Self
Portrait (Mama)
I have a German nose: aristocratic
cartilage, straight as a drawbridge.
These cheekbones are castles,
high on the proud kingdom of my
face.
Beauty's own seal is burrowed
there: each mole a seraph’s kiss.
My carriage is as any proper lady's
– head high so it never meets the
chest,
(not a drop spills when I bring the
water
bucket home) eyes forward. They say
I would win a staring match with the
sun;
I never turn away from any gaze,
even
my own. Thank God I have good hair:
no
knapps, no kinky-curls struggling to
grow.
My hands are not what they used to
be,
but see how slender my fingers are?
I would have played the pianoforte
like a dream. I'm a modest woman,
but it's no sin to admit: I'm not
bad-looking
for a woman trapped in the wrong
skin.
Wedding Vow (Mama)
Situations and circumstances alter
cases
I always say, but dat girl like she
loss her mind
to that man, and him so poor, so
black, lacking social graces
(Ah sure he so chupid, he cyant tie
his own shoelaces)
and she talking ‘bout married? How
the two of them combined
will be the ideal situation; how he
is such a different case
than the others chasing her with dey
pretty faces,
fickle hearts and lying tongues (& I
do know the kind,
but this one? Dirt poor and coal
dark without any trace
of breeding!) Now she calling me
prejudiced,
say I have no grounds, calls me
narrow minded, blind.
Love can alter a situation and good
sense bow to romance
is true – but to lose her to someone
so base
turns my blood to lava; my teeth
grind
at the thought of him: black as
nothing, a bum, a waste!
She will come to her senses by wile,
will or force;
I’ll make her see him as he is:
gross, shiftless, unrefined.
Situations and circumstances might
well alter cases,
but that beast won’t have my beauty
under any circumstances.
Bemoaning her old aged body and all
she would change given the chance
Mama starts to talk of breasts:
you have to whisper to them so they
will listen UP,
she warns, or else they’ll go
DOWN to talk to your navel!
Look!
Dipping into her nightgown she pulls
out the withered eggplant of her
boob,
startling Mom O-mouthed, setting
Aunty Marge to sputter like an
overheated teakettle.
We all explode – a collective fit
bordering on hysteria. No one tells
the other stories:
how Mama, convinced my dark-skinned
father captured her granddaughter’s
heart
with sinister magic, drenched my
sleeping mother with a cup of holy
water,
how she brandished her bible and
wooden crucifix at the demon of my
mother’s fury;
or how she packed her suitcases and
declared either that man will
live here or I will!
Incensed my mother refused to
choose, Mama bent over, flounced her
skirts up, left
and never returned – stories that
scripted us dat man’s children,
unnamed us as kin.
Laughter makes us amnesiacs. We know
only that we are here now, four
generations
on my great aunt’s living room
floor. This is all we will have of
her: Mama is dying.
On the walk home, Mom humphs,
life, eh, if yuh doh laugh, you will
cry.
I take this night with me, its small
truths: we can be strangers to our
own flesh;
life can take us to our most absurd
conclusions; remorse is a sudden
flowering
– an old woman exposing herself, the
sack of skin a bouquet in her
gnarled hand.
