Free Teahouse of the Almighty by Patricia Smith Page B

Koko Taylor
    It was black out there.
    The starless Alabama night
    pressed against my skin,
    hard like a man, steam I couldn’t fathom.
    I was 14. I was trouble.
    My chest bulged with wrong moving
    and other women’s men lapped up my smell—
    the smell of a gun barrel
    once the bullet is gone.
    Fat flies, blood loony and irritated by the moon,
    nibbled at my ankles and buzzed sweet Jesus
    when they tasted the thick sweet oil
    I rubbed in to make my legs shine.
    I was 14. My hips were wide, keening.
    I had lightning bolts for legs.
    Wrinkled women, grateful for the sleeping sun,
    shucked peas, ripped silk from corn,
    rocked do-diddy rhythms on fallen porches.
    Boys with earth naps screeched crave into the air
    and waited for answers and somewhere
    a man named J.T. or Diamond or Catfish
    blew everything he had into a harp
    and hollered when he found his heart,
    still moist and pumping,
    lying at the bottom of a shot glass.
    Everybody wanted a way up and out of that town,
    a town so small, such a fist of heat and no stars,
    that I was able to tuck it all into my cheek
    before I stood on my long brown lightning legs
    and flew.
    The backhand slap that stopped me was called Chicago.
    I ran into the first open door
    and screamed Mississippi into a microphone,
    knocking out most of my teeth in the process.
    The men, long cool wisps of glimmer,
    fed me whiskey, dressed me red, called me baby,
    laid me down in their king beds,
    mapped my widening body, flowered me.
    At night I swallowed their cigarette smoke,
    swiveled my fat, and gave them Mississippi—
    the proper name for the growing larger,
    the blue black, the heavy ankles,
    the stiff store-bought auburn flip. By then,
    I had to be dead to leave.
    Now I sit and watch the white girls
    wiggle in to ask for my signing on something.
    They wait till they think my back is turned
    and they laugh at the black hole of my mouth,
    the spilling out, my red wig sweat-sliding.
    They wonder how I stuff all this living
    into lamé two sizes too gold,
    laugh at how I write my name real slow.
    I just tap my slingback, smile real grateful-like,
    wait till they try to leave. Then I grab one of ’em,
    haul her back by that stringy perfumed head,
    and growl what the city taught me:
    You hearin’ me? You hear?
    I might not have but one tooth left.
    But at least
    it’s gold.

walloping! magnifying of a guy’s anatomy easily
    Subject line for a junk e-mail touting a “penile enhancer”
    Emmett was all pelvis, theatrics
    in lieu of heft and measure.
    I threw Rich out of bed
    and made him dance naked
    in the hall. His spurt was ludicrous.
    A.J.’s cocked to the left,
    dots of Hai Karate flowering
    his testes. And the bubbled one
    with gut smothering the stub.
    Florid dramas of the teeny weenie,
    the entertainments of strut,
    snug synthetic fibers, blustery spiels.
    And now this little yellow pill
    that grows even history huge.
    And easily. Yes, and damn.

10 WAYS TO GET RAY CHARLES AND RONALD REAGAN INTO THE SAME POEM
    1.
    Begin with the rhythm of chapped hands traversing
    the naked hips of a Raelette. Begin with the whispered
    boundaries of a gone world. Forced to craft other English,
    men stutter with their surfaces, jump when they touch
    something raw. At birth, the cottony light of the real grew
    faint until music swelled its arcing arms and claimed him.
    At the very second of heaven, a history swerved close,
    teased, but did not return. He said good-bye to strangers.
    2.
    What heaven would have him, ashed, so much of hollow,
    now irritably whole? Imagine the gasping and gulping, the
    sputtered queries at the sight of sunflowers and foil. There’s
    a holy niche in hell for these harbingers of hard wisdoms,
    men with this strain of jazz in them, men who have seen the
    inward of women, heard colors settle, eased shameful things
    into their mouths. The Last Rapture is best without his kind,
    without his crazed seeing knock splintering the gilded