hard away from her daddy and full unto me.
I have just enough time for her to sound it out:
D-D-D-unk-unk Dunk a N-N-N-ig-ig-Nig-ger
and then I salute, and hold her father’s eyes as I fall.
THE BOSS OF ME
In fifth grade I
was driven wild by you,
my teacher Copper pixie
with light shining from beneath
it Eyes giggling azure through
crinkled squint I
let you rub my hair I
let you probe the kinks I
clutched you, buried my nose
in the sting starch of your white
blouses I asked you if you thought
I was smart did you know
how much I wanted to come
home with you to roll and cry on
what had to be a bone-colored
carpet I found out where
you lived I dressed in the morning
with you in mind I spelled huge
words for you I opened the dictionary
and started with A I wanted to
impress the want out of you
I didn’t mind my skin because you
didn’t mind my skin I opened big books
and read to you and watched TV news
and learned war and weather for you
I
needed you in me enough to take
home enough to make me stop rocking
my own bed at night enough
to ignore my daddy banging on the front door
and my mama not letting him in I
prayed first to God and then to you
first to God and then to you
then to you and next to God then
just to you
Mrs. Carol
Baranowski do you even remember
the crack of surrender under your hand?
Do you remember my ankle socks
kissed with orange roses, socks turned perfectly
down and the click of the taps in my black
shiny shoes that were always pointed toward
you always walking your way always
dancing for a word from you? I looked
and looked for current that second
of flow between us but our oceans
were different yours was wide and blue
and mine
was
3
LEARNING TO SUBTRACT
OOO, BABY, BABY
A Smokey limerick on the long-play
There once was a song that took hold
of a child, cause the tale that it told
made her feel flushed and held
until she was compelled
to play it again, to behold
the craving encased in each note
that slipped from the singer’s sleek throat—
cause the beg that he sighed
made her ache from inside.
She was moved by his words to devote
her tomorrows to all that he said.
She was told she was out of her head.
But his tenor dug deep,
interrupting her sleep,
so she did some wild dreaming. Instead
of singing it dizzy, she would
pretend that he loved her, or could.
In her mirror, she braced
for his kiss, and the taste
of his mouth. Every day, there she stood
in a room by herself, all alone
with a body no longer her own.
All her soul was engrossed
in no more than a ghost,
every moment a new stepping stone
toward an empty she didn’t dare to name,
knowing Smokey was never to blame
though she whispered, No fair
as she slow-danced with air,
her hip-heavy waltzing a shame.
But if the song made her prefer
the conjure, the hot him and her,
she would live in her head,
stunned in love, newly wed,
the real just a feverish blur.
So she drowned in the silk of his voice
just because there was never a choice.
She was helplessly shook
by his ooh la la hook,
not a thing left to do but rejoice
in a romance that really was none
and a two that was really just one.
She was fatally awed
by a falsetto god—
his wooing had left her undone.
There once was a song that took hold
of a child, cause the story it told
made her feel flushed and held
until she was compelled
to give in to the lies that it sold.
FIRST FRICTION
I was twelve, too young to be left alone mornings
after Mama packed her paper hat and sugar-dusted
shoes to push gumballs down the assembly line.
So I was unceremoniously dumped at the door
of old Mrs. Gore’s mouse-addled basement hovel,
where the matron of snapping gum and gray grin
ushered me in and plopped me down in a chair
that stank of a dog they didn’t own. Seeing how I was
bleary and unslept, Mrs. Gore would open the door
to the bedroom where her twin girls, Kathy and Karen,
still dreamed on the edge of alarm. Peppery, flailing,
their waking bodies unwound to carve me room.
I don’t know how it started, how, wordlessly, Karen
and I tussled skin, adjusted knee and cunt, naturally
knew the repeating mouth and its looping stanza.
She smelled like what I couldn’t stop swallowing.
Content to thrive on a flickering cinema of ourselves,
our eyes fluttered, never fully opened. We pretended
a blazing slumber, hushing the grind, the soft rustle
of sparse sweating pubic, even after her unsuspecting
sister stretched and tumbled out to begin her day.
Strange she didn’t suspect our engine. For as long
as we could, Karen and I stayed prone in exquisite,
pressurized tangle beneath the knotty orange chenille.
We kept up the being blind, crashing into dampening
borders, until her fat mother shuffled in to rouse us,
throwing shades open to the damnable day, introducing
the stupid, useless notion of language again. By then,
there was a drum buried in our bellies. We stank like
men, all up under that sweet funk first sin leaves behind.
SPECULATION
Thirty years after Richard Speck murdered eight nurses on the South Side of Chicago, videotapes surfaced showing the convicted killer in prison parading in silk panties and sporting breasts reportedly grown with smuggled hormone treatments. After talking about the rampant sex he enjoyed, he said, “If they only knew how much fun I was having, they’d turn me loose.”
1.
Of course, you’re everybody’s bitch now,
your face aunt-soft, but still pummeled
and pitted, still that drooped dammit
of marbled landscape. Of course you are
slouch and winking sloe-eyed beneath
a Dutch-boy bowl of hair, pert pouted
areolas lazed on a pimpled gut, this is
what happens when eight women insist
on a winter rhythm inside you, they bless
you with feminine clock, sly locomotion,
with the hips they were just beginning.
With fabled cock crumpled backways
in panties of silk dark as a blue note,
you rise to walk, focused, overclicking
your sway like a practiced hag on the stroll
while, nodding gravely behind aviator
shades, your Negro lover wry
ly considers
the sashaying, ill-constructed hot mass
murderer mess of you. He is overseer,
brusque pimp. You are his gilded tunnel.
Between demanded fevers, you amuse him.
How’d it feel when you killed them ladies?
he monotones, in reluctant acknowledgment
of your stardom, your skewed rep, never
lifting his eyes to the camera, and of course
you had to say that you didn’t feel anything—
It’s just wasn’t their night—nothing at all
when the fatty spit in your face and said
she’d remember everything about the way
you looked, nothing as the screeching parade
of cheekbone and thigh turned your quest
for pocket change into a giddy little fuck/slice,
nothing after finding out that the little Filipino
whore had rolled under the bed to memorize
your ruined skeletal grace, foolishly denying
herself the impossible Wednesday of you.
2.
I was nine when your pebbled hangdog filled
the face of the family Philco. No one prepared me.
I nibbled sardines and saltines and twisted
the torsos of dolls while staring at the lineup
of neat nurses you had romanced and ended,
pictures always in the same order, all your girls
sporting puffed bouffants and hard white collars
buttoned to a point above their throats, and I
studied their faces, a tomorrow all expectant and
persistent in them. They were my first dead girls.
I practiced their names over and again, loving
Matusek’s white suburban splatter, the wide lyric
of Merlita Garguilo. In 1966, my parents, just
about a decade north, had clearly been deceived.
I was often alone with the perfect magic box,
Lucy and Vietnam one and the same, so no one
explained the frayed edges of narrative, grainy
shots of red-drenched beds, and you, you,
greasy pompadour, batter-skinned, droop-lipped
and lanky, my first killer within walking distance.
But before I knew what you wanted that night,
years before the televised daybreak of woman
in you, I was nine. You were always all over me.
I fell asleep under my Murphy bed, curled hard
against you, holding my own neck in my hands.
JUMPING DOUBLEDUTCH
Calves go chaos under pounding,
clothesline raises welt and bloodies
shin and ankle, hip and forearm
while we throw down nasty verses
and the boys step from the shadows.
In our stanzas, swerving beckons,
all our skin is steam and shining,
and we’re women—not these babies
spouting bowlegs, stomping rhythm,
not these braids of quick unravel.
Hear our keyless, tangled trochees—
Butch and Sally in the alley.
Squeeze them titties like you mean it.
Bet you ain’t gon’ reach my panties!
Jump and whirl, we tempt our future
in a language born of beatdown,
verbs we urge from high-top sneakers.
Whipping hips and licking lips and
punishing the ground with craving,
got no notion what we’re asking.
Mamas screeching from the windows,
Chile, you better stop that jumping,
showin’ the neighborhood your business!
Bring your tail inside for dinner!
And the boys slide from the shadows.
MINUS ONE. MINUS ONE MORE.
Carol Burnett tugs an ear, waves toodly-doo to the camera eye.
It’s ten o’clock, and a white mechanized man asked if I, a child,
know where my children are. No, but it’s time for the news, time
for the insisting war, and the preposterous Philco—half monster
TV screen, half bulky, functional phonograph—blares jungle, its
flat glass face filled with streaked pans of crushed foliage, the whir
of blades, dust-dreary GIS heaving through quick-slamming throats.
Lurching toward the ledges of copters, they screech commands,
instructions, prayers, struggle to cram blooded lumps back into
their uniforms—dead there, there, let’s see, almost dead over there—
a hand dangling by tendrils, a left eye imploded, black-and-white
red etches slow roadways into the back of a dimming hand. Beneath
the lack of hue, a white buzz, a lazy scroll of dates and numbers:
This is how many gone today, how many last week, last month,
this year. Big Daddy Cronkite’s eyes glaze, consider closing, refocus.
Think of all the children plopped in front of this unscripted boom
to pass the time. Think of Tom turning Jerry’s head into spectacular
dust, then this, our first official war smashing into the family room,
blurring into cinema, into lesson. It’s how we learned to subtract.
AND NOW THE NEWS: TONIGHT THE SOLDIERS
dropped their guns to dance. The sight
of spinning starlit men, their arms
around such waiting waists, alarmed
those paid to blare the urgent words
of war. And how did these hard men
decide on just this time to twirl
in bloodied dust, and how do we
explain the skin to skin, their hips
aligned, dramatic dips—was that
a kiss? Some rumba, others throw
a soundtrack down—they pound deep drums,
they twang imagined strings, they blow
notes blasted blue through sandy winds,
they dream a stout piano’s weight.
They spark the dance—the bop and twist,
the tango, yes, the trot, the stroll,
the slither-slow unmanly grind
within a brother’s brazen arms.
The talking heads can’t spit enough
as cameras catch the swirling men,
their thrown-back heads and bended backs,
the rhythm of their rite, the ways
they steam. The toothy anchors chant
the traitors’ numbers, names, to shame
them into still. But still the music
blows, the soldiers pivot, swing,
unleash their languid limbs, caress.
They don’t slow down to weep or stop
to grieve their new-gone guns. The public
bray begins, the song of killers
killing must resume! but then
the mirthful moon illuminates
the ball, our boys in dip and glide
and woo. We see the dancers’ dangling
eyes and blaring open sores,
shattered shoulders, earlobes smashed,
the halves of heads, the limp, the drag
of not quite legs. The soldiers dropped
their guns, and snagged a nasty bass
to roughride home. You hear the stomp,
the weary wheeze and grunt, the ragged
nudge of notes on air? You see
the whirling soldiers spin, the love
they braved, and oh my god, that kiss?
HAVE SOUL AND DIE
For Mary Wells
Stiff wigs, in cool but impossible shades
of strawberry and sienna, all whipped
into silky flips her own flat naps could
never manage—the night hair different
from the day hair, the going out hair,
the staying-in hair, Friday’s hair higher
and way redder than Monday’s—all these
wigs, 100% syn-the-tic, thank you, lined
up on snowy Styrofoam heads and paid
for with her own money, what could be
slicker than that? No lovesick player
flopped his wallet open for those crowns.
So she wasn’t Diana. Who wanted to be
all skeleton and whisper, hips like oil?
Didn’t need no hussies slinking in the
backdrop giving more throat, boosting
her rhythm. So what if her first album
cover drew her pimpled, bloat-cheeked,
Sunday hair skewed? She roared gospel
in those naked songs, took Berry’s little
ballads and made men squirm on their
barstools. They spun her in the dark.
Wasn’t she the alley grunt, the lyric played low?
Didn’t people she never met run up to try
and own her tired shoulders, shouting Mary!
like they were calling on the mama of Jesus?
And everywhere she dared to step,
Detroit devilment bubbling beneath sequins
that can’t help but pop under the pressure
black butts provide, every time she dropped
’round to paint the town brown, neon lights
slammed on, cameras clicked like air kisses,
and pretty soon somebody said Girl you know
you just gotta sing us something and even though
she didn’t have to do a damned thing but be
black, have soul, and die, she’d puck those lips
just so, like she didn’t know how damn electric
it all was, and every word landed torn and soft,
like a slap from somebody who loves you.
NEXT. NEXT.
he is the only white boy in lawndale
and who could blame him, searching
for a line of commerce that could save
his life? he starts hanging in the shadows
of our apartment building, pulling down
his pants and charging us a dime to look,
a quarter to touch. stubbed fingers, dingy,
pinkish, thumbing it. the slowly writhing
nub hooded and winking sly neon, here,
here, here, go on, touch it, go on be startled
by its whispered little rhumba, its soft
arrogance. the long line of wait, colored
and curious, snakes Washington street
with giggles electric, our one stomach
throbbing with this stupid magic. white boy
shifts from Ked to Ked, corporate bigwig
under the overhang, and if not for his
clipped command—Next. Next.—we would
not even notice him attached to the thing.
Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah Page 4