Elizabeth Alexander

(1825) 1. CUVIER Science, science, science! Everything is beautiful blown up beneath my glass. Colors dazzle insect wings. A drop of water swirls like marble. Ordinary crumbs become stalactites set in perfect angles of geometry I’d thought impossible. Few will ever see what I see through this microscope. Cranial measurements crowd my notebook pages, and I am moving closer, close to how these numbers signify aspects of national character. Her genitalia will float inside a labeled pickling jar in the Musée de l’Homme on a shelf above Broca’s brain: “The Venus Hottentot.” Elegant facts await me. Small things in this world are mine. 2. There is unexpected sun today in London, and the clouds that most days sift into this cage where I am working have dispersed. I am a black cutout against a captive blue sky, pivoting nude so the paying audience can view my naked buttocks. I am called “Venus Hottentot.” I left Capetown with a promise of revenue: half the profits and my passage home: A boon! Master’s brother proposed the trip; the magistrate granted me leave. I would return to my family a duchess, with watered-silk dresses and money to grow food, rouge and powders in glass pots, silver scissors, a lorgnette, voile and tulle instead of flax, cerulean blue instead of indigo. My brother would devour sugar-studded non- pareils, pale taffy, damask plums. That was years ago. London’s circuses are florid and filthy, swarming with cabbage-smelling citizens who stare and query, “Is it muscle? bone? or fat?” My neighbor to the left is The Sapient Pig, “The Only Scholar of His Race.” He plays at cards, tells time and fortunes by scraping his hooves. Behind me is Prince Kar-mi, who arches like a rubber tree and stares back at the crowd from under the crook of his knee. A professional animal trainer shouts my cues. There are singing mice here. “The Ball of Duchess DuBarry”: In the engraving I lurch toward the belles dames, mad-eyed, and they swoon. Men in capes and pince-nez shield them. Tassels dance at my hips. In this newspaper lithograph my buttocks are shown swollen and luminous as a planet. Monsieur Cuvier investigates between my legs, poking, prodding, sure of his hypothesis. I half expect him to pull silk scarves from inside me, paper poppies, then a rabbit! He complains at my scent and does not think I comprehend, but I speak English. I speak Dutch. I speak a little French as well, and languages Monsieur Cuvier will never know have names. Now I am bitter and now I am sick. I eat brown bread, drink rancid broth. I miss good sun, miss Mother’s sadza. My stomach is frequently queasy from mutton chops, pale potatoes, blood sausage. I was certain that this would be better than farm life. I am the family entrepreneur! But there are hours in every day to conjur my imaginary daughters, in banana skirts and ostrich-feather fans. Since my own genitals are public I have made other parts private. In my silence I possess mouth, larynx, brain, in a single gesture. I rub my hair with lanolin, and pose in profile like a painted Nubian archer, imagining gold leaf woven through my hair, and diamonds. Observe the wordless Odalisque. I have not forgotten my Xhosa clicks. My flexible tongue and healthy mouth bewilder this man with his rotting teeth. If he were to let me rise up from this table, I’d spirit his knives and cut out his black heart, seal it with science fluid inside a bell jar, place it on a low shelf in a white man’s museum so the whole world could see it was shriveled and hard, geometric, deformed, unnatural.

In white pleated trousers, peering through green sunshades, looking for the way the sun is red noise, how locusts hiss to replicate the sun. What is the visual equivalent of syncopation? Rows of seared palms wrinkle in the heat waves through green glass. Sprinklers tick, tick, tick. The Watts Towers aim to split the sky into chroma, spires tiled with rubble nothing less than aspiration. I’ve left minarets for sun and syncopation, sixty-seven shades of green which I have counted, beginning: palm leaves, front and back, luncheon pickle, bottle glass, etcetera. One day I will comprehend the different grades of red. On that day I will comprehend these people, rhythms, jazz, Simon Rodia, Watts, Los Angeles, aspiration.

Hard to picture, but these Goliath trees are taller still than Robeson. Outside vast plate windows in this lecture hall, I imagine him running down autumn fields, see his black thighs pumping that machinery across chalk-painted lines. He loved the woman in the lab, Eslanda, who saw order in swimming circles on inch-wide slides, who made photographs. I picture her standing in darkness, led by red light, bathing paper in broth, extracting images. Did this woman smile to watch white paper darken, to pull wet from the chemicals Paul Robeson’s totem face?

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Sometimes I think Sometimes I think In a 2001 interview, Elizabeth Alexander noted, “As for the ‘banner headline’, ‘Race’, I always loved the way that my grandfather, and to a lesser extent my parents, used the word race to talk about ‘the race’ — meaning, of course, black people — as a thing that they could imagine, a body of people that we could imagine, that you could almost get your arms around, that the race was something tangible and palpable.” about Great-Uncle Paul who left Tuskegee, Alabama

“I saw a friend from growing up who’s been living in L.A. for about twenty years, and I heard him say, ‘I’m from L.A.,’ and I said, ‘No, man, you from Philly. We don’t give nobody up.’” —Khan Jamal jazz vibraphonist Fish-man comes with trout and fresh crabs: “Live! They live crabs! They live crabs!” Bars called “Watutsi.” “Pony-Tail.” A dark green suit, a banded hat. The gentleman buys pig’s feet and papaya juice. He looks like church. Another man, down Spruce Street, says, “Yeah, California’s beautiful, but I ain’t got no people there, so I came back. I raised a racehorse. Trainer says he’s mean, but I say naw, naw. That horse just alive.” Which way to walk down these tree streets and find home cooking, boundless love? Double-dutching on front porches, men in sleeveless undershirts. I’m listening for the Philly sound— Brother            brother            brotherly love.

A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other’s eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair. Someone is trying to make music somewhere, with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum, with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice. A woman and her son wait for the bus. A farmer considers the changing sky. A teacher says,Take out your pencils. Begin. We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider. We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of some one and then others, who said I need to see what’s on the other side. I know there’s something better down the road. We need to find a place where we are safe. We walk into that which we cannot yet see. Say it plain: that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of. Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign, the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables. Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself, others by first do no harm or take no more than you need.

1. OVERTURE ”Obviously there is much to be said for the conscious cultivation and extension of taste, but there is also something to be said for the functional reaction to artistic design (and honeysuckles) as normal elements of human existence.” —Albert Murray

a poem in twelve rounds 1. My head so big they had to pry me out. I’m sorry Bird (is what I call my mother). Cassius Marcellus Clay, Muhammad Ali; you can say my name in any language, any continent: Ali. 2. Two photographs of Emmett Till, born my year, on my birthday. One, he’s smiling, happy, and the other one is after. His mother did the bold thing, kept the casket open, made the thousands look upon his bulging eyes, his twisted neck, her lynched black boy. I couldn’t sleep for thinking, Emmett Till. One day I went Down to the train tracks, found some iron shoe-shine rests and planted them between the ties and waited for a train to come, and watched the train derail, and ran, and after that I slept at night. 3. I need to train around people, hear them talk, talk back. I need to hear the traffic, see people in the barbershop, people getting shoe shines, talking, hear them talk, talk back. 4. Bottom line: Olympic gold can’t buy a black man a Louisville hamburger in nineteen-sixty. Wasn’t even real gold. I watched the river drag the ribbon down, red, white, and blue. 5. Laying on the bed, praying for a wife, in walk Sonji Roi. Pretty little shape. Do you like chop suey? Can I wash your hair underneath that wig? Lay on the bed, Girl. Lie with me. Shake to the east, to the north, south, west— but remember, remember, I need a Muslim wife. So Quit using lipstick. Quit your boogaloo. Cover up your knees like a Muslim wife, religion, religion, a Muslim wife. Eleven months with Sonji, first woman I loved. 6. There’s not too many days that pass that I don’t think of how it started, but I know no Great White Hope can beat a true black champ. Jerry Quarry could have been a movie star, a millionaire, a senator, a president— he only had to do one thing, is whip me, but he can’t. 7. Dressing-Room Visitor He opened up his shirt: “KKK” cut in his chest. He dropped his trousers: latticed scars where testicles should be, His face bewildered, frozen in the Alabama woods that night in 1966 when they left him for dead, his testicles in a Dixie cup. You a warning, they told him, to smart-mouth, sassy-acting niggers, meaning niggers still alive, meaning any nigger, meaning niggers like me. 8. Training Unsweetened grapefruit juice will melt my stomach down. Don’t drive if you can walk, don’t walk if you can run. I add a mile each day and run in eight-pound boots. My knuckles sometimes burst the glove. I let dead skin build up, and then I peel it, let it scar, so I don’t bleed as much. My bones absorb the shock. I train in three-minute spurts, like rounds: three rounds big bag, three speed bag, three jump rope, one- minute breaks, no more, no less. Am I too old? Eat only kosher meat. Eat cabbage, carrots, beets, and watch the weight come down: two-thirty, two-twenty, two-ten, two-oh-nine. 9. Will I go like Kid Paret, a fractured skull, a ten-day sleep, dreaming alligators, pork chops, saxophones, slow grinds, funk, fishbowls, lightbulbs, bats, typewriters, tuning forks, funk clocks, red rubber ball, what you see in that lifetime knockout minute on the cusp? You could be let go, you could be snatched back. 10. Rumble in the Jungle Ali boma ye, Ali boma ye,

I’ve been eating like a sultan since I was two days old. I had a mother and three sisters who worshipped me. When I was two years old they used to plop me in a bed with a jillion satin pillows and spray me with exotic perfumes and lilac water, and then they would shoot me the grapes.

Filene’s department store near nineteen-fifty-three: An Aunt Jemima floor Display. Red bandanna, apron holding white rolls of black fat fast against the bubbling pancakes, bowls and bowls of pale batter. This is what Donna sees across the “Cookwares” floor, and hears “Donessa?”Please, this can not be my aunt