Yona Harvey   AUGUST swatting mosquitoes I knelt beside daddy's deck as afternoon unraveled like a volleyball net. Our lawn recurred five times up the lane, every yard's tomato plants patterned after the same magazine. Granny Burns sighed at my aunts & mother fluttering like insects among paper plates, baked beans, potato salad. Too shy to dance, I watched my cousins' bodies bob & pop like pogo sticks to Roger Troutman & Zapp, each proud step an electric prayer. I searched old boxes for badminton racquets as beads of sweat clung to my small breasts like a boy's mouth, almost happy being asked to help.   CHARMED full of color the snake comes out of sleep out of earth out of a garden's combed black dirt out of the belly its tail slips onto the grass past the old fossil whose prayer is lost on the house behind it.......called back by nightcrawlers & beetles past the patch troubled with dolls' heads.....frog legs quickening in a jar onto the porch into the house quiet as a dream a girl dreams her mouth slobber & heat she dreams of the snake full of color its rainbowed skin a dance in her black eyes soot shaken free from its outcast body it climbs the staircase to the girl's bedroom where she wiggles free from her sheets.......the girl full of color.......the snake all struggle.......a whisper caught in a dry throat the girl awakens & does not scream. Annu Ratta Blue Buddha 30" x 18", ceramic see more of Annu Ratta's work     MARY LOU WILLIAMS WAITS FOR A SIGN Each saint's face in the Gillespie parlor is cast with lips pressed tight. But smoothing her skirt on the sofa, she swears she catches them reading Dizzy's score. She's listened to the music slip further from muddy water & spirit, like a country man cloaking suffering in a new bright suit. The music's gotta cut deep. But her friends don't know how to answer her. She treads their silence like a path to God. What she wants is a low-down connection. Boogie-woogie promise of call & response. Music joined with spirit like the ball & socket of a winging hip. The music's lost its roots. Glancing the piano's keys, she whispers a hymnal prayer.   MEDITATION ON THE COLOR PURPLE what color shug avery would wear lips look like dark plum black plum nipples piss off god if you don't notice it miss celie's song scratched out my head just about the color of eggplant the more i wonder the more i love   PROPHECY Tomorrow I will be born to a churchgoing woman & a man whose blistered feet will never leave her. She will buy ruffled socks for me & he will tote me to granny's in them. They will acquire debt for each other but we will not be saved. None of us knows that my baby sister will come home in borrowed blankets that we will dress in the mirrors of this house for years.   Like William "Bootsy" Collins and Toni Morrison, Yona Harvey is from the great state of Ohio. Like Morrison, she left that great state and came to Washington, DC to attend Howard University. Since her graduation several years ago, she has taught in Japan, received an MFA from Ohio State, ate gumbo in New Orleans, married a poet named Terrance, and given birth to a wonderful daughter named Ua. She has been published in Step Into a World, Testimony, Red Brick Review, and in many other places. Published in Volume 2, Number 4, Fall 2001.