Why you keep telling me I not one of the boys? I never think I was and that alright. I don't want be them and that good too. So what you keep carrying on 'bout?

Step III

Learn to listen.

When you pass the Comman Entrance exam and get into our best high school for girls, learn to listen. Immaculate Conception School for Girls is just the place for you.

You will hate the white uniforms. You will hate the white nuns. You will hate the rules about how to chew gum with your mouth closed and never in public. You will hate the rules about how to comb your hair so that every strand is straight and in place. You will learn how to stand each time your teacher comes into the room and how to wait until she tells you when to sit. You will learn to sit with your lips and knees pressed shut. You will learn how to cook rice and peas and chicken for other people. You will learn how to serve escovitch fish on a platter to other people. You will learn how to keep your eyes lowered when in conversation. You will learn good English. You will learn to be the kind of girl we can look at and admire. You will learn proper ways.

And you will wonder for years how you going make it. You might think this going kill you. But that just how it feel.

But I feel like I going die.

I hear what you saying to me, but, let me tell you, is not true. That just how it feel. You not going dead from this.

But I feel-

You not listening.

It already killing me.

You was always a hard-headed girl, real hard a hearing.

Step II.

But how-

Learn to listen.

But-

Learn to listen when we tell you how to walk and how to talk and how to look and how to-

But you not telling me how?

Sometimes we can't tell you a thing.

But you not telling me how I suppose to be this Immaculate girl.

Step I

Again?

Step I, again

Don't be the kind of girl you so bent on being.

How?

Step II

You know?

Step II

You not free to go 'bout like one of the boys.

Step III

Is this all you know?

Step III

Learn to listen.

Step I

Wait a minute: you even know how to be a Jamaican girl for real?

Learn to -

I don't think you really know how this go. I don't think you know a way for me to be.

Step I

Learn-

Step I

You can be-

You was always-

a bull-dagger.

Make-out with the girl next door and tell everyone she's your best friend. You're twelve and you can hold her hand and hug as much as you want in public. Learn to think of yourself as her very best friend, her very special friend, and feel good about what that means.

Choose an all girls school, like the Immaculate Conception School for Girls. Do not cry when you realize that your very best friend is going to go to a different school. It's the beginning of the summer when you both stop looking like little girls and she's already treating you like a not so special kind of bestfriend.

At the Immaculate Conception School, pretend to play by the rules. There are a lot of them. Do what it takes not to get expelled.

Do what it takes to make it.

Goldfish Are Ordinary

At the pet store on Court Street,
I search for the perfect fish.
The black moor, the blue damsel,
cichlids and neons. Something
to distract your sadness, something
you don't need to love you back.
Maybe a goldfish, the flaring tail,
orange, red-capped, pearled body,
the darting translucence? Goldfish
are ordinary, the boy selling fish
says to me. I turn back to the tank,
all of this grace and brilliance,
such simplicity the self could fail
to see. In three months I'll leave
this city. Today, a chill in the air,
you're reading Beckett fifty blocks
away, I'm looking at the orphaned
bodies of fish, undulant and gold fervor.
Do you want to see aggression?
the boy asks, holding a purple beta fish
to the light while dropping handfuls
of minnows into the bowl. He says,
I know you're a girl and all
but sometimes it's good to see.
Outside, in the rain, we love
with our hands tied,
while things tear away at us.

Alaska Memoir

What I wanted in the early splendor
was to center longing in flesh,
walking through eelgrass at slack-tide

with the resilience of a predator
in love's presence. Those mornings
we could volley desires in the fog

of unseeing, wanting to be seen,
collecting bones on the mudflats:
a seal's rib, vertebrae, mandible.

There was the urge to delineate
memory. Just offshore, guillemots
gathered, their red-throated calls

filling the embayment. Bull kelp
lay tangled like old limbs
of swimmers, too tired to go on

and on. Love between women
seemed more possible, talking
with you. I felt the crackle

of thatched barnacles beneath
my feet, climbing boulders
among ghost-life: the hulls

of urchins, inky mussels I imagined
as tiny mouths opening
to tell me it has never been lovelier

to be alive. Plankton, periwinkle,
a fluorescence of gold moss,
the odor of sea-spill, the alchemy

of mundane words. Predation
was almost invisible, such tenderness
in the solitary anemone, retracting

from your touch. The clouds
dialogued, here and there
like surveyors. There were steep exits

in the sky. We were part
of it all. I wanted to under-
stand your clarity.

We were diligent wives
of salt and sediment. You believed
in the celerity of everything

to leave us. To leave us
here, like this, the swelling tide,
our shy, dissilient hearts.

Excerpt from: Through the Turquoise Gate, a novel

Standing in her small white kitchen, Gypsy looked at the repair list that, in one version or another, had been roosting on the counter from the day she moved in. Every day some new thing went wrong, a gasket blew, a pipe crumbled, pieces fell off, and toilets wept their rims when flushed. She jumped when the phone rang and flipped it over with a pencil to see the caller ID window. A private number. A reservation?

"Bubble Up Hideaway," she said in a firm voice bigger than what one might expect from her five foot six inch frame.

"Yeah, hi. We're coming, me and my wife, to Palm Springs tomorrow and we need a place for about a week, maybe two - don't know yet. Anyway I got your number from the people at the Visitor thing."

Gypsy felt a surge of elation. A two-week rental and she could make her mortgage that month; at the expense of any other bill it was true, but mortgage was the priority. "Yeah, sure. Hey, gimme your name and I'll getcha in the book." She reached for her calendar and opened it to the week, revealing an orderly expanse of undisturbed white, and hatched off the Liberace Room for 14 days. When she'd hung up, she picked the list off the counter, whistled for her Chihuahuas, Marlon and Briget, and went out the back door headed for the hardware store.

∼

The gate bell sounded at the Bubble Up. The high-pitched voices of small dogs sounded viciously as Gypsy opened her front door and high-stepped her way through swirling Chihuahuas to answer the turquoise gate.

"Hi," said a tall, trim man dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt. A smallish bottle blonde in Capri pants and a pink tube top stood beside him. "We called. I'm Bear and this is my wife Dallas."

"Yeah, c'mon in," Gypsy gave them that jaw breaking, lip splitting smile that was natural to her welcoming worldview. The couple looked reasonable. They were about the same age as Gypsy--late 50s, the old age of youth, the youth of old age. Gypsy had a momentary thought about how exposed she sometimes felt in the desert opening her door to any stranger who rang; she pushed it aside. "I've got you in the middle room by the pool. Where y'all from?"

"LA. We just drove over to check out Palm Springs. It's been ages since we've been. When was the last time we were here, Bear?"

"Oh hell, Honey, I don't know. We just got so busy. There was never a weekend we could get away." He was lanky, with a thin face and sandy hair. His manner was relaxed and open.

Gypsy gave them a key, walked them through the few things they needed to know, and left them in their room. They knocked an hour later to ask about a restaurant. Evenings had become particularly dangerous for Gypsy. In the blue and purple shadows of evening, when the first lights blinked against the blood orange sky, it was easy to slip back to memories of the Memphis home she had shared with Trevy. Many nights friends would stop by with wine or beer, they would start to cook, and soon the crowd in the kitchen spilled out into the backyard or onto the wide front porch. The night slid away on the sounds of laughter and Trevy clattering dishes in the kitchen; a low-level, steady rattle that Gypsy had taken to mean contentment and too late learned otherwise. At dusk the line between the past and the present blurred and her thoughts either brimmed with longing for the home she no longer had or distilled into a tiny bead of apprehension about the future.

Excerpt from: The Palace Blues, a novel

In the summer of 1923, I became classified as a deviant, a criminal, not by the usual course of the thief, the prostitute, or the vagabond, but by way of whom I came to love.

- Dorothy Frances Copeland Journals

This was the first time I'd snuck into Jimmy Small's dressed like a boy. My hair was cut short, and I was grubby from cleaning the rent rooms. I just naturally looked like a boy in my father's brown hand-me-down trousers and suspenders, and lucky because it was the only way I would ever get in alone. So I latched my thumbs at my trouser pockets and strolled toward Small's.

There was a crowd of people standing around the side door smoking cigarettes and pushing down on each other's shoulders to see into the building. I walked into the front door to avoid the crowd at the other side. I hadn't had any problem getting in the front door, since no one was standing there, and once I was inside no one questioned me, maybe because I was dressed as a boy, maybe because I was white--probably both. I sure wasn't the only white person there. Plenty of rich folks come to slum it down on the South Side and plenty of folks like me just liked the music. Most all of them were men, though. The women, the white women came in fanning themselves with their little feather boas around their necks, slinging their hats and gloves off in the heat. They stood and swayed, sometimes fainted, but they were wide-eyed and sheepish. They left early, before their wax faces slid off and before the show really got good. I knew better than to act like that. I'd be thrown out for sure, white or not, alone as I was. And I was not going to leave early.

Small had set makeshift tables along the sidewalls and built a smooth cherry bar that wrapped around the back with matching stools. I found my way to a stool, dead center but in the back by the bar, and climbed up to stand on it so I could see the stage more clearly. From the minute I got on that stool to the time I left, it felt like my jaw was nailed to my neck. Her voice was like a hot horn vibrating through my chest and into my stomach as I stood on the stool, holding on to a support pole. I could barely see over the bobbing heads in front of me, and the men at the bar kept stumbling into my stool thinking it was empty. But I stayed on even when it shook under my feet each time she moaned a chorus.

I wanted to reach out, run my fingers along the lapel of her black suit jacket, cinch it at her waist. She wore a white men's collared shirt underneath, tight but unbuttoned enough at the top to hint at her collar bones, the shadow between her breasts. Her tie was tied, but swinging loosely about her neck and chest. She was dressed like a man, but her hips swayed like a woman. Her hands flitted under her French cuffs with a delicacy that accented each note from her chest. Shiny tight ringlets of hair hung all around a sparkling band and almost touched her broad rounded shoulders. Her face was as dark as her shoulders, cheeks plump and smooth, lighter around the eyes. Her full lips glistened in the lights, lined with a red glow. As far away as I was I could still see her long lashes flutter with the song, her honey-colored eyes beneath them ablaze and twinkling.

Jean Bailey's band was piled in a sweaty heap behind her, every last one of them was dressed in a black suit matching hers. The pianist sat apart from the rest, right beside her. He was thinner and softer looking than her, and his hands were just skin-covered bones moving across the keys. The clanging of the notes brought her voice to a vibrating boom.

"I'm always keeping one spot warm for you, honey."

This sent the cafe into a frenzy. Men hooted and hollered and the black women wailed with her, raising their hands in acknowledgment. The song she sang sent a warm rush from my stomach to between my thighs, and I almost buckled at the knee. It was like no other music I had ever heard. It was what they called "the blues," the real blues, not like the guys who came around jazzing the club every weekend. They didn't have that moan, that ability to bewitch the crowd. They didn't have her, Jean Bailey.

girl meets girl

girl i knows you something else this i cannot lie
say girl i knows you something else this i cannot lie
prayed to god for true love and he stuck eve in my eye

now what am i to do with this husband of mine?
say what am i to do with this husband of mine?
seems his sun only shines when my back is to the ground

i'm gonna wrap this little man up send him on his way
say i'm gonna wrap this little man up send him on his way
and pray a good woman finds him before judgment day

because girl i knows you something else this i cannot lie
and loving you makes me so damn happy i aint even gonna try

Published in The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia Press, 2007)

15 months engendered / let the steam

well i guess this isn't right either and in the end, which i know has a lot to do with the way wind moves the vagrant leaves and all of the carrying we have been doing-- there is the low ground and no one speaking. but first, we'll have to wade through the root systems of abandoned houses, cold drives and drinking alone. we'll have to lie with lovers who aren't really there for anything but the lapis pools of our eyes, which by morning, disappear completely. and supposing you are lucky there is the salt air too, a spool of forty pigeons that collectively move in and out of the light not from smokestacks but from the sun, someone may brush your arm and say under their breath 'i wish i would have gone home.' but empathy usually ends abruptly as it began. no one can really breathe into your mouth for that long without losing their own sense of balance. and so many casualties it's important to wring out your own hands under the steam of the kettle. in fact, in a photograph a woman had tied all of her neighbor's tea kettles to her body. this would be a place to begin rethinking a life. let the steam engender the body... all of your illusions, all of your grace and sense of not belonging coiled into the days that pass with an innocence so acute that there seems a fine line between being recognized and entirely unknown