THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES
The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of five poetry books annually through participating publishers. Publication is funded by the Lannan Foundation; the late James A. Michener and Edward J. Piszek through the Copernicus Society of America; Stephen Graham; International Institute of Modern Letters; Joyce & Seward Johnson Foundation; Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation; and the Tiny Tiger Foundation. This project also is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.
2005 COMPETITION WINNERS
Steve Gehrke of Columbia, Missouri,
Michelangelo’s Seizure
Chosen by T. R. Hummer, University of Illinois
Press
Nadine Meyer of Columbia, Missouri,
The Anatomy Theater
Chosen by John Koethe, HarperCollins
Patricia Smith of Tarrytown, New York,
Teahouse of the Almighty
Chosen by Edward Sanders, Coffee House Press
S. A. Stepanek of West Chicago, Illinois,
Three, Breathing
Chosen by Mary Ruefle, Wave Books
Tryfon Tolides of Farmington, Connecticut,
An Almost Pure Empty Walking
Chosen by Mary Karr, Penguin Books
COPYRIGHT © 2006 Patricia Smith
COVER & BOOK DESIGN Linda S. Koutsky
COVER ARTWORK © Maurice Evans (mauriceevansart.com)
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © Peter Dressel (peterdressel.com)
Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, 1045 Westgate Drive, Saint Paul, MN 55114. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to: Coffee House Press, 27 North Fourth Street, Suite 400, Minneapolis, MN 554.01.
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals help make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Smith, Patricia
Teahouse of the almighty : poems / by Patricia Smith.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-56689-366-4
1. African Americans—Poetry.1. Title.
PS3569.M537839T43 2006
378. 1'06—DC22
2006011899
FIRST EDITION | FIRST PRINTING
135798642
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications where these poems first appeared: Spirit and Flame: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Poetry: “Building Nicole’s Mama,” Asheville Poetry Review: “Map Rappin’,” Underwood Review: “Forgotten in All This,” Willow Review: “Teahouse of the Almighty,” Callaloo: “Her Other Name.”
Special thanks to Edward Sanders, and to the benefactors and supporters of the National Poetry Series; to Luis Rodriguez, Michael Warr, and Marc Smith for an invaluable birth; to Stephen Dobyns and Tom Lux for the friendship, support, and unflinching guidance; to the national poetry slam community and the staff and students of Cave Canem, and to Kwame Dawes, the perfect “go-to guy.”
For Mikaila, The Face, who lights every corner of my world and work.
For Bruce, my doting husband and partner, the consummate editor.
For Damon, my son, who will prevail.
And for Boof! Fwa!
CONTENTS
Building Nicole’s Mama
Giving Birth to Soldiers
It Had the Beat Inevitable
Mississippi’s Legs
walloping! magnifying of a guy’s anatomy easily
10 Ways to Get Ray Charles and Ronald Reagan Into the Same Poem
The World Won’t Wait
Listening at the Door
The End of a Marriage
Boy Dies, Girlfriend Gets His Heart
Dumpsters, Wastebaskets, Shallow Graves
To 3, No One in the Place
Sacrifice
My Million Fathers, Still Here Past
How to Be a Lecherous Little Old Black Man and Make Lots of Money
Hallelujah With Your Name
Little Poetry
Can’t Hear Nothing for That Damned Train
Drink, You Motherfuckers
Deltateach
Creatively Loved
Elegantly Ending
Sex and Music
Map Rappin’
In the Audience Tonight
Weapon Ultimate
Scribe
The Circus Is In Town
Her Other Name
Forgotten in All This
Down 4 the Up Stroke
Women Are Taught
Look at ’Em Go
Stop the Presses
What You Pray Toward
What Men Do With Their Mouths
Dream Dead Daddy Walking
Writing Exercise Breathing Outside My Binder
The Thrill Is On
Blues Through 2 Bone
Fireman
Psyche!
Related to the Buttercup, Blooms in Spring
When Dexter King Met James Earl Ray
All His Distressing Disguises
Teahouse of the Almighty
Running for Aretha
When the Burning Begins
If thou be more than hate or atmosphere
Step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves.
Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves.
—GWENDOLYN BROOKS
BUILDING NICOLE’S MAMA
for the 6th grade class of Lillie C. Evans School, Liberty City, Miami
I am astonished at their mouthful names—
Lakinishia, Fumilayo, Chevellanie, Delayo—
their ragged rebellions and lip-glossed pouts,
and all those pants drooped as drapery.
I rejoice when they kiss my face, whisper wet
and urgent in my ear, make me their obsession
because I have brought them poetry.
They shout me raw, bruise my wrists with pulling,
and brashly claim me as mama as they
cradle my head in their little laps,
waiting for new words to grow in my mouth.
You.
You.
You.
Angry, jubilant, weeping poets—we are all
saviors, reluctant hosannas in the limelight,
but you knew that, didn’t you? Then let us
bless this sixth grade class—40 nappy heads,
40 cracking voices, and all of them
raise their hands when I ask. They have all seen
the Reaper, grim in his heavy robe,
pushing the button for the dead project elevator,
begging for a break at the corner pawn shop,
cackling wildly in the back pew of the Baptist church.
I ask the death question and forty fists
punch the air, me!, me! And O’Neal,
matchstick crack child, watched his mother’s
body become a claw, and 9-year-old Tiko Jefferson,
barely big enough to lift the gun, fired a bullet
into his own throat after Mama bended his back
with a lead pipe. Tamika cried into a sofa pillow
when Daddy blasted Mama into the north wall
of their cluttered one-room apartment,
Donya’s cousin gone in a drive-by. Dark window,
click, click, gone, says Donya, her tiny finger
a
barrel, the thumb a hammer. I am shocked
by their losses—and yet when I read a poem
about my own hard-eyed teenager, Jeffery asks
He is dead yet?
It cannot be comprehended,
my 18-year-old still pushing and pulling
his own breath. And those 40 faces pity me,
knowing that I will soon be as they are,
numb to our bloodied histories,
favoring the Reaper with a thumbs-up and a wink,
hearing the question and shouting me, me,
Miss Smith, I know somebody dead!
Can poetry hurt us? they ask me before
snuggling inside my words to sleep.
1 love you, Nicole says, Nicole wearing my face,
pimples peppering her nose, and she is as black
as angels are. Nicole’s braids clipped, their ends
kissed with match flame to seal them,
and can you teach me to write a poem about my mother?
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 microphones—
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.
GIVING BIRTH TO SOLDIERS
February 1, 2005—Tabitha 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 HAD THE BEAT INEVITABLE
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.
MISSISSIPPI’S LEGS
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 smell—
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 Mississippi—
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 d
ance 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
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