Lerners, where we learned pinafore, gone.
No more havens for layaway, no more places
to plop down a dollar a week for P.F. Flyers
or wool jumpers with seams glued shut.
The meat market with its bloody sawdust, torched,
its Jewish proprietors now crisping languid
under Florida sun. And flap-jowled Mayor Daley,
our big benevolent murderous daddy,
gifted us with high-rise castles crafted of dirty dollars,
battered cans of bumpy milk, free cheese.
To know Gwen, you need to know the Alex,
the only movie theater West, where frisky rats
big as toddlers poked slow noses into your popcorn,
then locked red round eyes on Cleopatra Jones
and sat, confident and transfixed.
After the movies and any street corner’s fried lunch,
we’d head to “the store in back of that fat man’s house”
to surrender hoarded quarters for the latest 45,
stripped licorice in black or red,
pork rinds, Boston Baked Beans,
or fat sour pickles floating in a jar in the corner.
The fat man’s wife, Miss Caroline,
plunged her hammy forearm into the brine,
pulled out the exact pickle you pointed to
and shoved it deep into a single-ply paper bag.
Only the truly Negro would then poke
a peppermint stick down the center of that pickle
and slurp the dizzy of salt and sugar.
We gnawed rock-stiff candy dots off paper columns,
suffered Lemonheads and Red Hots,
pushed neon sweatsocks down on Vaselined calves,
and my Lord, we learned to switch. For a dime,
the fat man would warm up the record player,
click reject and give us a hit of Ms. Fontella Bass’s
heartbroke heart clamoring for rescue,
or Ruby Andrews steady wailing in a woman way.
There were so many millions of each one of us,
ashy goddesses walking the wild West,
strutting past sloped storefronts where brown meat
and hog heads crowded the windows,
past shuttered groceries, and gas stations
with pump boys eyeing our new undulating asses,
past fashion palaces where almost no money
satisfied our yearning for hollow glamour
with cheap threads already unraveling.
Observe the kick-ass angle of our crowns.
Chicago girls just keep coming back.
They don’t hear you,
they don’t see you,
they ain’t never really needed you.
They got the Holy Ghost and Garfield Park,
on one city block, they got a hundred ways to buy chicken,
they jump rope nasty and barefoot in the dirt,
they got the ooh achie koo,
the pink plastic clothesline underhand,
they got the slip bone. They got the Gwen in them.
Any jazz could be ours, and her jazz was.
Unflinching in riotous headwrap
and thick, two-shades-too stockings,
she penned the soundtrack of we because she knew,
because she was skinny early church and not bending,
because no man could ever hold her the way hurt did,
because she could peer at you over those Coke-bottle specs,
fast gal, and turn the sorry sight of you into her next poem.
Each year she stays gone, we colored girls aimlessly bop
and search dangerous places for music.
Chicago bows its huge head, grudgingly accepts spring.
God, if there is a You, there must surely still be a her.
Stop the relentless seasons. Show us Your face,
explain Your skewed timing,
Your wacky choice of angels.
13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT 13
1.
You touch your forefinger to the fat clots in the blood,
then lift its iron stench to look close, searching the globs
of black scarlet for the dimming swirl of dead children.
You thread one thick pad’s cottony tail, then the other,
through the little steel guides of the belt. You stand and lift
the contraption, press your thighs close to adjust the bulk,
then bend to pull up coarse white cotton panties bleached blue,
and just to be safe, you pin the bottom of the pad
to the shredding crotch of the Carter’s. And then you spritz
the guilty air with the cloying kiss of FDS.
It’s time to begin the game of justifying ache,
time to name the mystery prickling that’s riding your skin.
You’re convinced the boys can smell you, and they can, they can.
2.
Right now, this Tuesday in July, nothing’s headier
than the words Sheen! Manageable! Bounce! Squinting into
the smeared mirror, you search your ghetto-ripe head for them,
you probe with greased fingers, spreading paths in the chaos
wide enough for the advertised glimmer to escape,
but your snarls hold tight to their woven dry confounding.
Fevered strands snap under the drag of the wiry brush
and order unfurls, while down the hall Mama rotates
the hot comb in a bleary blaze, smacks her joyful gum.
Still, TV bellows its promise. You witness the pink
snap of the perfect neck, hear the impossible vow—
Shampoo with this! Sheen! Bounce! Her cornsilk head is gospel,
it’s true. C’mon chile! Even Mama’s summoning burns.
3.
Ms. Stein scribbled a word on the blackboard, said Who can
pronounce this? and the word was anemone and from
that moment you first felt the clutter of possible
in your mouth, from the time you stumbled through the rhythm
and she slow-smiled, you suddenly knew you had the right
to be explosive, to sling syllables through back doors,
to make up your own damned words just when you needed them.
All that day, sweet anemone tangled in your teeth,
spurted sugar tongue, led you to the dictionary
where you were assured that it existed, to the cave
of the bathroom where you warbled it in bounce echo,
and, finally convinced you owned that teeny gospel,
you wrote it again and again and again and a—.
4.
Trying hard to turn hips to slivers, sway to stutter,
you walk past the Sinclair station where lanky boys, dust
in their hair, dressed in their uniforms of oil and thud,
rename you pussy with their eyes. They bring sounds shudder
and blue from their throats just for you, serve up the ancient
sonata of skin drum and conch shell, sing suggesting woos
of AM radio, boom, boom, How you gon’ just walk
on by like that? and suddenly you know why you are
stitched so tight, crammed like a flash bomb into pinafore,
obeying Mama’s instructions to be a baby
as long as you can. Because it’s a man’s world and James
Brown is gasoline, the other side of slow zippers.
He is all of it, the pump, pump, the growled please please please.
5.
You try to keep your hands off your face, but the white-capped
pimples might harbor evil. It looks like something cursed
is trying to escape your cheeks, your whole soul could be
involved. So you pinch, squeeze, and pop, let the smelly snow
splash the mirror, slather your fresh-scarred landscape with creams
that clog and stra
ngle. At night, you look just like someone
obsessed with the moon, its gruff superstitions, its lies.
Your skin is a patchwork of wishing. You scrub and dab
and mask and surround, you bombard, spritz, and peel, rubbing
alcohol, flesh-toned Clearasil that pinkens and cakes
while new dirtworms shimmy beneath the pummeled surface
of you. Every time you touch your face, you leave a scar.
Hey, you. Every time you touch your face, you leave a scar.
6.
You want it all: chicken wings with bubbled skin fried tight,
salmon cakes in syrup, the most improbable parts
of swine, oily sardines on saltines splashed in red spark,
chitlins nurtured and scraped in Saturday assembly,
buttered piecrusts stuffed with sweet potatoes and sugar,
gray cheese conjured from the heads of hogs. All that Dixie
dirt binds, punches your insides flat, reteaches the blind
beat of your days. Like Mama and her mother before
her, you pulse on what is thrown away—gray hog guts stewed
improbable and limp, scrawny chicken necks merely
whispering meat. You will live beyond the naysayers,
your rebellious heart constructed of lard and salt, your
life labored but long. You are built of what should kill you.
7.
Always treat white folks right, your mama’s mantra again
and yet again, because they give you things. Like credit,
compliments, passing grades, government jobs, direction,
extra S&H stamps, produce painted to look fresh,
a religion. When the insurance man came, she snapped
herself alive, hurriedly rearranged her warm bulk. He
was balding badly, thatches of brown on a scabbed globe.
Just sign here, he hissed, staring crave into her huge breasts,
pocketing the death cash, money she would pay and pay
and never see again. C’mere girl, say hello to
Mister Fred. She had taught you to bow. She taught him
to ignore the gesture, to lock his watering eyes
to yours and lick his dry lips with a thick, coated tongue.
8.
In the bathroom of the what-not joint on the way to
school, you get rid of the starch and billowed lace, barrettes
taming unraveling braids, white kneesocks and sensible
hues. From a plastic bag, you take out electric blue
eye shadow, platforms with silver-glittered heels, neon
fishnets, and a blouse that doesn’t so much button as
snap shut. The transformation takes five minutes, and you
emerge feeling like a budding lady but looking,
in retrospect, like a blind streetwalker bursting from
a cocoon. This is what television does, turns your
mother into clueless backdrop, fills your pressed head with
the probability of thrum. Your body becomes
just not yours anymore. It’s a dumb little marquee.
9.
With your bedroom door closed, you are skyscraper bouffant,
peach foundation, eyelashes like upturned claws. You are
exuding ice, pinched all over by earrings, you are
way too much woman for this room. The audience has
one chest, a single shared chance to gasp. They shudder, heave,
waiting for you to open your mouth and break their hearts.
Taking the stage, you become an S, pour ache into your
hip swings, tsk tsk as the front row collapses. Damn, they
want you. You lift the microphone, something illegal
comes out of you, a sound like titties and oil. Mama
flings the door open with a church version of your name.
Then you are pimpled, sexless, ashed and doubledutch knees.
You are spindles. You are singing into a hairbrush.
10.
This is what everyone else is doing: skating in
soul circles, skinning shins, tongue-kissing in the coatroom,
skimming alleys for Chicago rats, failing English, math,
crushing curfew, lying about yesterday and age,
slipping Woolworth’s bounty into an inside pocket,
sprouting breasts. Here is what everyone else is doing:
sampling the hotness of hootch, grinding under blue light,
getting turned around in the subway, flinging all them
curse words, inhaling a quick supper before supper
fried up in hot Crisco and granulated sugar,
sneaking out through open windows when the night goes dark,
calling mamas bitches under their breath, staying up
till dawn to see what hides. What you are doing: Reading.
11.
You are never too old. And you are never too world,
too almost grown, you are never correct, no matter
how many times you are corrected. It is never
too late, never too early to be told to cross the
street to the place where the wild stuff is, to suffer her
instructions: No, not that little switch, get the big one,
the one that makes that good whipping sound when the breeze blows,
and you are never too fast crossing the boulevard
to bring it back while winged sedans carve jazz on your path.
You climb the stairs, she screams Get up here! The door to where
you live with her flies open. She snatches the thorned branch,
whips it a hundred times across the backs of your legs.
You want her to die. Not once, no. Many times. Gently.
12.
That boy does not see you. He sees through you, past your tone
of undecided earth. You are the exact shade of
the failed paper bag test, the Aunt Esther, you are hair
forever turning back in the direction from which
it came. You are clacking knees and nails bitten to blood.
Stumbling forth in black, Jesus-prescribed shoes, you have no
knowledge of his knowledge of hip sling and thrust. That boy
does not see you. So squeeze your eyes shut and imagine
your mouth touching the swell of his forearm. Imagine
just your name’s first syllable in the sugared well of
his throat. Dream of all the ways he is not walking past
you again, turning his eyes to the place where you are,
where you’re standing, where you shake, where you pray, where you aren’t.
13.
You’re almost fourteen. And you think you’re ready to push
beyond the brutal wisdoms of the one and the three,
but some nagging crave in you doesn’t want to let go.
You suspect that you will never be this unfinished,
all Hail Mary and precipice, stuttering sashay,
fuses in your swollen chest suddenly lit, spitting,
and you’ll need to give your hips a name for what they did
while you weren’t there. You’ll miss the pervasive fever that
signals bloom, the sore lessons of jumprope in your calves.
This is the last year your father is allowed to touch
you. Sighing, you push Barbie’s perfect body through the
thick dust of a top shelf. There her prideful heart thunders.
She has hardened you well. She has taught you everything.
DEAR JIMMY CONNOLL
Dear Jimmy Connoll, who snatched an ill-fitting but culturally snug
Afro wig from my head while I stood in the chow line on a Tuesday
at roughly 12:30 p.m. at Carl Schurz High School on the northwest
side of Chi: O.K., maybe you suspected that it was just a weirdness
plopped atop me, you couldn’t have
known that the damn thing
wasn’t anchored down by bobby pins or that my real hair was flat
plaited dusty and matted beneath because that Tuesday all I cared
about was the sheen that showed, not the shameful itch beneath.
The stated color of the wig, Jet Black IA, was actually two shades
too black for me, just some cheap tangle meant to imitate real hair
’cause real hair cost up in the dollars and I was just stalking the kink
anyway, the natural ignored root. Didn’t want to rattle anyone.
Dear Jimmy, I was your public personal curiosity, mantel-ready
and scrub-skinned in your presence, aching through the ritual
of Tri-Hi-Y and Latin Club, every word I spoke tilted obediently
up at the end. I was a thing with no color. But it was 1970, a year
with its stupid fist in the air, and since my hair was the only thing
I couldn’t change (yes, I still believed that pesky skin thing could
be negotiated), I surrendered to letting those naps say Negro out
loud. There it was, undeniable, shifting as I stumbled, the front
inching down my forehead, the back lifting for a flash of private
knotting, oh no, I was way too big a slice of colored, something
had to be done. Jimmy, how noble of you to take it upon yourself,
to slap me back to center, to staunch my wacky revolution. What
courage it took for you to confront that most formidable wrong.
Remember when you held me in your arms? You were chaperone
at a freshman dance, and by then I was so in love with you my ribs
ached from struggling to hold that huge sin in. A downbeat,
you with arms outstretched, and I signed myself over, told myself
maybe he, maybe I, dared a maybe we, prayed me pale and pliant,
prayed you’d wash me woman with that stabbing blue Jesus gaze.
When the music stopped, your mouth touched my cheek, and I
dizzied myself writing, dreaming, building whole futures on that
blazing square of skin. Now I know you were aping the room over
my shoulder, googoo jungle mug, look at me rocking the world
of the colored girl! Later I bet you laughed, mocked how my hips
sought yours, bubbled your perfect lips obscenely, hooted monkey.
Dear Jimmy Connoll, did you talk about it with your friends, did you
snicker and plan, did you think about the second after, whether you
would drop the wig at my feet or run away holding it high over your
head? You held it out and I took it. And all my air became pointing
fingers, open mouths, shouts from the windows, laughing from
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