Funeral Diva

by Pamela Sneed

  She gave her opinion on each image.

  “Ooooh this one with flowers,” she pointed. “I like this.”

  The next was an image of a man with cock and balls out,

  “I don’t like this one,” she said.

  She persisted onto the next image.

  “Pregnant butch,” she said out loud and giggled.

  “A pregnant butch,” she said again as if fascinated by the idea.

  “I don’t see yours, oh but here it is!”

  She fastened on a blue and red watercolor of figures gathered in grief

  titled, 6 times.

  “It’s the family of Stephon Clark,” I explained. “That Black kid from Sacramento

  police shot in the back six to eight times, unarmed in his backyard.

  They said he was a burglar.”

  “I wanted to paint the pictures of his family grieving because they had no voice

  and were made invisible.”

  My mother got quiet, mouthed something like a ha

  Her eyes narrowed and full, like when I visit and we watch shows

  about slavery together/like in Roots when Chicken George has to leave his

  son at the crossroads to gain freedom.

  My mother wants to cry but doesn’t.

  She commands me to show the catalogue to my father.

  Later she asks to take a picture because she wants to show my

  ninety-year-old aunt.

  In New York this year we are celebrating,

  The 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.

  My queer friends complain about all the festivities as

  “The monster that ate New York,”

  But I say I’m excited by it all

  If only because I can go home to my family

  (Because of all of those queens and kings before me)

  Marked safe.

  WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF

  FOR NTOZAKE SHANGE

  The internet has transformed our grieving patterns

  Everything comes and goes so quickly

  After death there’s a tremendous outpouring and then a few

  weeks later months years later nothing

  I have come now to watch all who shaped me die

  Never got to write about or even register Prince

  Then Aretha

  Ntozake

  People without whom I couldn’t have formed my voice

  My identity

  I joke now there’s probably not a Black girl alive who came through

  a theater program in the United States who hadn’t encountered

  the work of Ntozake Shange

  In fact, I know some University Theater Programs ban For Colored Girls

  from being performed “Choose something else,” they say

  because it’s been performed so much

  I chuckle thinking about how many times Ntozake’s words were

  used by Black girls as audition monologues for a theater

  “And I will be presenting the lady in green/or the lady in yellow”

  And then them skipping around the room talking about Toussaint Louveture

  Or the infamous somebody almost walked off with all of my stuff

  Or if they were really dramatic they might perform the lady in red

  with the perils of Beau Willie Brown, a crazed Vietnam Vet

  and that infamous last line

  About how he dropped the kids out of the window

  In our college production, I was the lady in blue

  a character that was rather obscure in compare to the others

  I remember the beginning of the choreopoem playing

  childhood games and then being frozen while a woman came around

  and tagged us awake “I’m outside Houston …”

  “I’m outside Chicago …”

  And “this is for colored girls who’ve considered suicide/but moved to

  the ends of their own rainbows”

  The play was such that you could memorize everyone else’s lines

  I struggled initially with how to pronounce Ntozake’s name

  and read her Black vernacular and slash mark punctuation

  But it was like reading Morrison’s Beloved which I tried at least five times before

  I understood but then the codes gave way to an ecstasy and understanding

  Her words became mine

  Even though I was a young suburb girl

  And the kinds of male partner violence that Ntozake spoke of was foreign to me

  Later in a conversation at her house she remarked she didn’t want

  older women to perform For Colored Girls

  As the words became too bitter in their mouths

  A point we starkly disagreed on

  But ’Zake’s words were the first to unlock an experience in literature

  A pool, a mirror by which Black girls could see themselves

  like Tubman

  She freed a lot of souls

  That said, she was a hero of mine

  And so when I first had the chance to meet her

  as an adult many many years after undergrad

  I was honored and floored

  A friend of mine from Boston managed her

  I went to meet her at Nuyorican Poets Café

  It was after her second stroke

  And she was dancing with her hands and hair

  Her arms were raised above her head and she moved wildly to the music

  her dreadlocks with gold beads moved with her

  Afterward we hugged and were like old friends or sisters

  I saw her many times after that

  Once she came to see me perform

  And I couldn’t believe I was performing for the woman who’d given me words

  that was a beautiful moment when my mentor became an equal

  I don’t think I could ever impart what she’s meant

  but I will always remember her

  after two strokes

  with her hands over her head

  raised to the sky god

  Dancing.

  A TALE OF TWO PANDEMICS

  The headline in yesterday’s news blared A Tale of Two Pandemics

  Shocking Inequities in the Healthcare System

  what got me was use of words shocking and two

  Those of us who lived through through the 1980s early ’90s AIDS crisis already knew about the existence of two New Yorks

  Two twenty thirty forty fifty Americas maybe more

  Depending on age race class citizenship status

  Entirely different systems for those who aren’t white straight

  middle class

  Those of us who saw our brothers friends sisters die at the hands of system that shunned

  Refused to treat

  Threw away the unwanted

  Still can’t forget a gay friend waiting

  For Medicaid to treat HIV

  He got sicker and sicker.

  I asked why Medicaid took so long

  He said they’re waiting to see if I’ll die first

  That wasn’t the America I learned about in elementary school

  I was instructed to put my hand over heart

  and salute

  That wasn’t the free America we sang of

  People who are LGBTQIA already know there are two Americas

  A doctor who kept forcing me to take a pregnancy test

  Even after I insisted at the time

  I only have sex with women

  I saw his scorn/still a test

  He made me pay for

  And those women who were forcibly sterilized

  Had wombs their life force taken

  Left dry barren by doctors

  who never even stopped to explain

  Felt entitled to take scar women’s bodies

  Breasts cut off no options or consolation given

  Women who aren’t rich and white already know invisible lines you can’t cross

 
; With no insurance or Medicaid

  Forced into black markets for drugs

  A land of botched care botched procedures

  Black people already know

  separate doors

  separate entrances

  treatments

  options

  Existing long after Jim Crow

  And I have kept waiting for this moment

  This time of a medical #MeToo

  When those who’ve suffered from botched procedures and the indignities

  Step out from shadows

  Speak and name the atrocities committed

  medical malpractice

  I won’t blame all doctors

  some are good

  just middlemen like so many in a broken system doing what they can

  and I’m grateful for the good ones in this pandemic risking

  their own lives

  But the image of medical researchers that we see in movies and on television who understand a complex problem

  pour through medical books and science journals

  Stay up all night burning midnight oil to find a cure

  Who weep with concern

  are mostly false

  rare like ones who find cures

  and refuse to patent

  or personally profit

  Those days have become myth

  what’s replaced them are businessmen

  wanting status amongst peers

  entry to country clubs and power

  Gaslighters hustlers actors like Trump

  There is a doctor at Mount Sinai

  star of his field

  charged with drugging and raping his patients

  No one believed til it was proven

  his victims

  were only Black women

  the rest he left alone.

  I CAN’T BREATHE

  I suppose I should place them under separate files

  Both died from different circumstances kind of, one from HIV/AIDS and possibly not having taken his medicines

  the other from COVID-19 coupled with

  complications from an underlying HIV status

  In each case their deaths may have been preventable if one had taken his meds and the hospital had thought to treat the other

  instead of sending him home saying, He wasn’t sick enough

  he died a few days later

  They were both mountains of men

  dark Black beautiful gay men

  both more than six feet tall fierce and way ahead of their time

  One’s drag persona was Wonder Woman and the other started a Black fashion magazine

  He also liked poetry

  They both knew each other from the same club scene we all grew up in

  When I was working the door at a club one frequented

  He would always say to me, “Haven’t they figured out you’re a star yet?”

  And years ago bartending with the other when I complained about certain people and treatment he said, “Sounds like it’s time for you to clean house.”

  Both I know were proud of me the poet star stayed true to my roots

  I guess what stands out to me is that they both were

  gay Black mountains of men

  Cut down

  Felled too early

  And it makes me think the biggest and blackest are almost always more vulnerable

  My white friend speculates why the doctors sent one home

  If he had enough antibodies

  Did they not know his HIV status

  She approaches it rationally

  removed from race as if there were any rational for sending him home

  Still she credits the doctors for thinking it through

  But I speculate they saw a big Black man before them

  Maybe they couldn’t imagine him weak

  Maybe because of his size color class they imagined him strong

  said he’s okay

  Which happened to me so many times

  Once when I’d been hospitalized at the same time as a white girl

  she had pig-tails

  we had the same thing but I saw how tenderly they treated her

  Or knowing so many times in the medical system I would never have been treated so terribly if I had had a man with me

  Or if I were white and entitled enough to sue

  Both deaths could have been prevented both were almost first to fall in this season of death

  But it reminds me of what I said after Eric Garner a large Black man was strangled to death over some cigarettes

  Six cops took him down

  His famous last words were I can’t breathe

  and now George Floyd

  so if we are always the threat

  To whom or where do we turn for protection?

  WHY I CLING TO FLOWERS

  I was trying to think of what it means

  why I keep painting and posting flowers and trees in the pandemic

  I know they’re beautiful

  And they assert amidst any chaos and confusion

  Life on the planet

  Every spring

  Despite climate change every natural disaster

  Purple crocus push up out of the ground determined

  I’m fascinated by their colors striped purple violet and white

  Red blue and yellow

  I love that some humans place wire nets over them to protect their growth

  so they don’t get trampled on

  I sometimes think of Brooklyn streets as fashion runways

  All the flowers model for humans trying to look their best

  in various poses showing off their blooms

  Each trying to outdo the other with fabulousness

  Like Black women on Easter

  wearing an array of hats

  I love pink purple magenta magnolia blossoms

  How each bulb occupies a separate branch looking and pointing to the sky like an elegant candelabra

  I love the daffodils red orange yellow faces

  and one daffodil that I pass each day pushes its neck through

  an opening in a metal garden gate

  I identify with how it breaks apart

  stands separate

  As if refusing confines of a cell

  I struggle to understand what this all means

  Why I cling to flowers

  When the newsfeed reports COVID-19 death after death

  and fear

  They say the pandemic most affects Black people migrant workers and poor Brown people globally, the aged and those with underlying conditions

  And your friends are still dying from AIDS even when you thought hoped and prayed the worst was over

  They say the next two weeks will be the pandemic’s greatest peak in America

  People are yelling and fighting

  in grocery stores

  on the street

  there is so much fear

  And the life you knew good or bad may never return

  But finally talking to my father today I

  understood my connection to flowers more

  Over the years, anticipating his demise he’s given me messages

  Said, You’ve never given me any problems

  You went off and did things on your own

  You did everything all by yourself

  You decided to go to New York and never looked back

  You’ve made it on your own.

  Today we are talking about the pandemic

  I try to find masks and hand sanitizer to send to my family

  Touched and impressed by my efforts, my father said

  You still look out for us

  You’re a beautiful girl

  I’m glad you’re my daughter

  I am here for you

  And then I understand what it all means

  If we can survive

  have equipment means money

  support conditions

  There are also other possibilities<
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  We can heal.