Shake Loose My Skin

by Sonia Sanchez

  He turned and held her and sed, Stay up wid me tonite, babee. I got all these memories creeping in on me. Bad ones. They’s the things that make kicking hard, you know. You begin remembering all the mean things you’ve done to yo/family/friends who dig you. I’m remembering now all the heavee things I done laid on you in such a short time. You hardly had a chance to catch yo/breath when I’d think of sum new game to lay on you. Help me, Sandy. Listen to my talk. Hold my hand when I git too sad. Laugh at my fears that keep poppin’ out on me like some childhood disease. Be my vaccine, babee. I need you. Don’t ever leave me, babee, cuz I’ll never have a love like you again. I’ll never have another woman again if you leave me. He picked up her hands and rubbed them in his palms as he talked, and she listened until he finally slept and morning crept in through the shades and covered them.

  He threw away his works when he woke up. He came over to where she wuz feeding the boys and kissed her and walked out to the backyard and threw the manila envelope into the middle can. He came back inside, smiled and took a dollie wid a glass of water, and fell on the couch.

  Sandy put the boys in their strollers in the backyard where she cud watch them as she cleaned the kitchen. She saw Snow, their big/wite/dog, come round the corner of the house to sit in front of them. They babbled words to him but he sat still guarding them from the backyard/evils of the world.

  She moved fast in the house, had a second cup of coffee, called their babysitter and finished straightening up the house. She put on a short dress which showed her legs, and she felt good about her black/hairy legs. She laughed as she remembered that the young brothers on her block used to call her a big/legged/momma as she walked in her young ways.

  They never made the country. Their car refused to start and Winston wuz too sick to push it to the filling station for a jump. So they walked to the park. He pushed her in the swing and she pumped herself higher and higher and higher till he told her to stop. She let the swing come slowly to a stop and she jumped out and hit him on the behind and ran. She heard him gaining on her and she tried to dodge him but they fell laughing and holding each other. She looked at him and her eyes sed, I wish you cud make love to me man. As she laughed and pushed him away she thot, but just you wait til you all right Winston, I’ll give you a workout you’ll never forget, and they got up and walked till he felt bad and went home.

  He stayed upstairs while she cooked. When she went upstairs to check on him, he was curled up, wrapped tight as a child in his mother’s womb. She wiped his head and body full of sweat and kissed him and thought how beautiful he wuz and how proud she wuz of him. She massaged his back and went away. He called fo her as she wuz feeding the children and asked for the wine. He needed somethin’ else to relieve this saturday/nite/pain that was creeping up on him. He looked bad, she thot, and raced down the stairs and brought him the sherry. He thanked her as she went out the door and she curtsied, smiled and sed, Any ol time, man. She noticed she hadn’t stuttered and felt good.

  By the time she got back upstairs he was moaning and turning back and forth on the bed. He had drunk half the wine in the bottle, now he wuz getting up to bring it all up. When she came back up to the room he sed he was cold, so she got another blanket for him. He wuz still cold, so she took off her clothes and got under the covers wid him and rubbed her body against him. She wuz scared. She started to sing a Billie Holiday song. Yeh. God bless the child that’s got his own. She cried in between the lyrics as she felt his big frame trembling and heaving. Oh god, she thot, am I doing the right thing? He soon quieted down and got up to go to the toilet. She closed her eyes as she waited fo him. She closed her eyes and felt the warmth of the covers creeping over her. She remembered calling his name as she drifted off to sleep. She remembered how quiet everything finally wuz.

  One of the babies woke her up. She went into the room, picked up his bottle and got him more milk. It wuz while she wuz handing him the milk that she heard the silence. She ran to their bedroom and turned on the light. The bed wuz empty. She ran down the stairs and turned on the lights. He was gone. She saw her purse on the couch. Her wallet wuz empty. Nothing was left. She opened the door and went out on the porch, and she remembered the lights were on and that she wuz naked. But she stood fo a moment looking out at the flat/Indianapolis/street and she stood and let the late/nite/air touch her body and she turned and went inside.

  I Have Walked a Long Time

  i have walked a long time

  much longer than death that splinters

  wid her innuendos.

  my life, ah my alien life,

  is like an echo of nostalgia

  bringen blue screens to bury clouds

  rinsen wite stones stretched among the sea.

  you, man, will you remember me when i die?

  will you stare and stain my death and say

  i saw her dancen among swallows

  far from the world’s obscenities?

  you, man, will you remember and cry?

  and i have not loved.

  always

  while the body prowls

  the soul catalogues each step;

  while the unconscious unbridles feasts

  the flesh knots toward the shore.

  ah, i have not loved

  wid legs stretched like stalks against sheets

  wid stomachs drainen the piracy of oceans

  wid mouths discarden the gelatin

  to shake the sharp self.

  i have walked by memory of others

  between the blood night

  and twilights i have lived in tunnels

  and fed the bloodless fish;

  between the yellow rain

  and ash,

  i have heard the rattle

  of my seed,

  so time, like some pearl necklace embracen

  a superior whore, converges

  and the swift spider binds my breast.

  you, man, will you remember me when i die?

  will you stare and stain my death and say

  i saw her applauden suns

  far from the grandiose audience?

  you, man, will you remember and cry?

  On Passing thru Morgantown, Pa.

  i saw you

  vincent van

  gogh perched

  on those pennsylvania

  cornfields communing

  amid secret black

  bird societies. yes.

  i’m sure that was

  you exploding your

  fantastic delirium

  while in the

  distance

  red indian

  hills beckoned.

  On Seeing a Pacifist Burn

  this day is not

  real. the crowing of

  the far-away

  carillons ring

  out direction

  less. even you are

  un real roasting

  under a man

  hattan sky

  while passersby flap

  their indecent tongues.

  even i am un

  real but i

  am black and

  thought to be

  without meaning.

  Letter to Ezekiel Mphahlele

  dear zeke,

  i’ve just left your house where you and rebecca served a dinner of peace to me and my sons. the ride home is not as long as the way i came, two centuries of hunger brought me along many detours before i recognized your house. it is raining and as i watch the raindrops spin like colored beads on the windshield, i hear your voice calling out to your ancestors to prepare a place for you, for you were returning home leaving the skeleton rites of twenty years behind.

  you and rebecca have been walking a long time. your feet have crossed the african continent to this western one where you moved amid leaden eyes and laughter that froze you in snow/capped memories. your journey began in 1957, when the ruling class could not understand your yawns of freedom, the motion of a million eyes to see for themselves what life
was/is and could be, and you cut across the burial grounds of south africa where many of your comrades slept and you cut across those black africans smiling their long smiles from diplomatic teeth. now you are returning home. now your mother’s womb cries out to you. now your history demands your heartbeat. and you turn your body toward the whirlwind of change, toward young black voices calling for a dignity speeding beyond control, on the right side of the road. but this nite full of whispering summer trees, this nite nodding with south african faces, heard you say, sonia. i must be buried in my country in my own homeland, my bones must replenish the black earth from whence they came, our bones must fertilize the ground on which we walk or we shall never walk as men and women in the 21st century.

  i talked to my sons as the car chased the longlegged rain running before us. i told them that men and women are measured by their acts not by their swaggering speech or walk, or the money they have stashed between their legs. i talked to my sons about bravery outside of bruce lee grunts and jabs, outside of star wars’ knights fertilizing america’s green youth into continued fantasies while reality explodes in neutron boldness. i said you have just sat and eaten amid bravery. relish the taste. stir it around and around in your mouth until the quick sweetness of it becomes bitter, then swallow it slowly, letting this new astringent taste burn the throat. bravery is no easy taste to swallow. i said this man and woman we have just left this nite have decided to walk like panthers in their country, to breathe again their own breath suspended by twenty years of exile, to settle in the maternal space of their birth where there are men who “shake hands without hearts” waiting for them. they are a fixed portrait of courage.

  it is 2 a.m., my children stretch themselves in dreams, kicking away the room’s shadows. i stare at the nite piling in little heaps near my bed. zeke. maybe you are a madman. i a madwoman to want to walk across the sea, to saddle time while singing a future note. we follow the new day’s breath, we answer old bruises waiting to descend upon our heads, we answer screams creeping out of holes and shells buried by memories waiting to be cleansed. you invoking the ghosts lurking inside this child/woman. you breaking my curtain of silence. i love the tom-tom days you are marching, your feet rooted in the sea. save a space for me and mine zeke and rebecca. this lost woman, who walks her own shadow for peace.

  Under a Soprano Sky

  1.

  once i lived on pillars in a green house

  boarded by lilacs that rocked voices into weeds.

  i bled an owl’s blood

  shredding the grass until i

  rocked in a choir of worms.

  obscene with hands, i wooed the world

  with thumbs

  while yo-yos hummed.

  was it an unborn lacquer i peeled?

  the woods, tall as waves, sang in mixed

  tongues that loosened the scalp

  and my bones wrapped in white dust

  returned to echo in my thighs.

  i heard a pulse wandering somewhere

  on vague embankments.

  O are my hands breathing? I cannot smell the nerves.

  i saw the sun

  ripening green stones for fields.

  O have my eyes run down? i cannot taste my birth.

  2.

  now as i move, mouth quivering with silks

  my skin runs soft with eyes.

  descending into my legs, i follow obscure birds

  purchasing orthopedic wings.

  the air is late this summer.

  i peel the spine and flood

  the earth with adolescence.

  O who will pump these breasts? I cannot waltz my tongue.

  under a soprano sky, a woman sings,

  lovely as chandeliers.

  Philadelphia: Spring, 1985

  1.

  /a phila. fireman reflects after

  seeing a decapitated body in the MOVE ruins/

  to see those eyes

  orange like butterflies

  over the walls.

  i must move away

  from this little-ease

  where the pulse

  shrinks into itself

  and carve myself in white.

  O to press the seasons

  and taste the quiet juice

  of their veins.

  2. /memory/

  a.

  Thus in the varicose town

  where eyes splintered the night with glass

  the children touched at random

  sat in places where legions rode.

  And O we watched the young birds

  stretch the sky

  until it streamed white ashes

  and O we saw mountains lean on seas

  to drink the blood of whales

  then wander dumb with their wet bowels.

  b.

  Everywhere young

  faces breathing in crusts.

  breakfast of dreams.

  The city, lit by a single fire,

  followed the air into disorder.

  And the sabbath stones singed our eyes

  with each morning’s coin.

  c.

  Praise of a cureless death they heard

  without confessor;

  Praise of cathedrals

  pressing their genesis from priests;

  Praise of wild gulls who came and drank

  their summer’s milk,

  then led them toward the parish snow.

  How still the spiderless city.

  The earth is immemorial in death.

  Haiku

  (for the police on Osage Ave.)

  they came eating their

  own mouths orgiastic teeth

  smiling crucifixions

  Dear Mama,

  It is Christmas eve and the year is passing away with calloused feet. My father, your son and I decorate the night with words. Sit ceremoniously in human song. Watch our blue sapphire words eclipse the night. We have come to this simplicity from afar.

  He stirs, pulls from his pocket a faded picture of you. Blackwoman. Sitting in frigid peace. All of your biography preserved in your face. And my eyes draw up short as he says, “Her name was Elizabeth but we used to call her Lizzie.” And I hold your picture in my hands. But I know your name by heart. It’s Mama. I hold you in my hands and let time pass over my face: “Let my baby be. She ain’t like the others. She rough. She’ll stumble on gentleness later on.”

  Ah Mama. Gentleness ain’t never been no stranger to my genes. But I did like the roughness of running and swallowing the wind, diving in rivers I could barely swim, jumping from second story windows into a saving backyard bush. I did love you for loving me so hard until I slid inside your veins and sailed your blood to an uncrucified shore.

  And I remember Saturday afternoons at our house. The old sister deaconesses sitting in sacred pain. Black cadavers burning with lost aromas. And I crawled behind the couch and listened to breaths I had never breathed. Tasted their enormous martyrdom. Lives spent on so many things. Heard their laughter at Sister Smith’s latest performance in church—her purse sailing toward Brother Thomas’s head again. And I hugged the laughter round my knees. Draped it round my shoulder like a Spanish shawl.

  And history began once again. I received it and let it circulate in my blood. I learned on those Saturday afternoons about women rooted in themselves, raising themselves in dark America, discharging their pain without ever stopping. I learned about women fighting men back when they hit them: “Don’t never let no mens hit you mo than once girl.” I learned about “womens waking up they mens” in the nite with pans of hot grease and the compromises reached after the smell of hot grease had penetrated their sleepy brains. I learned about loose women walking their abandoned walk down front in church, crossing their legs instead of their hands to God. And I crept into my eyes. Alone with my daydreams of being woman. Adult. Powerful. Loving. Like them. Allowing nobody to rule me if I didn’t want to be.

  And when they left. When those old bodies had gat
hered up their sovereign smells. After they had kissed and packed up beans snapped and cakes cooked and laughter bagged. After they had called out their last goodbyes, I crawled out of my place. Surveyed the room. Then walked over to the couch where some had sat for hours and bent my head and smelled their evening smells. I screamed out loud, “Oooweeee! Ain’t that stinky!” and I laughed laughter from a thousand corridors. And you turned Mama, closed the door, chased me round the room until I crawled into a corner where your large body could not reach me. But your laughter pierced the little alcove where I sat laughing at the night. And your humming sprinkled my small space. Your humming about your Jesus and how one day he was gonna take you home . . .

  Because you died when I was six Mama, I never laughed like that again. Because you died without warning Mama, my sister and I moved from family to stepmother to friend of the family. I never felt your warmth again.

  But I knew corners and alcoves and closets where I was pushed when some mad woman went out of control. Where I sat for days while some woman raved in rhymes about unwanted children. And work. And not enough money. Or love. And I sat out my childhood with stutters and poems gathered in my head like some winter storm. And the poems erased the stutters and pain. And the words loved me and I loved them in return.

  My first real poem was about you Mama and death. My first real poem recited an alphabet of spit splattering a white bus driver’s face after he tried to push cousin Lucille off a bus and she left Birmingham under the cover of darkness. Forever. My first real poem was about your Charles-white arms holding me up against death.