478 Identity poems

I loathed you, Spoon River. I tried to rise above you, I was ashamed of you. I despised you As the place of my nativity. And there in Rome, among the artists, Speaking Italian, speaking French, I seemed to myself at times to be free Of every trace of my origin. I seemed to be reaching the heights of art And to breathe the air that the masters breathed, And to see the world with their eyes. But still they’d pass my work and say: "What are you driving at, my friend? Sometimes the face looks like Apollo’s, At others it has a trace of Lincoln’s." There was no culture, you know, in Spoon River, And I burned with shame and held my peace. And what could I do, all covered over And weighted down with western soil, Except aspire, and pray for another Birth in the world, with all of Spoon River Rooted out of my soul?

In the damp sick In the dough In the chewed on chew of faces of expensive car owner faces chewed ons of the world: I do not fetishize the truth I poke around Holding my bland sandwich in my non-dominant hand, I think what could be worse, I think what could be as bad? To feel the thing you want to feel and not to care To be a wet road in the dark I'd like to thank Toyota, like to thank my parents, esthetician Ritalin Clonazepam internet TV weed my beautiful dresses

As a kid the only black woman in my life was my fourth-grade teacher— I remember her not because she was black but mostly because of her copper-colored bob that never changed, as if a piece of bronze had been chiseled onto her head and neither I nor my classmates could prove it was a wig, but we knew it was too perfect to be real. Then you came in- to my home—but not the way someone came in one afternoon while we were away grocery shopping, leaving the side door wide open releasing my white-winged parakeet, my mother’s jewelry and our television, gone. And for years I watched you go from analog into digital; you were the modicum of motherhood I encountered daily while my mother stood on a production line mouthing prayers for prosperity and health in a room of air compressors. You’re a super galactic hologram—scattered light reconstructed through the dark matter, ever-shrinking pixels—shifting the cosmology of the world with gigs of Gayle, and revolutionary road trips. And now will you quietly fade out into the space- time continuum where not even my imagination will find you? Your last broadcast like the final song of our beloved parakeet as it flew past the leafless trees toward the vast dome of heaven.

I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes. Smell what fouled tunes come in to his breath. Love his wretched women. Slits in the metal, for sun. Where my eyes sit turning, at the cool air the glance of light, or hard flesh rubbed against me, a woman, a man, without shadow, or voice, or meaning. This is the enclosure (flesh, where innocence is a weapon. An abstraction. Touch. (Not mine. Or yours, if you are the soul I had and abandoned when I was blind and had my enemies carry me as a dead man (if he is beautiful, or pitied. It can be pain. (As now, as all his flesh hurts me.) It can be that. Or pain. As when she ran from me into that forest. Or pain, the mind silver spiraled whirled against the sun, higher than even old men thought God would be. Or pain. And the other. The yes. (Inside his books, his fingers. They are withered yellow flowers and were never beautiful.) The yes. You will, lost soul, say ‘beauty.’ Beauty, practiced, as the tree. The slow river. A white sun in its wet sentences. Or, the cold men in their gale. Ecstasy. Flesh or soul. The yes. (Their robes blown. Their bowls empty. They chant at my heels, not at yours.) Flesh or soul, as corrupt. Where the answer moves too quickly. Where the God is a self, after all.) Cold air blown through narrow blind eyes. Flesh, white hot metal. Glows as the day with its sun. It is a human love, I live inside. A bony skeleton you recognize as words or simple feeling. But it has no feeling. As the metal, is hot, it is not, given to love. It burns the thing inside it. And that thing screams.

I’m this tiny, this statuesque, and everywhere in between, and everywhere in between bony and overweight, my shadow cannot hold one shape in Omaha, in Tuscaloosa, in Aberdeen. My skin is mocha brown, two shades darker than taupe, your question is racist, nutmeg, beige, I’m not offended by your question at all. Penis or vagina? Yes and yes. Gay or straight? Both boxes. Bi, not bi, who cares, stop fixating on my sex life, Jesus never leveled his eye to a bedroom’s keyhole. I go to church in Tempe, in Waco, the one with the exquisite stained glass, the one with a white spire like the tip of a Klansman’s hood. Churches creep me out, I never step inside one, never utter hymns, Sundays I hide my flesh with camouflage and hunt. I don’t hunt but wish every deer wore a bulletproof vest and fired back. It’s cinnamon, my skin, it’s more sandstone than any color I know. I voted for Obama, McCain, Nader, I was too apathetic to vote, too lazy to walk one block, two blocks to the voting booth For or against a women’s right to choose? Yes, for and against. For waterboarding, for strapping detainees with snorkels and diving masks. Against burning fossil fuels, let’s punish all those smokestacks for eating the ozone, bring the wrecking balls, but build more smokestacks, we need jobs here in Harrisburg, here in Kalamazoo. Against gun control, for cotton bullets, for constructing a better fence along the border, let’s raise concrete toward the sky, why does it need all that space to begin with? For creating holes in the fence, adding ladders, they’re not here to steal work from us, no one dreams of crab walking for hours across a lettuce field so someone could order the Caesar salad. No one dreams of sliding a squeegee down the cloud-mirrored windows of a high-rise, but some of us do it. Some of us sell flowers. Some of us cut hair. Some of us carefully steer a mower around the cemetery grounds. Some of us paint houses. Some of us monitor the power grid. Some of us ring you up while some of us crisscross a parking lot to gather the shopping carts into one long, rolling, clamorous and glittering backbone.

I know Not these my hands And yet I think there was A woman like me once had hands Like these.

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame. I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone. I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold While your better selves watch from the bleachers. I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow- Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls. I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart. Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

Inside me is a black-eyed animal Bracing in a small stall. As if a bird Could grow without breaking its shell. As if the clatter of a thousand black Birds whipping in a storm could be held In a shell. Inside me is a huge black Bull balled small enough to fit inside The bead of a nipple ring. I mean to leave A record of my raptures. I was raised By a beautiful man. I loved his grasp of time. My mother shaped my grasp of space. Would you rather spend the rest of eternity With your wild wings bewildering a cage or With your four good feet stuck in a plot of dirt?

Why are you bugging me you stank minuscule husk Of musk, muster & deliberation crawling over reasons And possessions I have & have not touched? Should I fail in my insecticide, I pray for a black boy Who lifts you to a flame with bedeviled tweezers Until mercy rises & disappears. You are the size Of a stuttering drop of liquid — milk, machine oil, Semen, blood. Yes, you funky stud, you are the jewel In the knob of an elegant butt plug, snug between Pleasure & disgust. You are the scent of rot at the heart Of lovemaking. The meat inside your exoskeleton Is as tender as Jesus. Neruda wrote of “a nipple Perfuming the earth.” Yes, you are an odor, an almost Imperceptible ode to death, a lousy, stinking stinkbug.

Who I know knows why all those lush-boned worn-out girls are Whooping at where the moon should be, an eyelid clamped On its lightness. Nobody sees her without the hoops firing in her Ears because nobody sees. Tattooed across her chest she claims Is BRING ME TO WHERE MY BLOOD RUNS and I want that to be here Where I am her son, pent in blackness and turning the night's calm Loose and letting the same blood fire through me. In her bomb hair: Shells full of thunder; in her mouth: the fingers of some calamity, Somebody foolish enough to love her foolishly. Those who could hear No music weren't listening—and when I say it, it's like claiming She's an elegy. It rhymes, because of her, with effigy. Because of her, If there is no smoke, there is no party. I think of you, Miss Calamity, Every Sunday. I think of you on Monday. I think of you hurling hurt Where the moon should be and stomping into our darkness calmly.