"Rachel M. Harper is a novelist and screenwriter. Her first novel, Brass Ankle Blues, was a Borders Original Voices Award finalist and selected as a Target Breakout Book. Her newest novel, This Side of Providence, will be published in April 2016; it was recently adapted into an original television pilot, City of Providence.
Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous anthologies including Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, Literary Pasadena, and Mending the World: Stories of Family by Contemporary Black Writers, as well as the journals Carolina Quarterly, Chicago Review, African American Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her One-Act play, “Bluffing on a Queen’s Playground,” was part of the New Black Playwrights Festival at Actor’s Express in Atlanta, and she recently collaborated on the performance piece, “The Book of Daniel,” by award-winning interdisciplinary theatre artist Daniel Alexander Jones.
Harper has received multiple fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and was profiled by The Root as part of their 2011 city series on Los Angeles’ black literary giants. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Southern California, Harper is on the faculty at Spalding University’s low-residency MFA in Writing Program. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is currently at work on a new novel and several TV/film projects." from Creative Writing Conference
The Myth of Music
for my father
BY RACHEL M. HARPER
If music can be passed on
like brown eyes or a strong
left hook, this melody
is my inheritance, lineage traced
through a title track,
displayed on an album cover
that you pin to the wall
as art, oral history taught
on a record player, the lessons
sealed into the grooves like fact.
This is the only myth I know.
I sit on the hardwood
floors of a damp November,
my brother dealing cards
from an incomplete deck,
and I don’t realize that this
moment is the definition
of family, collective memory
cut in rough-textured tones,
the voice of a horn so familiar
I don’t know I’m listening,
Don’t know I’m singing,
a child’s improvisation
of Giant Steps or Impressions:1
songs without lyrics
can still be sung.
In six months, when my mother
is 2,000 miles away, deciding
if she wants to come home,
I will have forgotten
this moment, the security
of her footsteps, the warmth
of a radiator on my back and you
present in the sound of typing
your own accompaniment,
multiphonics disguised as chords
in a distant room, speakers set
on high to fill the whole house
with your spirit, your call
as a declaration of love.
But the music will remain.
The timeless notes of jazz
too personal to play out loud,
stay locked in the rhythm
of my childhood, memories fading
like the words of a lullaby,
come to life in a saxophone’s blow.
They lie when they say
music is universal—this is my song,
the notes like fingerprints
as delicate as breath.
I will not share this air
with anyone
but you.
1Giant Steps is a jazz album (1960) by John Coltrane. Impressions (1963) is another album by Coltrane.
Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, an anthology by 
Mending the World: stories of family by contemporary black writers by