur-Genius-Award Winner Deborah Willis’s curated exhibition Reflections in Black:100 Years of Black Photography, which showed at the Whitney Museum. The Juilliard School of Drama commissioned and produced a play by Mr. Mills. He has recorded his poetry on ESPN and RCA Records.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx