My clanging harbor, almost overnight
you’ve wooed me with the terrifying threat
of bustling where I’m not. I crave your bite,
the way your every touch tends to reset
my temperature, that strut you strut beside
me, arcing, shielding, sewing shut that seam
where light leaks in. I’m one child, magnified,
so many of us, thousands, suddenly seem
so snug within your arms. I weep on cue.
I finally found religion, named it you.
3315 W. WASHINGTON, 3A
This is heartbeat now—shadowbox, dinette
purchased with slow nickels, skittering mice
wedged beneath the stove, warbling their regret
like balladeers. This patchwork paradise
smells vaguely of impending sacrifice
and admissions of defeat. Better yet,
it stinks of chance, the brash tossing of dice.
This is heartbeat now—shadowbox, dinette,
paid for on time, such fashionable debt
for thin and collapsible merchandise
that’s prayed for, then thrown out. A safety net
purchased with slow nickels. Skittering mice
know no one will heed their feverish advice
even as they croon in doomed, blue quartet.
Their soundtrack of the slum, fractured, concise,
intent beneath the stove, is warbled regret.
Again, Chicago’s perfect silhouette
reshapes the room, pretties up to entice
the migrants, who sing city alphabet
like balladeers. That patchwork paradise
has vowed to save them—a jumble of vice
and lies, northward promise, remembered sweat
and sometimes dead mice might have to suffice
before the revelation of sunset.
This is heartbeat now.
ALLIANCE
All I wanted that year was one of those tall blonde
dolls, always pale-named Susie something, a doll
that bolted forward (“She’s magic! She walks! She
looks just like you!”) when you squeezed her hand
just so, one of those dolls with flat nightmare hair
the color of exploded corn and a dress that glowed
and crinkled and sparked. I wanted a perfect friend
to stumble ahead with, an unyielding plastic to wrestle
and wake against, all I wanted was blue flutter-lashed
eyes flapping little voodoo, I wanted to fall in love
with and be horrified by her, to search her mouth
for a full tongue, to grow to resent her, to grant her
mysticism and fury, to lock her up in my closet and
watch the doorknob all damn night, waiting for that
slow Twilight Zone twist. All I talked was Susie this,
Susie that, scrawling her in tortured block-lettered
pleadings with Santa, taking my father by the hand
and leading him past rows and rows of her shelved
at Kresge’s. I said I’d never ever ask for anything
else again ever, not knowing that Barbie, just one
aisle over, was sharpening her fashionable talons,
sniffing the air for fresh breasts and menstrual blood.
I wanted, wanted and prayed for something hard
and possible. My fresh mute walking baby woman.
But on Christmas Eve, when I snuck a peek through
my wishing window into the starry, slanted snow
and saw Daddy pull a want-shaped box from the trunk
of his Buick, it didn’t stun my belief in the annual
gospel of a porky, apple-cheeked Santa. You know,
I wasn’t stupid—at eight, I’d already signed on for
the miraculous black art of white men. They danced
in my cereal, sold detergent to my mother, this one
shimmied down tenement chimneys. I knew Santa
was still coming, tugged by huffing reindeer, fooled
again by my wide-eyed vow that I’d been an angel.
This gift came from another place, for another reason.
I folded my little body into the dark, kept watching.
When I glimpsed pink knees and a sunshiny coif
through the box’s cellophane front, I thought it was
only right that my father loved hard enough to introduce
Susie to the dim, resigned sigh of his daughter. All that
frosted night, they must have huddled, plastic against
pulse, discussing my sad soft, the out-loud mistakes
in my walking. Actually, only my father spoke. Susie
simply nodded, her stout legs thrumming, a warm
purpose trembling behind her slammed-shut tempera smile.
2
WE SHINED LIKE THE NEW THINGS WE WERE
A COLORED GIRL WILL SLICE YOU IF YOU TALK WRONG ABOUT MOTOWN
The men and women who coupled, causing us, first
arrived confounded. Surrounded by teetering towers
of no, not now, and you shoulda known better, they
cowered and built little boxes of Northern home,
crammed themselves inside, feasted on the familiar
of fat skin and the unskimmed, made gods of doors.
When we came—the same insistent bloody and question
we would have been down South—they clutched us,
plumped us on government cereal drenched in Carnation,
slathered our hair, faces, our fat wiggling arms and legs
with Vaseline. We shined like the new things we were.
The city squared its teeth, smiled oil, smelled the sour
each hour left at the corner of our mouths. Our parents
threw darts at the day. They romanced shut factories,
waged hot battle with skittering roaches and vermin,
lumbered after hunches. Their newborn children grew
like streetlights. We grew like insurance payments.
We grew like resentment. And since no tall sweet gum
thrived to offer its shouldered shade, no front porch
lesson spun wide to craft our wrong or righteous,
our parents loosed us into the crumble, into the glass,
into the hips of a new city. They trusted exploded
summer hydrants, scarlet licorice whips, and crumbling
rocks of government cheese to conjure a sort of joy,
trusted joy to school us in the woeful limits of jukeboxes
and moonwash. Freshly dunked in church water, slapped
away from double negatives and country ways, we were
orphans of the North Star, dutifully sacrificed, our young
bodies arranged on sharp slabs of boulevard. We learned
what we needed, not from our parents and their rumored
South, but from the gospel seeping through the sad gap
in Mary Wells’s grin. Smokey slow-sketched pictures
of our husbands, their future skins flooded with white light,
their voices all remorse and atmospheric coo. Little Stevie
squeezed his eyes shut on the soul notes, replacing his
dark with ours. Diana was the bone our mamas coveted,
the flow of slip silver they knew was buried deep beneath
their rollicking heft. Every lyric, growled or sweet from
perfect brown throats, was instruction: Sit pert, pout, and
seamed silk. Then watch him beg. Every spun line was
consolation: You’re such a good girl. If he has not arrived,
he will. Every wall of horn, every slick choreographed
swivel, threaded us with the rhythm of the mildly wild.
We slept with transistor radios, worked the two silver knobs,
one tiny earbud blocking out the roar of our parents’ tardy
attempts to retrieve us. Instead, we snuggled with the Temps,
lined up five pretty men across. And damned if they didn’t
begin every one of their songs with the same word: Girl.
ANNIE PEARL’S ARETHABOPS
1.
She wakes up to the radiating of his curved body
snapped to hers. Not wanting his eyes to open yet,
she resists the urge to shift too suddenly toward
the smudged window, its unwelcoming sun. Instead
she links to the clock of his breathing, sniffs its sour
relentless cream. Again, she’d dreamed of slapping him.
One morning that chain is gonna break.
’Til then, I’m gonna take all I can take.
How could he have saved her so deftly, charging
up on a stallion the color of West Side slush, lifting
her off her feet, vowing screwtop wine and reversals?
Eventually Chicago would demand to be romanced,
switching her formidable hip to a raucous duet
of marked cards and mistaken clocks. Now, when
he locks onto her eyes and mentions love, he sputters
hollows. The O of his practiced mouth, still perfect.
One morning that chain is gonna break.
’Til then, I’m gonna take all I can take.
She finds the suitcase in the hall closet; still clinging
to their first unfolding. It stinks of Alabama. While
he sleeps, snorting in fractures, she tosses in wingtips,
unmatched cufflinks, a Luckys pack, a pewter
sharkskin suit, his ashed cantata hands, those lips.
Aloud, she says I love you. Then forgets why.
One morning that chain is gonna break.
’Til then, I’m gonna take all I can take.
2.
Get out! Her hair conks rivers, her eyes bulge.
It doesn’t help that he is smiling sad crooked sugar,
doesn’t help that he watches her raving from
beneath hooded lids, mumbling Girl, c’mon now
like she is just a hardheaded cur straining the leash.
He says no way he’s leaving. She bares her teeth.
No-good heartbreaker; you’re a liar, you’re a cheat—
I don’t know why. I let you do these things to me . . .
She thinks of his burnt-orange women, puff-lipped,
deep-spritzed beehives, wiggled seams snaking down
the backs of their legs, sadiddy asses dripping off
the edges of barstools while he spoon-feeds them spirits
and meat. She thinks of mouths thrown open, red octave
cackles riding a surface of glass. And his hands on them,
unthreading her language. Their hurried names, written
in whiskey, had sweated out the lining of his pocket.
No-good heartbreaker; you’re a liar, you’re a cheat—
I don’t know why. I let you do these things to me . . .
I ain’t going nowhere woman, and she sways,
considers regretting, as he turns his wall of a back
to the unsettled weather of her. Instead, she folds,
grows small, hard, a brusque knot of what she was.
She flashes her bricked torso, and he skips a beat
in his breath. She could carry his ass out, and would.
No-good heartbreaker; you’re a liar, you’re a cheat—
I don’t know why. I let you do these things to me . . .
3.
Back when Alabama was a quick hot glance over
her shoulder, when Arkansas numbed his calling
tongue, they emerged, stumbling, from the exhaust
of northbound buses and coupled on the warped
hardwood of that first home. There was only the one
and the one. Always the denying there would be others.
My soul was in the lost and found.
You came along to claim it.
Imagine a savior not being forever. She had stitched
her whole self to his forward, forward, his angled
shoulders. Her tenement body craved his cures,
the gospel of his denying nouns. And he said woman
then, and he meant her, the way she was, thick
and Southern. Remembering, she engines beneath him
a final time, grieving, annoyed by his familiar burn.
Aloud, he says Thank you, baby. Silent, she says good-bye.
My soul was in the lost and found.
You came along to claim it.
Bellowed rebuttals, his shirt still off, chest scarred by
the screeched road of a bitten, unpolished fingernail, one
fevered You crazy, bitch? unanswered in the air, suddenly
it’s all grind and blue juke, another English he has learned.
He bangs and shivers the thin doorframe on the way out,
stunning the stubborn beat of the thing he had rescued.
My soul was in the lost and found.
You came along to claim it.
TRUE THAT
In my neighborhood
I got jumped
because my daddy lived at home.
Then,
when he didn’t live at home anymore,
I got jumped
because he had the nerve
to visit.
SHEDDING
She screamed when she saw the clumps of hair
in my hand, the slowly uncrumpling wads stuffing
the sink drain, the nappy tufts clinging to the slick
white walls of the tub. In disbelief, she dragged
her claw across my scalp, then stared at the thick
tendrils that easily came away with her hand.
“Girl, what did you do?” she demanded, deciding
that the loss of my hair was punishment for some
closeted purple sin, so then began the questions:
Did you let anybody touch you? You been going
to school every day? Have you been stopping off
at that place where they sell candy? Girl, you been
stealing stuff from Woolworth’s, slipping money
outta my purse? Did you say something wrong
to God? You call God out His name? You been
cursing? I was eight. Nothing purple could find
thread in me. All I knew was that the week before,
my mother had stated, casually, while she chopped
onions or tuned in to Petticoat Junction or shaved
a corn on her toe with a razor, “Oh, your daddy
ain’t gonna be living here no more,” and my halo
shredded and my whole slice of sky started to hurt.
LAUGH YOUR TROUBLES AWAY!
Motto, Riverview Park, 1904–1967, Chicago
1.
Every city had one, a palace with a fried tint to its air,
a hurting-hued screech of no underneath, everything
plummeting or ascending, a monument to hazy flailing
and sudden fun vomit. Swing the Riviera onto Belmont,
and you see the Pair-O-Chutes rising to heaven on dual
strings, headed for the pinpoint and release, then the sick
whip and fall, the little public murder, a blaring grace
so storybook gorgeous, suddenly flood in the throat.
Revelers board creaking Fireball cars and slice the August,
mistaking acid bubbling in their bellies for symptoms
of glee, then stop to stuff quavering guts with plastic
and syrup. Their quick sustenance has wafted all day
all day on a river of grease. They hunger for white cakes
curled stiff with sugar, sausages that pop huge heat,
pink candy of cotton chomping rot down their throats.
The jagged stains of compromised fruit circle screaming
mouths and paint shadow across th
e teeth, making them
horrible. Bulbs flash. Wet Polaroids are lifted and waved
like church fans to etch and clarify in the summer steam.
The aged horses are dizzied, diseased. Chained to a tilting
stake, they blur through the drag, deferring to their brutal,
squirming burdens. Potbellied flies, nasty to the point
of charm, nibble passages toward the horses’ blue hearts.
Above it all, the freak show M.C.—his shout an odd mixture
of pity and sex—dares us to witness sweaty sloth, tiny floating
corpses, so much skin unlike ours, more legs than allowed,
and a Negro who can separate himself from his eyes.
While on the midway, your father will never win the thinly
stuffed neon grinners—the bears, dolphins, curlique serpents,
Kewpie dolls, and counterfeit Mickey Mice that leer from shelves.
He hurls balls at weighted milk cans, blasts at a measured parade
of bobbing ducks, guns water into a pinpoint, guesses a woman’s
weight. Finally, he just buys something soft and ugly, a token
you will clutch and sing to until, too blackly loved, it melts.
At dusk, he steers you away from the midway’s squalling edge,
where everything seems to be happening, where the hooting
and laughter have a raw, unmeasured throat. You pout, he pulls,
and, not for the first time, you wonder what he hides.
2.
I am their pickaninny, dressed in a repeating river.
All of me is droop and sustain.
My drenched dungarees are gravity on me.
I have learned to smile at the several versions
of my name, my face is complete in its teeth.
and studied dumb ogle. Oh, woe is me I say
while the white boys wind up, and damn if they
don’t always smack that huge disc, dead center.
I rise laughing from my clockwork baptisms,
the canned river funked with my own spit and piss,
just to see another man clutching the red ball,
his eyes harder than the first of these. Sometimes
an awed Negro dots the crowd, his numbed smile
a link chained to mine. I spot one using his body
to block his little girl’s view of me, so I make
my voice louder: I oh sweet jesus kind suh no,
I lawd ham mercy suh I I believes I might drown
I please let me dry off in this sun a little I mercy
me you sho does look strong suh until she twists
Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah Page 3