“i don’t care if you’re Black, white, green, or purple.”
—ancient white proverb

i find it strange how these beings came to my planet
expecting to find themselves. as if the only thing i could
have been was a mirror. these bags of veins and alabaster
roughness, they sun don’t even respect them. they won’t
look me in my eye. won’t shake my vines. won’t learn
what’s customary here. they expect i should know what
was never taught to me. they keep trying to convince me
they don’t care what i look like. but i hear them, hear
them tell their friends i am lavender instead of raisin.
praise the lilac and periwinkle children they forced into
me. i see it, the slow erasure of my fig, my mulberry. i hear
them say plum plague, plum magic, plum list, plum mail
and i know that is not an accident. they offer me bleach
and name it peace. they teach my children to hate me in a
tongue i don’t know. they tell me to never look back while
calling their history law. separate our families and call it a
statistic.
i miss watching the wild of my children spread without
fear. i miss the monuments dedicated to my darkness. i
miss facing my sun and saying good morning.

Most nights I don’t think of it,
the blood on my teeth,

my white dress, stained
with soot and wet grass,

how the mud hugged my feet
like bedroom slippers.

I hid in the bush until
the storytellers found me.

They enjoy the music of split-open things,
stretched my skin into a drum

until I sounded like hollowed fruit.

____________

The first time God pulled
me into a body, I imagined
myself a fruit,

soft and spilling.

What if I am also the seed,
hard white knot of a mango,
when aimed can wound.

____________

Beat this dumb drum,
beat this troubled song:

my skin, I painted red with clay,
my hair, I laced with lavender.

Even when the man hurt me,
my body could not forget
awakening.

I returned to rip the sun
out of his window.


We pitched forward in the dark;
he had the knife,
I was the ram
undoing him with my teeth,
our desecration darkening
his fingertips.

Each time I offered my body,
he grew a vision—
a rain tree,
the sky aflame,
children,
burning.

I stop my hand midair.

If I touch her there everything about me will be true.
The New World discovered without pick or ax.

I will be what Brenda Jones was stoned for in 1969.
I saw it as a girl but didn’t know I was taking in myself.

My hand remembers, treading the watery room,
just behind the rose-veiled eyes of memory.

Alone in the yard tucked beneath the hood of her car,
lucky clover all about her feet, green tea-sweet necklace
for her mud-pie crusty work boots.

She fends off their spit & words with silent two-handed
twists & turns of her socket wrench. A hurl of sticks &
stones and only me to whisper for her, from sidewalk far,

break my bones. A grown woman in grease-pocket overalls
inside her own sexy transmission despite the crowding of
hurled red hots. Beneath the hood of her candy-apple Camaro:

souped, shiny, low to the ground.

The stars over the Atlantic are dangling
salt crystals. The room at the Seashell Inn is
$20 a night; special winter off-season rate.
No one else here but us and the night clerk,
five floors below, alone with his cherished
stack of Spiderman. My lips are red snails
in a primal search for every constellation
hiding in the sky of your body. My hand
waits for permission, for my life to agree
to be changed, forever. Can Captain Night
Clerk hear my fingers tambourining you
there on the moon? Won’t he soon climb
the stairs and bam! on the hood of this car?
You are a woman with film reels for eyes.
Years of long talking have brought us to the
land of the body. Our skin is one endless
prayer bead of brown. If my hand ever lands,
I will fly past dreaming Australian Aborigines.
The old claw hammer and monkey wrench
that flew at Brenda Jones will fly across the
yard of ocean at me. A grease rag will be
thrust into my painter’s pants against my
will. I will never be able to wash or peel
any of this away. Before the night is over
someone I do not know will want the keys
to my ’55 silver Thunderbird. He will chase
me down the street. A gaggle of spooked
hens will fly up in my grandmother’s yard,
never to lay another egg, just as I am jump-
ed, kneed, pulled finally to the high ground
of sweet clover.

For Detroit
There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between buildings
and buildings. No.
The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,
I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make of a building.
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
his neighborhood is not like a war zone.
I am trying to say
his neighborhood
is as tattered and feathered
as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying
how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be in that birdless city.