where my storybook slippers should lie.
I heard once about hot-coal walkers. Thrill-seekers
who toe the line between
this world and the next.
But I was not made for fire. A chair, aflame
at the end of the hall, agreed. It’s white vinyl melting
into a face, aghast.
Together, we’d assembled it our first month in the house.
You knelt on a towel and I, on the dog’s bed,
sorting screws, which allowed a joke in those days.
The L of the Allen wrench an unfinished question mark.
In my waking moments, I cannot feel
the wall of heat. Only your hand cupped
around mine as you pass me a small clink of nails.
These are sharp.
Be careful.
Chicago
This is not a poem for the 115ths street Harold’s
and the men with low-slung JNCOs. Chicken in hand—strips,
sandwiches, legs. White flight. Their Chicago
is older than mine. Nor is this a poem for the crooners
that caress microphone stands like spines. The aurora-glow
and melting jazz of the Green Mill where Capone wall-eyed
both doors for the fuzz. Who respond only to the violent
calls on the weekend, now. No. This is a poem for the red womb
of the California Clipper. The icy Pago Pagos with black
cherries in the last booth back. The gang who is really
a salsa band that lives on our street. The secret Puerto Rican asocio
with one red balloon on the door, where I broke my wrist
dancing with the middle-aged boricuas on Valentines day.
Their tiny pot bellies swaying in front of the yellowing jukebox.
The city of big shoulders, but no husker. Hog butcher
tattoos. The burn of a thousand right angles against the fizzing
sodium lamps. A subway that can’t bear to be underground. A subway
that dreams. Thunders overhead and makes
my heart thalak thalak thalak.
Aurora Borealis in Tennessee
Like an egg I left in the pan too long,
my memory of you
scorched on one side.
Only certain parts are still soft,
can be bled open.
I see your lipstick, terrorist maroon,
on a bagel in Nashville.
Drunk and topless,
hand washing a silk shirt
in the ceramic blue of my bathroom.
I’ve filed you under
Things Only For The Mind
next to tube tops in Tehran,
a clean subway,
the Aurora Borealis in Tennessee.
Escobar’s Hacienda Napoles
When it was still something of this world,
there were fields of Cadillacs, Mercedes
all maroon. As if they had once been Gringo Red
but since baked to a color more appropriate
for the fourth parallel north of the equator.
Napoles was his woman,
the jewel resting on Colombia’s breastbone
between Bogotá and Medellín.
El Patron’s other mujeres only a skein, squawking
and fluttering from doorway to doorway
in the hot, vastness of the house. They sweated.
Cut slug-fat lines of gum-curling cocaina
with the iridescent B sides of CDs. Each
mound its own legend, the slight smell
and electric white of new chalk.
The best blow tastes like nails just painted.
He knew firsthand—sucked the small, glossy squares
of their fingertips between sips of Aguardiente
at the breakfast table. The pirujas didn’t stay for free, cabrón.
Everyone knew that.
Opulence is 15 hippopotami with purpling skin
in Colombia’s bone-crumbling campo;
Escobar had 300.
African ocelots lazed in windowsill wells
like overgrown housecats. The bullring,
a private airstrip—the land’s bad Brazilian wax—
the decadences bore each other. Each not to be outdone
by the last.
Don Pablo raised cast-iron dinosaurs
out of the ground one October.
Moses with money. In 1993, the federal debt
in Colombia was 17 billion U. S. dollars. Pablo Escobar
could’ve created a surplus and still been worth eight.
Though, he wouldn’t have, friend.
And yet—
to have this history told in secondhand words
makes it fiction, not fact, for the living.
Stories aren’t too good to be true,
they’re too good to be walking.
And just so, the cars’ blast-out skeletons
with their heat-chewed rocker panels
become testament. A graveyard of iron prehistorics
that remain frozen among the breathing.
Five hippos thrive, even now;
they have children of their own.
His are still alive. They sang, not read, at his mass
because F minor is the saddest key.
Today, the muse is his own mausoleum. His empire,
a museo. If you arrive,
you will be handed a perforated,
purple admissions ticket in the empty doorway.
Keep This Coupon
It will say in Webster’s English, as you thumb
its small stiffness in your pocket.
Cynthia Robinson Young
Triple Dare
When I was four I was a stripper.
I guess I started early. The boy next door
DARED me, he said
I wasn’t born from my momma because
I didn’t have a belly button.
I had to prove him wrong.
My grandma told it was time to go
and get my own whuppin’ switch
from the thorniest bush in the backyard
because it “was time for you to learn
who you should take your clothes off for,
and who you shouldn’t.”
When I was five I was too short to hang
clothes on the rope line outside,
but not too young to identify
whose underwear was whose.
That same boy dared me,
and that same grandma spanked me,
but with a different switch that
she picked out herself,
claiming I wasn’t hard enough on myself to
pick a good one that sang in the wind
before it hit my legs.
That boy grew up to be a man who
kept daring women to do all sorts of things
they shouldn’na
been doing,
but I married him,
because he dared me.
Grandma wasn’t able to
teach me a dog gone thing.
Nancy Beal, 1820
(grandmother, 4 times removed)
I found you, Grandma,
hidden among the Archives
in a census. Did they even let you
give your name? Who asked
the questions, and who
gave the answers that would define
your life
two centuries later,
giving me so little
to understand
who you really were?
Nancy,
you have a granddaughter now
who carries your name
into a generation
where there are no slaves
such as you were.
She dances to tribal rhythms
embedded
in Hip Hop, in Jazz, in
melodic refrains
&
nbsp; you might have hummed
unconsciously
as you toiled
in a hot North Carolina
field,
or baked bread in a humid southern
kitchen,
careful not be to overheard,
determined to remain silent
when the overseer passed,
lest it be mistaken
for contentment.
Cornered
I have stood on corners,
shaking with fear and cold, waiting
with my sister on a northeastern November
night, neon blinking “Budweiser”
in a ghoulish light
on
our young Black faces.
My sister wasn’t old enough
to protect herself,
so how could she
protect me?
The boys who could be men
were coming
toward us. The street lamp
lit up the mischief
in their eyes. I wished
the light would hypnotize and hold them
in that halo until
our mother could come out of the bar
to rescue us.
But the bar windows were tinted dark.
No one is meant to see through
them, dark enough to protect
the ones inside who start their drinking
early in the day
and stop
early the next.
Our mother did not do that, she was not like that.
She was the mother who says,
“I’ll only be a minute/
just wait right here on the corner/
by the door/ you’ll be safe/ I’ll be right back out.”
We had to believe her.
She was our mother.
We had no choice.
The men who could be boys
were saying things
our mother would have never
allowed her daughters to hear.
She would have shut them up. She would
have washed their mouths out
with Pure Ivory Soap,
and if they tried to
spit it out on the dirty street,
she would not have let them,
not until she thought their mouths would
not allow those words to live there.
But the damage was done.
I won’t forget
their words,
the sound of their laugh,
and the lie
that my sister gave to me, that
“this did not happen/ we will not tell Mommy/ she feels bad enough all the time
with her troubles/ don’t let her hear any more from us.”
So she wrapped her protection
Around our mother instead of me.
And an hour later we caught
the last bus running in the city,
staring out at our reflections against the darkness,
riding past so many corners,
some healthy and happy,
some not so much,
until our mother reached up
and pulled the cord.
Nicole Lachat
Your Throat Is Gripped with Love’s Pain
No avenue wet with salt
No white sails anchored between blues
Nothing but the line to evoke them
It is ten o’clock in the morning
I am uptown and nowhere near myself
Outside flakes drape the pavement
The city lives through another white burial
You smoked Dunhill blues
One leg over the sheets
And my legs wrapped around your torso
Learned the many ways to pray
With the body
Down Broadway the afternoon ploughs
Someone shouts about Jesus
From a milk carton hill
We live under the burden of scarves
Someone steps onto the platform
Emerges from the underground
A moment we do not photograph
A warming dark
A thing becoming clearer
The grip of sunlight over a naked body
I have returned up the six flights
The voices in the hallway vanish
You are not next to me
I’m in another country
Your bougainvillea will darken without witness
The sheets are cold
On the roof the neighbors are smoking
Of Infidelities
there were only a handful.
A natural decline, or be it progress,
we’ve learned more than two ways of splitting
a deck. As if every morning were not another death
they rose to the charade again, to the rehearsed
kindnesses. She, resuming the position
of footstool and porter. He, a roof,
a silk blouse. And because he couldn’t bring himself
to make a clean cut, he hacked away
at the bird on Thanksgiving, until, claiming
he could no longer muster cruelty,
let the creature squirm until it’d all bled out.
Amy Nawrocki
Waiting for the Plowman
In the morning: Rousseau’s Confessions. Breakfast:
something forgettable and unfulfilling, toast,
the white of an egg circling a shiny yolk.
By midday, the desert of chalk buries the laurel
and watching juncos burrow under the feeder
suffices for motion. Blank under its plastic face
the kitchen dial signals two o’clock with sleek
anemic hands. Within the hour, sugar held
in the spoon’s mouth is let go into black liquid,
and boots, scuffed and sheltered alert the tangled
knit scarf to concoct itself. At four, shovel in hand
I depart to do the job myself. The man
and his truck are nowhere to be found
even though the blizzard’s end is new
and he promised and there is a lot of it.
Lighter than a pile of proverbial feathers
but sticky and heaping, the first bundle I take
begins to build a dune around the driveway
but there is nowhere else to go and no rest
and nothing to do to lessen the white
except to bend at the knees and let it fly.
Literally
She says without irony or modesty
I’m literally so irritated, as if irritation
could be anything other than literal, forget
the aching hyperbole of so and the blankness
of those other loosely placed modifiers that fill
space left empty by the dysfunction of sound,
the way fireflies pulse unevenly in the summer air.
She literally calls herself Mary C
on her cellphone when she asked for Saturday
night off to attend a “family gathering.”
I literally was like making fun of him,
and I told him: I was, like, I never would do
that and I like can’t even imagine you
trying to handle a girl like me, you literally
have been doing a shitty job lately. This was before
she told her brackishly tanned friend, who
sported a shiny ankle bracelet and had
her hair pinned back literally with a binder clip,
that she had thrown up in the parking lot
sometime after the office party. You can tell
this was the type of parking lot where
white lines had to be repainted and underneath
some faded ones still gloomed like
bad eye
shadow on a clown. A very sad clown.
Literally, the clown is sad.
Mary C has dark auburn hair, like soil
found beneath piles of wet and decomposing
oak leaves that like the stasis underneath
the layers of newly dead foliage, storm-tossed
and musty. I guess he has, like, a superiority complex,
so like I would pick him up and take him on a date,
so he, like, would feel like he’s accomplishing
something. It’s very long hair, like long, literally
past her shoulders, which isn’t that long, not like
polygamy wife long or whatever, but long enough
for you to know she has never, in 30 some-odd years,
ever been confused with someone clownish, or even
someone with a superiority complex, not with those
pouty eyes and tailored eyebrows. Clowns, literally,
do not speak with such elegance or authority, like
not ever. Clowns are known to stumble and wear
cherry wigs and awkward shoes and bow ties, for
crying out loud. So funny, though, like literally,
so funny. It’s true, few of them mind picking
up people and chauffeuring them around
especially in very small cars. Mary C drives
a Nissan Sentra, so you can understand about
trying to handle a girl like that. Fireflies, you know,
filling a really humid night with sparkles, so
irritating, if you, like, aren’t paying attention.
Instead of Poems
Instead of poems, I weed the sidewalk
and empty crevices of intruders.
I find it helpful to harvest
their relentlessness. Maybe dirt,
maybe blood sacrifices, maybe
a shovel.
The words I wished would come
unprompted, stick like pollen
to my nose. But the heat has broken
enough for me to breathe.
Despite the scarlet beetle
that has scoured their stalks
to skeletal canes, the lilies’ perfume
layers into me like embroidered
handkerchiefs pocketed once,
then rediscovered in a pair
of comfortable pants.
Instead of poems, I savor
scents sung by saffron tongues
and listen to the striated pink
of unbeatable blooms.
Bad Girls
The boy at the pub had blonding hair
and a round face
and we were cruel to him.
If I sat under hypnosis with a police sketch artist,
I could recall exactly what he looked like, down to the earlobes