I mean, you write about your daddy and he dead,
can you teach me to remember my mama?
A teacher tells me this is the first time Nicole
has admitted that her mother is gone,
murdered by slim silver needles and a stranger
rifling through her blood, the virus pushing
her skeleton through for Nicole to see.
And now this child with rusty knees
and mismatched shoes sees poetry as her scream
and asks me for the words to build her mother again.
Replacing the voice.
Stitching on the lost flesh.
So poets,
as we pick up our pens,
as we flirt and sin and rejoice behind microphonesâ
remember Nicole.
She knows that we are here now,
and she is an empty vessel waiting to be filled.
And she is waiting.
And she
is
waiting.
And she waits.
February 1, 2005âTabitha Bonilla's husband, Army Captain Orlando A. Bonilla, 27, was killed Wednesday in a helicopter accident in Baghdad. Her father, Army Sergeant First Class Henry A. Bacon, 45, died in Iraq last February.
She will pin ponderous medals to her
housedress, dripping the repeated roses,
while she claws through boxes filled with
him and then him. The accepting of God's
weird wisdom takes place over forkfuls
of rubbery casseroles and the snowy vows
of newsmen who measure her worth
in cued weeping. She offers her husband's
hands, a shrine of their mingled smells,
a warm seat on a couch of napped corduroy.
They offer one polished bone, scrubbed
clean of war. And she babbles of links and
irony, shrugs her numb shoulders, and feels
dimly blessed as a door slams shut on both
sides of her head. Suddenly, she is her
only history. Smiling politely beneath a fierce
salute, propped upright behind the crumpled
ghosts of her men, she is the catchy logo
for a confounded country. This day is the day
she has. Tomorrow, she will touch her own
breasts, she will dismantle a gaudy altar
with her teeth. And she will ask a bemused God
for guidance as she steps back into line,
her womb tingling vaguely with the next soldier.
It's all right what Bobby Womack taught us, what Chaka growled,
O.K.
to flaunt the hard stone double dutch planted in our calves.
Forgive Smokey for sending us off to search for that white horse
and the half-white boy riding it. Go on, shove that peppermint stick
down the center of that sour pickle, dine on a sandwich of Wonder
and souse, take your stand in that black woman assembly line to
scrape the scream from chitlins. It's all right that Mama caught the
'hound up from Alabama, that Daddy rode up from Arkansas and
you're the only souvenir they got. We brown girls, first generation
brick, sparkling in Dacron and pink sweat socks, we went the only
way we could. Our weather vane, whirling in Chicago wind, was the
rusted iron torso of a stout black woman. We vanished for a while.
Gwen Brooks hissed
Follow.
We had no choice.
for Koko Taylor
It was black out there.
The starless Alabama night
pressed against my skin,
hard like a man, steam I couldn't fathom.
I was 14. I was trouble.
My chest bulged with wrong moving
and other women's men lapped up my smellâ
the smell of a gun barrel
once the bullet is gone.
Fat flies, blood loony and irritated by the moon,
nibbled at my ankles and buzzed
sweet Jesus
when they tasted the thick sweet oil
I rubbed in to make my legs shine.
I was 14. My hips were wide, keening.
I had lightning bolts for legs.
Wrinkled women, grateful for the sleeping sun,
shucked peas, ripped silk from corn,
rocked do-diddy rhythms on fallen porches.
Boys with earth naps screeched crave into the air
and waited for answers and somewhere
a man named
J.T.
or
Diamond
or
Catfish
blew everything he had into a harp
and hollered when he found his heart,
still moist and pumping,
lying at the bottom of a shot glass.
Everybody wanted a way up and out of that town,
a town so small, such a fist of heat and no stars,
that I was able to tuck it all into my cheek
before I stood on my long brown lightning legs
and flew.
The backhand slap that stopped me was called Chicago.
I ran into the first open door
and screamed Mississippi into a microphone,
knocking out most of my teeth in the process.
The men, long cool wisps of glimmer,
fed me whiskey, dressed me red, called me
baby,
laid me down in their king beds,
mapped my widening body, flowered me.
At night I swallowed their cigarette smoke,
swiveled my fat, and gave them Mississippiâ
the proper name for the growing larger,
the blue black, the heavy ankles,
the stiff store-bought auburn flip. By then,
I had to be dead to leave.
Now I sit and watch the white girls
wiggle in to ask for my signing on something.
They wait till they think my back is turned
and they laugh at the black hole of my mouth,
the spilling out, my red wig sweat-sliding.
They wonder how I stuff all this living
into lamé two sizes too gold,
laugh at how I write my name real slow.
I just tap my slingback, smile real grateful-like,
wait till they try to leave. Then I grab one of 'em,
haul her back by that stringy perfumed head,
and growl what the city taught me:
You hearin' me? You hear?
I might not have but one tooth left.
But at least
it's gold.
walloping! magnifying of a guy's anatomy easily
Subject line for a junk e-mail touting a “penile enhancer”
Emmett was all pelvis, theatrics
in lieu of heft and measure.
I threw Rich out of bed
and made him dance naked
in the hall. His spurt was ludicrous.
A.J.'s cocked to the left,
dots of Hai Karate flowering
his testes. And the bubbled one
with gut smothering the stub.
Florid dramas of the teeny weenie,
the entertainments of strut,
snug synthetic fibers, blustery spiels.
And now this little yellow pill
that grows even history huge.
And easily. Yes, and damn.
10 WAYS TO GET RAY CHARLES AND RONALD REAGAN INTO THE SAME POEM
1.
Begin with the rhythm of chapped hands traversing
the naked hips of a Raelette. Begin with the whispered
boundaries of a gone world. Forced to craft other English,
men stutter with their surfaces, jump when they touch
something raw. At birth, the cottony light of the real grew
faint until music swelled its arcing arms and claimed him.
At the very second of heaven, a history swerved close,
teased, but did not return. He said good-bye to strangers.
2.
What heaven would have him, ashed, so much of hollow,
now irritably whole? Imagine the gasping and gulping, the
sputtered queries at the sight of sunflowers and foil. There's
a holy niche in hell for these harbingers of hard wisdoms,
men with this strain of jazz in them, men who have seen the
inward of women, heard colors settle, eased shameful things
into their mouths. The Last Rapture is best without his kind,
without his crazed seeing knock splintering the gilded wood.
3.
Which is the kill that repeats: To lose what you have seen, or
never to see what you have already lost? And the ears become
earth drums, huge hands, vessels. They rush to scream him
everything, including dust, cerulean, the moist blinking of a
woman's hip. Even touch gets loud, shocking his long fingers,
jolting him upright in the damnable dark. His days become
his skin, blank and patient. Even when bellowed, many words,
like
today
and
never,
translate to nothing truly seen or known.
4.
Sudden mothers, lying clocks, warm canes. Women are
everywhere. He has buckled beneath their gazing, knowing
how truly they see him, straining erect, eyes bop-do-ditty in
a bobbing head. He allows them their pity strolls across his
map while he moves his palms up and down, flat against their
waiting faces, reading, reading. They stink so good, and he is
amazed at their talent for tangling the recalled. But they talk
too damned much. All those split declaratives deny his eyes.
5.
The politics of smooth and unpuckered, the sounds of a man
reciting what he will never know. What separates the living of
this from the dying of it, it is all that no-color, that hugest of
sound, the din, fingertips swollen from touching everything
twice, the dim wattage of time crawling beyond where it was.
Faces, angle and ghost, rise up to him, dance their mean
little circumstance dance, claim the simplest drifting names.
Slamming all his eyes against them only carves the hard loss.
6.
Promise drips from songs, but the heart can't see anything.
7.
The body, snide prankster, won't stop. Tumbling through sheets
leaves a bright sting. The right music ignites even the flattest ass.
Damned toes tap. Anything on the tongue must be swallowed or
expelled. The gut fills, piss trickles. Eyes flap open, even though.
The elbow cranks, the cock stiffens, roots of thirst and addictions
thicken. The sun bakes blank recollection on open skin. Inside him
a wretched world spins, machine unerring, striving for such a silly
perfect. The body doesn't need moonwash or windows. It just churns.
8.
His pulse has the gall to beat urgently, like it does when one spies
a familiar canvas or a lostago sweet. It's as if one of his strangers
has dangled life's pointed, two-pronged instruction just inside the
void:
Remember what you have seen. See what you remember.
He
spends his days straining toward either or both of these squiggling
concepts, building whole novels on a hint of ginger riding someone's
breath. In the end, almost buried by his sad collage, he clings to a
single truth: Whenever he asks for water, it arrives. It always arrives.
9.
When a gone man dies, what could possibly be taken away? It must
be the light that leaves, darkening even places it has never touched.
10.
Salvation blesses him with gasping eyes, pinned open and glaring,
and hours that slide like silver over his skin. The first thing he sees