Teahouse of the Almighty (2 page)

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 dance 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

waiting faces, reading, reading. They stink so good, and he is

amazed at their talent for tangling the recalled. But they talk

too damned much. All those split declaratives deny his eyes.

5.

The politics of smooth and unpuckered, the sounds of a man

reciting what he will never know. What separates the living of

this from the dying of it, it is all that no-color, that hugest of

sound, the din, fingertips swollen from touching everything

twice, the dim wattage of time crawling beyond where it was.

Faces, angle and ghost, rise up to him, dance their mean

little circumstance dance, claim the simplest drifting names.

Slamming all his eyes against them only carves the hard loss.

6.

Promise drips from songs, but the heart can't see anything.

7.

The body, snide prankster, won't stop. Tumbling through sheets

leaves a bright sting. The right music ignites even the flattest ass.

Damned toes tap. Anything on the tongue must be swallowed or

expelled. The gut fills, piss trickles. Eyes flap open, even though.

The elbow cranks, the cock stiffens, roots of thirst and addictions

thicken. The sun bakes blank recollection on open skin. Inside him

a wretched world spins, machine unerring, striving for such a silly

perfect. The body doesn't need moonwash or windows. It just churns.

8.

His pulse has the gall to beat urgently, like it does when one spies

a familiar canvas or a lostago sweet. It's as if one of his strangers

has dangled life's pointed, two-pronged instruction just inside the

void:
Remember what you have seen. See what you remember.
He

spends his days straining toward either or both of these squiggling

concepts, building whole novels on a hint of ginger riding someone's

breath. In the end, almost buried by his sad collage, he clings to a

single truth: Whenever he asks for water, it arrives. It always arrives.

9.

When a gone man dies, what could possibly be taken away? It must

be the light that leaves, darkening even places it has never touched.

10.

Salvation blesses him with gasping eyes, pinned open and glaring,

and hours that slide like silver over his skin. The first thing he sees