Not long ago, I studied medicine.
It was terrible, what the body told.
I’d look inside another person’s mouth,
And see the desolation of the world.
I’d see his genitals and think of sin.
Because my body speaks the stranger’s language,
I’ve never understood those nods and stares.
My parents held me in their arms, and still
I think I’ve disappointed them; they care
And stare, they nod, they make their pilgrimage
To somewhere distant in my heart, they cry.
I look inside their other-person’s mouths
And see the wet interior of souls.
It’s warm and red in there—like love, with teeth.
I’ve studied medicine until I cried
All night. Through certain books, a truth unfolds.
Anatomy and physiology,
The tiny sensing organs of the tongue—
Each nameless cell contributing its needs.
It was fabulous, what the body told.
Tag: racism
“Sexual Privacy of Women on Welfare,” Pinkie Gordon Lane
The ACLU Mountain States Regional Office came across a welfare application used in… (a certain state) for women with illegitimate children. Among the questions:
THE PRIVACY REPORT, American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, Vol. IV, No. 3, Oct., 1976.
—When and where did you first meet the defendant (the child’s father).
—When and where did intercourse first occur.
—Frequency and period of time during which intercourse occurred.
—Was anyone ever present. If yes, give dates, names, and addresses.
—Were preventive measures always used.
—Have you ever had intercourse with anyone other than the defendant. If yes, give dates, names, and addresses.
When and where did you first
confront loneliness?
When and where did you resist
the urge to die?
Did you pull a blind around
your sorrow?
Was anyone present? If yes, give
names and dates and addresses
Did you survive?
Were preventive measures always
used?
Who listened to the rage of your
silent screams? Give the frequency
and period of time,
dates and names and addresses…
Will you promise never to breathe ice?
To follow the outline
of a city street whose perspective
darkens with the morning light? Document.
“History Lesson,” Natasha Trethewey
I am four in this photograph, standing
on a wide strip of Mississippi beach,
my hands on the flowered hips
of a bright bikini. My toes dig in,
curl around wet sand. The sun cuts
the rippling Gulf in flashes with each
tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet
glinting like switchblades. I am alone
except for my grandmother, other side
of the camera, telling me how to pose.
It is 1970, two years after they opened
the rest of this beach to us,
forty years since the photograph
where she stood on a narrow plot
of sand marked colored, smiling,
her hands on the flowered hips
of a cotton meal-sack dress.
“For the Record,” Audre Lorde
In memory of Eleanor Bumpurs
Call out the colored girls
and the ones who call themselves Black
and the ones who hate the word nigger
and the ones who are very pale
Who will count the big fleshy women
the grandmother weighing 22 stone
with the rusty braids
and gap-toothed scowl
who wasn’t afraid of Armageddon
the first shotgun blast tore her right arm off
the one with the butcher knife
the second blew out her heart
through the back of her chest
and I am going to keep writing it down
how they carried her body out of the house
dress torn up around her waist
uncovered
past tenants and the neighborhood children
a mountain of Black Woman
and I am going to keep telling this
if it kills me
and it might in ways I am
learning
The next day Indira Gandhi
was shot down in her garden
and I wonder what these two 67-year old
colored girls
are saying to each other now
planning their return
and they weren’t even
sisters.
Punch-in-the-Face Poetry 