Free Teahouse of the Almighty by Patricia Smith Page A

into a sofa pillow
    when Daddy blasted Mama into the north wall
    of their cluttered one-room apartment,
    Donya’s cousin gone in a drive-by. Dark window,
    click, click, gone, says Donya, her tiny finger
    a barrel, the thumb a hammer. I am shocked
    by their losses—and yet when I read a poem
    about my own hard-eyed teenager, Jeffery asks
    He is dead yet?
    It cannot be comprehended,
    my 18-year-old still pushing and pulling
    his own breath. And those 40 faces pity me,
    knowing that I will soon be as they are,
    numb to our bloodied histories,
    favoring the Reaper with a thumbs-up and a wink,
    hearing the question and shouting me, me,
    Miss Smith, I know somebody dead!
    Can poetry hurt us? they ask me before
    snuggling inside my words to sleep.
    1 love you, Nicole says, Nicole wearing my face,
    pimples peppering her nose, and she is as black
    as angels are. Nicole’s braids clipped, their ends
    kissed with match flame to seal them,
    and can you teach me to write a poem about my mother?
    I mean, you write about your daddy and he dead,
    can you teach me to remember my mama?
    A teacher tells me this is the first time Nicole
    has admitted that her mother is gone,
    murdered by slim silver needles and a stranger
    rifling through her blood, the virus pushing
    her skeleton through for Nicole to see.
    And now this child with rusty knees
    and mismatched shoes sees poetry as her scream
    and asks me for the words to build her mother again.
    Replacing the voice.
    Stitching on the lost flesh.
    So poets,
    as we pick up our pens,
    as we flirt and sin and rejoice behind microphones—
    remember Nicole.
    She knows that we are here now,
    and she is an empty vessel waiting to be filled.
    And she is waiting.
    And she
    is
    waiting.
    And she waits.

GIVING BIRTH TO SOLDIERS
    February 1, 2005—Tabitha Bonilla’s husband, Army Captain Orlando A. Bonilla, 27, was killed Wednesday in a helicopter accident in Baghdad. Her father, Army Sergeant First Class Henry A. Bacon, 45, died in Iraq last February.
    She will pin ponderous medals to her
    housedress, dripping the repeated roses,
    while she claws through boxes filled with
    him and then him. The accepting of God’s
    weird wisdom takes place over forkfuls
    of rubbery casseroles and the snowy vows
    of newsmen who measure her worth
    in cued weeping. She offers her husband’s
    hands, a shrine of their mingled smells,
    a warm seat on a couch of napped corduroy.
    They offer one polished bone, scrubbed
    clean of war. And she babbles of links and
    irony, shrugs her numb shoulders, and feels
    dimly blessed as a door slams shut on both
    sides of her head. Suddenly, she is her
    only history. Smiling politely beneath a fierce
    salute, propped upright behind the crumpled
    ghosts of her men, she is the catchy logo
    for a confounded country. This day is the day
    she has. Tomorrow, she will touch her own
    breasts, she will dismantle a gaudy altar
    with her teeth. And she will ask a bemused God
    for guidance as she steps back into line,
    her womb tingling vaguely with the next soldier.

IT HAD THE BEAT INEVITABLE
    It’s all right what Bobby Womack taught us, what Chaka growled,
    O.K. to flaunt the hard stone double dutch planted in our calves.
    Forgive Smokey for sending us off to search for that white horse
    and the half-white boy riding it. Go on, shove that peppermint stick
    down the center of that sour pickle, dine on a sandwich of Wonder
    and souse, take your stand in that black woman assembly line to
    scrape the scream from chitlins. It’s all right that Mama caught the
    â€™hound up from Alabama, that Daddy rode up from Arkansas and
    you’re the only souvenir they got. We brown girls, first generation
    brick, sparkling in Dacron and pink sweat socks, we went the only
    way we could. Our weather vane, whirling in Chicago wind, was the
    rusted iron torso of a stout black woman. We vanished for a while.
    Gwen Brooks hissed Follow. We had no choice.

MISSISSIPPI’S LEGS
    for