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Lightskinned
id
for the
South
It so happens my id is red.
Check the clues, my lightskinned
parts: underneath my underwear,
if you pull the skin taut. On the white
hand side and down my wrist
where the veins branch out
like green pipes. My foot-bottom
and almost my eyes up close. It used
to be my whole self, until I was
six for sure. But a brownness
took over. Started swimming
at nine, how sun and chlorine
kissed the night into my skin.
There was no turning back.
But my id is good
and redboned. Like slicing open
a pear for the surprise
of its flesh. Look hard:
there’s a murmur of bronze
in my skin, my complex complexion.
I’m a peanut-butter oreo.
An apple dipped in molasses.
I’m a tall drink of brown and tan.
O the chiaroscuro of my self.
Still not freed from Freud, I’m fried
on the outside. What a brown on me.
Since the colour beneath my colour
is curried. It wants to come out,
my high yellow id. Always on the verge
of beige. It wants me to Ambi my skin,
to blossom a peach all over. Throwing tantrums
the colour of tan. My id has such a need.
Here it goes with its libido of gold.
Clashing with the ego, my I, a browner negro,
and the superego, who’s a radiant
absence of white. He thinks he’s in charge.
It makes me act like I’m
better than people, my id. It wants
what it wants. It makes me lick
melted margarine and steal copper
coins from bums. Makes me
bathe in mango juice. Pour sour
milk down my ears and sign
checks in blood to prove it.
On the forms I fill in
Other and scribble Yellow
On The Inside in red ink.
I drink pee.
I suck the nectar beneath my skin.
My id’s pretty niggerish,
for a mulatto. My id is everyone’s
Indian uncle. It’s taking me
to Hollywood on an undersong
of cream. My id is colourstruck
with itself. My id is El DeBarge.
My id, it’s job is to keep it light.
How my id misses the eighties.
If only this amber
at heart were enough.
I have to praise it. I have to lull it
with new roses. Run my fingers
along this sallow river
of desire. Stuck in the plantation
kitchen, black ants dying
in an orgy of honey.
mp3
Magic City
Wedding tomorrow. What we tell the girls
is bowling, but God, this is Atlanta
and bold metaphors just seem to unfurl
like night does here— so black there’s nothing bolder.
Where we take the groom is the blackest part
of night, with mist clearing like the gateway
to a netherworld. Then the women start
to appear, unbelievably tall, craned
by sky-high heels, clopping syllables strong,
clapping their bottoms in welcome. They all
look like cheap, blurry videos. The long,
thick bass gives them a rhythm, gives the walls
of glass the shivers. A heavy one
floats down a pole as if she doesn’t know
she’s fat. Others strip, like crabs underground,
shuffling slow, clawing, their bodies both
bent and round. But these women are winged, flapping
and preening their rites. Some are The Friends,
who hear us out and tell their tales of green
bills for college fees. The Selfish attend
to the moods of the mirrors. But The Business-
women charm me the most, with their pursed lips,
the thing gone, like a sudden gust, from their eyes.
Their silence is rugged, the blankness says
I am not real to them. One reminds me
of somebody and I hate her for
that. Two white men emerge, with their hungry
looks. I need them to vanish, but my power
doesn’t work. Sick of myself, I want to
melt in my guilt. I do. The mirrors pelt;
I hang onto a glance of light, the truth
in watching myself watch women watch themselves
watching me. I realise that I am.
But what can I believe? These nameless shape-
shifters? Wonder who’s working who. I can’t
explain this city’s black magic. If we take
what the night gives us, the morning might be proud.
I think of the sign: No Touching Allowed.
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Welcome Centre
Sent out for a gift for my aunt,
the one in Miami, on the Trini side:
for a straw bag, bonafide Bahamian bag,
made by women from Andros or Exuma
who plait silvertop leaf like hair,
I went down Bay Street, downtown,
past the Queen Victoria Statue
and out near the water, to where
Bahamians don’t go.
Old man in a palmtree shirt, yellow
as the building walls. The twang-
twang on guitar and him, hoarse
as churchpeople: Bahamas experience,
you can find true romance. . .
Solid woman rigged as a straw
doll in Androsia and pigtail wig,
teaching tourists to dance,
greeting them with a high-pitched voice:
Welcome to The Bahamas!
Welcome to The Bahamas!
She popped her eyes
when she said it, shook
her huge bottom as if
its own broad life.
Bunghy, Bahamians say,
what this woman shook
like no tomorrow, a bouncing
bubble word, better than ass
or bottom, it asks for the whole
of the mouth.
But somehow it was too ripe
inside the pink and white skirt.
Real flesh don’t bounce like that.
It was fake, an extra self.
If I could touch it, I’d prove it.
When our eyes caught,
she knew I knew. Or did she think
I was a tourist too?
It was nothing really: another refuge
for Yankees, island music
that didn’t make me dance,
a lady in a culture-bustle.
Not a thing happens here.
What I hate bout Home
is in that look,
me to her, her to me.
The poem is the glance,
right there. Or that she kept
dancing, is that the poem?
That I can leave, that she can’t leave,
that tourists come and go?
The next shipload came in,
confusion of ants,
and I left, without a dance,
still wandering town for the gift.
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