it never begins when the body hangs from a silk tree.
it always begins when the body hangs heavy and knotted
to the silk tree, and the tongue slips out of the mouth
–like a swollen maggot?— no, simply like tongue.
this began when the body hung heavy from rope,
knotted to the silk tree and the tongue, swollen with creole,
slipped out of the mouth, a simple tongue.
it didn’t begin with the tongue, swollen with creole,
slipping out between blue lips; hands bound as if praying
couldn’t push the tongue back into the mouth.
did it begin with the tongue, swollen with creole?
the shoeshine polish on the long fingers clutching a winning
lotto ticket, a stolen lamp, the tongue bragging with glee?
it will begin again by forgetting the tongue, the black shoeshine polish
on the long fingers, winning or stealing, the dirt caked on bare feet,
the tree bowing low in the park plaza in this city of caballeros.
begin here: black polish, skin, dirt. a city named after gentlemen.
the shoeshine boy, not yet twenty, known by no real name,
known for no real reason to have been strung up
the way only a black bruised body takes flight.
it never ends here– these bodies hanging from silk trees.
(216 words)
There is quite a bit of repetition in this poem, constantly talking about a tongue hanging out, simply being a tongue doing as a tongue does, “And tongue slips out of mouth -Like a swollen maggot?- no, simply like tongue”. The beginning seems to talk about death in in itself, not just a simple hanging. The simplicity of it all, just hanging there with blue lips and a swollen tongue and hands bound, there really isn’t anything special. And then it continually repeats shoeshine caked onto fingers and hinting at the history of the body. How it talks about the city life and the person’s life, how they related to others, and possibly how they died? I don’t know what happened on February 10th, 2015, but I believe there might have been a suicide or murder and our little poet here, Elizabeth Acevedo, decided to use it as inspiration. And honestly, I feel a sort of sad vibe coming from this poem, the beginning talking about a body hanging from a silk tree and even more when she says, “the shoeshine boy, not yet twenty, known by no real name,” and “only a black bruised body takes flight”. This, in my opinion, is a form of grief for all the people who died before their time.
Muffin; The Blog 
The poem is about a murder. On February 10, 2015, a Haitian man was murdered in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic. His body was found hanging from a tree in a park, in front of a public hospital, where he worked shining shoes. The newspapers told several stories about the circumstances of his death and couldn’t even agree on what his name was- some said he was involved in a robbery, or that he had won some money in the lotto. It happened at a time of particularly increased tension, when ethnic Haitians without papers were being deported and potentially rendered stateless.
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