by Sapphire
(pee I woulda said at seven)
tries to push his dick
into me.
I am 8:
when I put my tongue
in Mary-Mae’s mouth
for the first time
(under the same steps)
9:
my fingers
10:
my tongue but this time
I put it in her
where he tried to put
it in me
13:
I am pressed close to her
against the wall
in her room
we will fall on the
still pink in some places
chenille bedspread
My fingers A trains howling thru her dark tunnel We will-DADDY! DADDY!
Come LOOK what Mary-Mae and Jermaine is doing!
BULLDAGGERBULLDAGGERBULLDYKE
DYKEBULLDYKEBULLDYKEDYKEDYKE the
voices become like the programmed messages in the subway time unpredictable loud irritating expected
but it is Mary-Mae’s father who catches me one night to show me what a MAN is, what a woman is when I get up from my new knowledge one of my front teeth is gone The doctor will tell my mother damage is done I won’t tell her by who I never told that part of my story before because I hate to see their square eyes light up with, “Oh that’s why! I understand now! I see—”
No! You don’t see! Before I was snatched out the air like a butterfly, wings torn off me. BEFORE
any all that I had slid my fingers up the sweet stink of another child and knelt down to lick her thighs. Men did not make me this way. Nothing happened to make me this way. I was born butch!
I was 14:
my mother is a religious movement. I don’t know how else to describe it, a walking church. A wake up, go to sleep, jack off, shouting ass Christian. It make me sick. JESUS this, JESUS that, fuck that shit.
We are nuclear but poor
four of us
mother father sister brother sitting around the white formica covered table, little flecks of gold embedded like sunshine in the white plastic. We are eating breakfast, which is sardines out a can emptied onto our plates and some cold biscuits left over from last night. He went to take a sip of coffee and she said, “According to Luke Chapter 9. verse 16, Jezus took the five loaves and the two fishes and looking up at heaven—” And his arm flew out like a jack-in-the-box and snatched the Bible from her and threw it in her face HARD.
Hitting her in the eye. A blood red spot grew and spread across her eye for seven days. By the time she went to Emergency she was another colored woman shoulda come in sooner story there’s not really much we can do for you now except call in the medical students from NYU to stare at how stupid you people are and you can learn to see almost as well with one eye as you can with two.
So my mother—one eye, no man, two children and the Bible.
What hurt more than the dark hole of Daddy’s leaving, than Mary-Mae’s father raping me, more than seeing the spot grow in Mama’s eye like a radioactive tomato, was seeing her afterward on the D train, holding her Bible over her head screeching, “HELL! You are going to hell! Unless you accept the word of God’s only son JEEZUSS!! JEEEEEZZUUSSS!!! The train hurtling through the dark tunnel, the laughing pitying and annoyed eyes of the riders and my mother, blind eye, a snot colored marble in her chocolate face screaming, “JEZUS! JJEEEEEE-ZZZZUUUUUUSSSS!! ! ! !”
I’m 17:
when she walks in on me and Mary-Mae fucking.
Can’t she see we’re in love?
No, she can’t.
She starts to foam at the mouth screaming curses in the name of God.
FILTHYSICKHELPMEJEZUSIDIDNTRAISEYOU-THISWAYFILTHYFILTHY The words float over our naked bodies like clouds of poison gas. They drop on us soiling Mary-Mae’s long copper legs, smooth child free body. The smell of us sweet, stinky, swollen with sex contracts and dies in the air.
I love Mary-Mae.
I pull my underpants, jeans, shirt, shoes on, all in one seemingly impossible move. Mary-Mae is in a daze. The poison gas shaming her causing her to stumble. We fall out the room together and then the front door of the apartment. Mary-Mae turns down the hall to her father’s apartment. I keep going until I hit the street. I never see Mary-Mae again.
I’m seventeen and parent free. An emancipated minor. I mean my father was not hard to find. In a tiny studio in Queens, where, “I’m welcome to stay as long as I want.” But at night when he flops down on the convertible sofa, the kind you see advertised on the subway for five hundred dollars, I am left on a thin mat near the door listening to him masturbate. Does he think I’m asleep? In the morning over a breakfast of boiled eggs and salmon cakes that reminds me of sardines, he asks me if the floor isn’t hard. The sardines remind me how swift and long his arms are. The sun coming through his window is a blood red spot that covers the sky.
So I step out on the street that morning, on my own, like Huck Finn or some shit, it’s been like that ever since— Harlem, The Village, The Bronx, Queens— I know my way around. I bartend, drive cab, do maintenance. I was super over on 126th and Madison for three years. But I want more than pushing a mutherfuck-ing broom, or slooshing fire juice to other broom pushers. So I came back to school. I knew from day one I should be in G.E.D. class but I know I never woulda wrote this story with those dickheads in there. I never would have stayed.
My face? My eye, ear? Ms Rain say you might want to write about that? Write about six grown men,
I’m 19: by then. What can I say except I fought back. And when it’s six men that means you put your fist up and try to hit at least one of ‘em ‘fore they kill you. I’m with Rita, on that some things don’t need to be written about. For example, how it sounds when a fist with two hundred pounds behind it connects solidly with your eye. Or the way concrete does not yield to lip cheek nostril when they meet. And a razor, the closest thing it feels like is extreme cold. Cold so cold it’s hot, a laser separating.
I woke up in Harlem Hospital. Like Mama one eye messed up ear too. But the Bible did not save me. I saved myself. Am still saving myself.
That was the second time men took me to school. Only time I don’t have a gun on me now is when I go to sleep, even then, Mary-Mae, as I call my rod, is not far away.
It’s not over yet!
Jermaine
untitled by Precious Jones
Rain, wheels, bus
car,
only in dreams
I have car
me n Abdul riding like
in the movies
sun a yellow red ball
rising over hills
where indeins usta live
beaches. Islands
where Jamaica-talks live
Bob Marley
song
first I don’t unnerstan it
but now I do
CONCREET JUNGLE
it’s a prison days
we live in
at least me
I’m not really free
baby, Mama, HIV
where I wanna be where i wanna be?
not where I AM
on the 102
down lex avenue
I do have
lungs take in air
I can see
I can read
nobody can see now
but I might be a poet, rapper, I got water colors my child is smart my CHILDREN is alive some girls in forin countries babies dead.
Look up sometimes and the birds is like dancers or
like programmed by computer how they fly tear up your heart bus moving
PLAY THE HAND YOU GOT housemother say.
HOLD FAST TO DREAMS
Langston say.
GET UP OFF YOUR KNEES
Farrakhan say.
CHANGE
Alice Walker
say.
Rain fall down
wheels turn round
DON’T ALWAYS RHYME
M
s Rain say
walk on
go into the poem
the HEART of it
beating
like
a clock
a virus
tick
tock.
1991
