Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

by Patricia Smith

  hard away from her daddy and full unto me.

  I have just enough time for her to sound it out:

  D-D-D-unk-unk Dunk a N-N-N-ig-ig-Nig-ger

  and then I salute, and hold her father’s eyes as I fall.

  THE BOSS OF ME

  In fifth grade I

  was driven wild by you,

  my teacher Copper pixie

  with light shining from beneath

  it Eyes giggling azure through

  crinkled squint I

  let you rub my hair I

  let you probe the kinks I

  clutched you, buried my nose

  in the sting starch of your white

  blouses I asked you if you thought

  I was smart did you know

  how much I wanted to come

  home with you to roll and cry on

  what had to be a bone-colored

  carpet I found out where

  you lived I dressed in the morning

  with you in mind I spelled huge

  words for you I opened the dictionary

  and started with A I wanted to

  impress the want out of you

  I didn’t mind my skin because you

  didn’t mind my skin I opened big books

  and read to you and watched TV news

  and learned war and weather for you

  I

  needed you in me enough to take

  home enough to make me stop rocking

  my own bed at night enough

  to ignore my daddy banging on the front door

  and my mama not letting him in I

  prayed first to God and then to you

  first to God and then to you

  then to you and next to God then

  just to you

  Mrs. Carol

  Baranowski do you even remember

  the crack of surrender under your hand?

  Do you remember my ankle socks

  kissed with orange roses, socks turned perfectly

  down and the click of the taps in my black

  shiny shoes that were always pointed toward

  you always walking your way always

  dancing for a word from you? I looked

  and looked for current that second

  of flow between us but our oceans

  were different yours was wide and blue

  and mine

  was

  3

  LEARNING TO SUBTRACT

  OOO, BABY, BABY

  A Smokey limerick on the long-play

  There once was a song that took hold

  of a child, cause the tale that it told

  made her feel flushed and held

  until she was compelled

  to play it again, to behold

  the craving encased in each note

  that slipped from the singer’s sleek throat—

  cause the beg that he sighed

  made her ache from inside.

  She was moved by his words to devote

  her tomorrows to all that he said.

  She was told she was out of her head.

  But his tenor dug deep,

  interrupting her sleep,

  so she did some wild dreaming. Instead

  of singing it dizzy, she would

  pretend that he loved her, or could.

  In her mirror, she braced

  for his kiss, and the taste

  of his mouth. Every day, there she stood

  in a room by herself, all alone

  with a body no longer her own.

  All her soul was engrossed

  in no more than a ghost,

  every moment a new stepping stone

  toward an empty she didn’t dare to name,

  knowing Smokey was never to blame

  though she whispered, No fair

  as she slow-danced with air,

  her hip-heavy waltzing a shame.

  But if the song made her prefer

  the conjure, the hot him and her,

  she would live in her head,

  stunned in love, newly wed,

  the real just a feverish blur.

  So she drowned in the silk of his voice

  just because there was never a choice.

  She was helplessly shook

  by his ooh la la hook,

  not a thing left to do but rejoice

  in a romance that really was none

  and a two that was really just one.

  She was fatally awed

  by a falsetto god—

  his wooing had left her undone.

  There once was a song that took hold

  of a child, cause the story it told

  made her feel flushed and held

  until she was compelled

  to give in to the lies that it sold.

  FIRST FRICTION

  I was twelve, too young to be left alone mornings

  after Mama packed her paper hat and sugar-dusted

  shoes to push gumballs down the assembly line.

  So I was unceremoniously dumped at the door

  of old Mrs. Gore’s mouse-addled basement hovel,

  where the matron of snapping gum and gray grin

  ushered me in and plopped me down in a chair

  that stank of a dog they didn’t own. Seeing how I was

  bleary and unslept, Mrs. Gore would open the door

  to the bedroom where her twin girls, Kathy and Karen,

  still dreamed on the edge of alarm. Peppery, flailing,

  their waking bodies unwound to carve me room.

  I don’t know how it started, how, wordlessly, Karen

  and I tussled skin, adjusted knee and cunt, naturally

  knew the repeating mouth and its looping stanza.

  She smelled like what I couldn’t stop swallowing.

  Content to thrive on a flickering cinema of ourselves,

  our eyes fluttered, never fully opened. We pretended

  a blazing slumber, hushing the grind, the soft rustle

  of sparse sweating pubic, even after her unsuspecting

  sister stretched and tumbled out to begin her day.

  Strange she didn’t suspect our engine. For as long

  as we could, Karen and I stayed prone in exquisite,

  pressurized tangle beneath the knotty orange chenille.

  We kept up the being blind, crashing into dampening

  borders, until her fat mother shuffled in to rouse us,

  throwing shades open to the damnable day, introducing

  the stupid, useless notion of language again. By then,

  there was a drum buried in our bellies. We stank like

  men, all up under that sweet funk first sin leaves behind.

  SPECULATION

  Thirty years after Richard Speck murdered eight nurses on the South Side of Chicago, videotapes surfaced showing the convicted killer in prison parading in silk panties and sporting breasts reportedly grown with smuggled hormone treatments. After talking about the rampant sex he enjoyed, he said, “If they only knew how much fun I was having, they’d turn me loose.”

  1.

  Of course, you’re everybody’s bitch now,

  your face aunt-soft, but still pummeled

  and pitted, still that drooped dammit

  of marbled landscape. Of course you are

  slouch and winking sloe-eyed beneath

  a Dutch-boy bowl of hair, pert pouted

  areolas lazed on a pimpled gut, this is

  what happens when eight women insist

  on a winter rhythm inside you, they bless

  you with feminine clock, sly locomotion,

  with the hips they were just beginning.

  With fabled cock crumpled backways

  in panties of silk dark as a blue note,

  you rise to walk, focused, overclicking

  your sway like a practiced hag on the stroll

  while, nodding gravely behind aviator

  shades, your Negro lover wry
ly considers

  the sashaying, ill-constructed hot mass

  murderer mess of you. He is overseer,

  brusque pimp. You are his gilded tunnel.

  Between demanded fevers, you amuse him.

  How’d it feel when you killed them ladies?

  he monotones, in reluctant acknowledgment

  of your stardom, your skewed rep, never

  lifting his eyes to the camera, and of course

  you had to say that you didn’t feel anything—

  It’s just wasn’t their night—nothing at all

  when the fatty spit in your face and said

  she’d remember everything about the way

  you looked, nothing as the screeching parade

  of cheekbone and thigh turned your quest

  for pocket change into a giddy little fuck/slice,

  nothing after finding out that the little Filipino

  whore had rolled under the bed to memorize

  your ruined skeletal grace, foolishly denying

  herself the impossible Wednesday of you.

  2.

  I was nine when your pebbled hangdog filled

  the face of the family Philco. No one prepared me.

  I nibbled sardines and saltines and twisted

  the torsos of dolls while staring at the lineup

  of neat nurses you had romanced and ended,

  pictures always in the same order, all your girls

  sporting puffed bouffants and hard white collars

  buttoned to a point above their throats, and I

  studied their faces, a tomorrow all expectant and

  persistent in them. They were my first dead girls.

  I practiced their names over and again, loving

  Matusek’s white suburban splatter, the wide lyric

  of Merlita Garguilo. In 1966, my parents, just

  about a decade north, had clearly been deceived.

  I was often alone with the perfect magic box,

  Lucy and Vietnam one and the same, so no one

  explained the frayed edges of narrative, grainy

  shots of red-drenched beds, and you, you,

  greasy pompadour, batter-skinned, droop-lipped

  and lanky, my first killer within walking distance.

  But before I knew what you wanted that night,

  years before the televised daybreak of woman

  in you, I was nine. You were always all over me.

  I fell asleep under my Murphy bed, curled hard

  against you, holding my own neck in my hands.

  JUMPING DOUBLEDUTCH

  Calves go chaos under pounding,

  clothesline raises welt and bloodies

  shin and ankle, hip and forearm

  while we throw down nasty verses

  and the boys step from the shadows.

  In our stanzas, swerving beckons,

  all our skin is steam and shining,

  and we’re women—not these babies

  spouting bowlegs, stomping rhythm,

  not these braids of quick unravel.

  Hear our keyless, tangled trochees—

  Butch and Sally in the alley.

  Squeeze them titties like you mean it.

  Bet you ain’t gon’ reach my panties!

  Jump and whirl, we tempt our future

  in a language born of beatdown,

  verbs we urge from high-top sneakers.

  Whipping hips and licking lips and

  punishing the ground with craving,

  got no notion what we’re asking.

  Mamas screeching from the windows,

  Chile, you better stop that jumping,

  showin’ the neighborhood your business!

  Bring your tail inside for dinner!

  And the boys slide from the shadows.

  MINUS ONE. MINUS ONE MORE.

  Carol Burnett tugs an ear, waves toodly-doo to the camera eye.

  It’s ten o’clock, and a white mechanized man asked if I, a child,

  know where my children are. No, but it’s time for the news, time

  for the insisting war, and the preposterous Philco—half monster

  TV screen, half bulky, functional phonograph—blares jungle, its

  flat glass face filled with streaked pans of crushed foliage, the whir

  of blades, dust-dreary GIS heaving through quick-slamming throats.

  Lurching toward the ledges of copters, they screech commands,

  instructions, prayers, struggle to cram blooded lumps back into

  their uniforms—dead there, there, let’s see, almost dead over there—

  a hand dangling by tendrils, a left eye imploded, black-and-white

  red etches slow roadways into the back of a dimming hand. Beneath

  the lack of hue, a white buzz, a lazy scroll of dates and numbers:

  This is how many gone today, how many last week, last month,

  this year. Big Daddy Cronkite’s eyes glaze, consider closing, refocus.

  Think of all the children plopped in front of this unscripted boom

  to pass the time. Think of Tom turning Jerry’s head into spectacular

  dust, then this, our first official war smashing into the family room,

  blurring into cinema, into lesson. It’s how we learned to subtract.

  AND NOW THE NEWS: TONIGHT THE SOLDIERS

  dropped their guns to dance. The sight

  of spinning starlit men, their arms

  around such waiting waists, alarmed

  those paid to blare the urgent words

  of war. And how did these hard men

  decide on just this time to twirl

  in bloodied dust, and how do we

  explain the skin to skin, their hips

  aligned, dramatic dips—was that

  a kiss? Some rumba, others throw

  a soundtrack down—they pound deep drums,

  they twang imagined strings, they blow

  notes blasted blue through sandy winds,

  they dream a stout piano’s weight.

  They spark the dance—the bop and twist,

  the tango, yes, the trot, the stroll,

  the slither-slow unmanly grind

  within a brother’s brazen arms.

  The talking heads can’t spit enough

  as cameras catch the swirling men,

  their thrown-back heads and bended backs,

  the rhythm of their rite, the ways

  they steam. The toothy anchors chant

  the traitors’ numbers, names, to shame

  them into still. But still the music

  blows, the soldiers pivot, swing,

  unleash their languid limbs, caress.

  They don’t slow down to weep or stop

  to grieve their new-gone guns. The public

  bray begins, the song of killers

  killing must resume! but then

  the mirthful moon illuminates

  the ball, our boys in dip and glide

  and woo. We see the dancers’ dangling

  eyes and blaring open sores,

  shattered shoulders, earlobes smashed,

  the halves of heads, the limp, the drag

  of not quite legs. The soldiers dropped

  their guns, and snagged a nasty bass

  to roughride home. You hear the stomp,

  the weary wheeze and grunt, the ragged

  nudge of notes on air? You see

  the whirling soldiers spin, the love

  they braved, and oh my god, that kiss?

  HAVE SOUL AND DIE

  For Mary Wells

  Stiff wigs, in cool but impossible shades

  of strawberry and sienna, all whipped

  into silky flips her own flat naps could

  never manage—the night hair different

  from the day hair, the going out hair,

  the staying-in hair, Friday’s hair higher

  and way redder than Monday’s—all these

 
wigs, 100% syn-the-tic, thank you, lined

  up on snowy Styrofoam heads and paid

  for with her own money, what could be

  slicker than that? No lovesick player

  flopped his wallet open for those crowns.

  So she wasn’t Diana. Who wanted to be

  all skeleton and whisper, hips like oil?

  Didn’t need no hussies slinking in the

  backdrop giving more throat, boosting

  her rhythm. So what if her first album

  cover drew her pimpled, bloat-cheeked,

  Sunday hair skewed? She roared gospel

  in those naked songs, took Berry’s little

  ballads and made men squirm on their

  barstools. They spun her in the dark.

  Wasn’t she the alley grunt, the lyric played low?

  Didn’t people she never met run up to try

  and own her tired shoulders, shouting Mary!

  like they were calling on the mama of Jesus?

  And everywhere she dared to step,

  Detroit devilment bubbling beneath sequins

  that can’t help but pop under the pressure

  black butts provide, every time she dropped

  ’round to paint the town brown, neon lights

  slammed on, cameras clicked like air kisses,

  and pretty soon somebody said Girl you know

  you just gotta sing us something and even though

  she didn’t have to do a damned thing but be

  black, have soul, and die, she’d puck those lips

  just so, like she didn’t know how damn electric

  it all was, and every word landed torn and soft,

  like a slap from somebody who loves you.

  NEXT. NEXT.

  he is the only white boy in lawndale

  and who could blame him, searching

  for a line of commerce that could save

  his life? he starts hanging in the shadows

  of our apartment building, pulling down

  his pants and charging us a dime to look,

  a quarter to touch. stubbed fingers, dingy,

  pinkish, thumbing it. the slowly writhing

  nub hooded and winking sly neon, here,

  here, here, go on, touch it, go on be startled

  by its whispered little rhumba, its soft

  arrogance. the long line of wait, colored

  and curious, snakes Washington street

  with giggles electric, our one stomach

  throbbing with this stupid magic. white boy

  shifts from Ked to Ked, corporate bigwig

  under the overhang, and if not for his

  clipped command—Next. Next.—we would

  not even notice him attached to the thing.