Patricia Smith

MOTOWN CROWN

The Temps, all swerve and pivot, conjured schemes
that had us skipping school, made us forget
how mamas schooled us hard against the threat
of five-part harmony and sharkskin seams.
We spent our schooldays balanced on the beams
of moon we wished upon, the needled jetblack
45s that spun and hadn’t yet
become the dizzy spinning of our dreams.
Sugar Pie, Honey Bun, oh you
loved our nappy hair and rusty knees.
Marvin Gaye slowed down while we gave chase
and then he was our smokin’ fine taboo.
We hungered for the anguished screech of Please
inside our chests—relentless, booming bass.

_____

Inside our chests, relentless booming bass
softened to the turn of Smokey’s key.
His languid, liquid, luscious, aching plea
for bodies we didn’t have yet made a case
for lying to ourselves. He could erase
our bowlegs, raging pimples, we could see
his croon inside our clothes, his pedigree
of milky flawless skin. Oh, we’d replace
our daddies with his fine and lanky frame,
I did you wrong, my heart went out to play
he serenaded, filling up the space
that separated Smoke from certain flame.
We couldn’t see the drug of him—OK,
silk where his throat should be. He growled such grace.

_____

Silk where his throat should be, and growling grace,
Little Stevie made us wonder why
we even needed sight. His rhythm eye
could see us click our hips and swerve in place
whenever he cut loose. Ooh, we’d unlace
our Converse All-Stars. Yeah, we wondered why
we couldn’t get down without our shoes, we’d try
and dance and keep up with his funky pace
of hiss and howl and hum, and then he’d slow
to twist our hearts until he heard them crack,
ignoring what was leaking from the seams.
The rockin’ blind boy couldn’t help but show
us light. We bellowed every soulful track
from open window, ’neath the door—pipe dreams.

_____

From open windows, ’neath the doors, pipe dreams
taught us bone, bouffant and nicotine
and served up Lady D, the boisterous queen
of overdone, her body built from beams
of awkward light. Her bug-eyed brash extremes
dizzied normal girls. The evergreen
machine, so clean and mean, dabbed kerosene
behind our ears and said Now burn. Our screams
meant only that our hips would now be thin,
that we’d hear symphonies, wouldn’t hurry love,
as Diana said, Make sure it gleams
no matter what it is. Her different spin,
a voice like sugar air, no inkling of
a soul beneath the vinyl. The Supremes.

_____

That soul beneath the vinyl, the Supremes
knew nothing of it. They were breathy sighs
and fluid hips, soul music’s booby prize.
But Mary Wells, so drained of self-esteem,
was a pudgy, barstool-ridin’ buck-toothed dream
who none of us would dare to idolize
out loud. She had our mamas’ grunt and thighs
and we preferred to just avoid THAT theme—
as well as war and God and gov’ment cheese
and bullets in the street and ghetto blight.
While Mary’s “My Guy” blared, we didn’t think race,
’cause there was all that romance, and the keys
that Motown held. Unlocked, we’d soon ignite.
We stockpiled extra sequins, just in case.

_____

We stockpiled extra sequins, just in case
the Marvelettes decided that our grit
was way beyond Diana’s, that we fit
inside their swirl, a much more naughty place.
Those girls came from the brick, we had to brace
ourselves against their heat, much too legit
to dress up as some other thing. We split
our blue jeans trying to match their pace.
And soon our breasts commenced to pop, we spoke
in deeper tones, and Berry Gordy looked
and licked his lips. Our only saving grace?
The luscious, liquid languid tone of Smoke,
the soundtrack while our A-cup bras unhooked.
Our sudden Negro hips required more space.

_____

Our sudden Negro hips required more space,
but we pretended not to feel that spill
that changed the way we walked. And yes, we still
couldn’t help but feel so strangely out of place
while Motown filled our eager hearts with lace
and Valentines. Romance was all uphill,
no push, no prod, no shiny magic pill
could lift us to that light. No breathing space
in all that time. We grew like vines to sun,
and then we burned. As mamas shook their heads
and mourned our Delta names, we didn’t deem
to care. Religion—there was only one.
We took transistor preachers to our beds
and Smokey sang a lyric dripping cream.

_____

While Smokey sang a lyric dripping cream,
Levi tried to woo us with his growl:
Can’t help myself. Admitted with a scowl,
his bit of weakness was a soulful scheme—
and we kept screaming, front row, under gleam
of lights, beside the speakers’ blasting vowels,
we rocked and screamed. Levi, on the prowl,
glowed black, a savior in the stagelight’s beam.
But then the stagelight dimmed, and there we were
in bodies primed—for what we didn’t know.
We sang off-key while skipping home alone.
Deceptions that you sing to tend to blur
and disappear in dance, why is that so?
Ask any colored girl and she will moan.

_____

Ask any colored girl and she will moan
an answer with a downbeat and a sleek
five-part croon. She’s dazzled, and she’ll shriek
what she’s been taught: She won’t long be alone,
or crazed with wanting more. One day she’ll own
that quiet heart that Motown taught to speak,
she’ll know that being the same makes her unique.
She’ll rest her butt on music’s paper throne
until the bassline booms, until some old
Temptation leers and says I’ll take you home
and heal you in the way the music vowed.
She’s trapped within his clutch, his perfumed hold,
dancing to his conjured, crafted poem,
remembering how. Love had lied so loud.

_____

Remembering how love had lied so loud,
we tangled in the rhythms that we chose.
Seduced by thump and sequins, heaven knows
we tried to live our looming lives unbowed,
but bending led to break. We were so proud
to mirror every lyric. Radios
spit beg and mend, and precious stereos
told us what we were and weren’t allowed.
Our daddies sweat in factories while we
found other daddies under limelight’s glow.
And then we begged those daddies to create
us. Like Stevie, help us blindly see
the rhythms, but instead, the crippling blow.
We whimpered while the downbeat dangled bait.

_____

We whimpered while the downbeat dangled bait,
we leapt and swallowed all the music said
while Smokey laughed and Marvin idly read
our minds and slapped us hard and slapped us straight,
and even then, we listened for the great
announcement of the drum, for tune to spread,
a Marvelette to pick up on the thread.
But as we know by now, it’s much too late
to reconsider love, or claw our way
through all the glow they tossed to slow our roll.
What we know now we should have always known.
When Smokey winked at us and then said They
don’t love you like I do, he snagged our soul.
We wound up doing the slow drag, all alone.

_____

They made us do the slow drag, all alone.
They made us kiss our mirrors, deal with heat,
our bodies sudden bumps. They danced deceit
and we did too, addicted to the drone
of revelation, all the notes they’d thrown
our way: Oh, love will change your life. The sweet
sweet fairy tale we spin will certainly beat
the real thing any day. Oh, yes we own
you now. We sang you pliable and clueless,
waiting, waiting, oh the dream you’ll hug
one day, the boy who craves you right out loud
in front of everyone. But we told you,
we know we did, we preached it with a shrug—
less than perfect love was not allowed.

_____

Less than perfect love was not allowed.
Temptations begged as if their every sway
depended on you coming home to stay.
Diana whispered air, aloof and proud
to be the perfect girl beneath a shroud
of glitter and a fright she held at bay.
And Michael Jackson, flailing in the fray
of daddy love, succumbed to every crowd.
What would we have done if not for them,
wooing us with roses carved of sound
and hiding muck we’re born to navigate?
Little did we know that they’d condemn
us to live so tethered to the ground.
While every song they sang told us to wait.

_____

Every song they sang told us to wait
and wait we did, our gangly heartbeats stunned
and holding place. Already so outgunned
we little girls obeyed. And now it’s late,
and CDs spinning only help deflate
us. The songs all say, Just look what you’ve done,
you’ve wished through your whole life. And one by one
your stupid sisters boogie to their fate.
So now, at fifty plus, I turn around
and see the glitter drifting in my wake
and mingling with the dirt. My dingy dreams
are shoved high on the shelf. They’re wrapped and bound
so I can’t see and contemplate the ache.
The Temps, all swirl and pivot, conjured schemes.

_____

The Temps, all swirl and pivot, conjured schemes
inside our chests, relentless booming bass
then silk where throats should be. Much growling grace
from open window, ’neath the door, pipe dreams—
that soul beneath the vinyl. The Supremes
used to stockpile extra sequins just in case
Diana’s Negro hips required more space,
while Smokey penned a lyric dripping cream.
Ask any colored girl, and she will moan,
remembering how love had lied so loud.
I whimpered while the downbeat dangled bait
and taught myself to slow drag, all alone.
Less than perfect love was not allowed
and every song they sang told me to wait.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
Tribute to the Sonnet
Pushcart Prize Nominee

Alison Townsend

THE ONLY SURVIVING RECORDING
OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S VOICE

I’m not expecting to hear her speak, stopped as I am
at a red light in Stoughton, Wisconsin, on the daily, desperate
dash home from work, my fractured spine throbbing
as if it housed my heart not my nerves, this snippet
on NPR as unexpected as recent November warm weather.
But here she is, sounding husky and a bit tired, her plummy
accent drawn out as she speaks about words, English
words…full of echoes and memories, associations
she does not name. It’s still 1937 in her mouth
and later I’ll learn that she’s not really talking at all,
but reading a talk called “Craftsmanship” on the BBC’s
program Words Fail Me, the script held up before her,
like a tablet of light in her long, white hands. Or a window
the sound of her voice opens in my head, her deliberate
phrasing a kind of eulogy to words and the way
They’ve been out and about on people’s lips, in houses,
on the streets for so many centuries, time passing in the hiss
and skritch of the tape. As I imagine her in the studio,
a bit tense perhaps, her hair in that dark knot, dressed up,
though no one will see her, though years later her nephew
will describe the recording as too fast, too flat, barely
recognizable, her beautiful voice (though not so beautiful
as Vanessa’s, he’ll add) deprived of all resonance and depth.
But I don’t know this as I listen, nothing to compare her to
but the sound her words made in my American head, as I lay
on my narrow dorm bed in my first November in college,
underlining phrase after phrase from To the Lighthouse
in turquoise or fuchsia ink, not because I understood
what they meant but because they sounded beautiful
aloud and my teacher had her photograph up in her office.
After my mother died, the first thing I forgot was the sound
of her voice, nothing to preserve it but a moment or two
on tape where she speaks in the background, saying
“Not now, not now,” as if no time would ever be right, even
that scrap vanished somewhere in the past. Though I recall it
as I listen to Virginia Woolf, her voice—which is nothing
like my mother’s, which my Woolf-scholar friend tells me
she “needs some time to get used to”—drifting on for eight
entire minutes, a kind of dream one could fall into, as words
stored with other meaning, other memories spill like smoke
from her throat and the light changes, and I drive on
through the gathering darkness, thinking about voices
and where they go when we die, how to describe pain
then leave it behind, her lamp in the spine
glowing, briefly lighting my way.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention
Pushcart Prize Nominee

Terrance Hayes

MODEL PRISON MODEL

Here in this small expertly crafted model
you can see the layout of the prison I will erect:
the 17,500 six-by-eight cells, the wards
for dreamers reduced to beggars to my right,

the wards for strangers who might be or become
enemies to my left. It has taken years of research
and perspiration to design and assemble
this miniature, but with your support

it should only take 12 to 18 months to build
it to functioning size. You may note the words
(Prison is for the unindoctrinated) painted
on the tiny sign at the main gate are still wet.

I finished them while waiting for you to arrive.
They are the smell of civilization in the air.
Let me direct your attentions to the barbed wire
which thickens to a virtual cyclone of fangs

above the prison. With a good fence
to draw upon I was able to create
a terrific somberness and then lie down
and look through it at the prisoners

and officers inside. I feel like this is a good time
to tell you my father, mother and closest cousin
have worked decades as correctional officers
for the State. Nonetheless when I, a black poet,

was asked to participate in the construction
of this vision, I was surprised.
During those first uninspired years I smoked
so much I would have set myself on fire

had I not been weeping most of the time.
I am told the first time my uncle was an inmate,
my father would find him cowering
in his cell like a folded rag. Between jail

he works Saturdays helping out a man
at a flea market fruit stand, my uncle Junior.
You will note the imposing guard towers
at each corner of the prison. In the yard

below them I will loose vicious, obedient dogs.
Whether you consider dogs symbols
of security or symbols of danger depends
upon whether you’re inside or outside

the fence. In our current positions
around the model you and I represent
the mulling picketers: the just and vengeful,
the holy and grief-stricken citizens.

Standing along the corridor
leading to the preliminary de-dressing area,
several savage and savaged widows will insult
the new inmates. Even a slur is a form

of welcome. I plan to have the vocalists
among the prisoners sing for the old men
who die there. Perhaps their song will soften
the picketers. The prison of the picketer,

let me remark, is a landscape of dry riverbeds,
canyons and caves. During the uninspired hours
I imagined that land as the color of brick
set to flame. Everything gets tender in fire.

I imagined the melancholy stone of the prison
with a sort of geological desire. I imagined
the rehabilitated before the parole board
spilling brightly lit jive, alive with the indecipherable,

indecipherably alive. Everything is excited
by freedom. But I don’t know. I feel like no matter how
large we build this prison, it isn’t going to save us.
Please permit me to end my presentation for now.

We might get so caught up imagining the future,
we’ll never find our way. Come. Bend over and try
moving forward while looking between your legs
to get a sense of what it feels like trying to escape.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets
Pushcart Prize Nominee

Howard Price

CROW-MAGNON

Everybody’s dying this week,
and for no good reason, that is, no money in it,
and suddenly second opinions are like men wearing
tiaras and women at the gym 4 days a week building huge
arms so they can both look better in a dress. For sure,
third and fourth opinions at a minimum now, since it occurs
to us that the real money’s not in dying but living, and doing
whatever, to hide the forty years of duct tape that holds
us together, is not such an unreasonable ploy. The new plan is to
benefit the whole time we’re alive, make out like undertakers,
even as we prolong the agony of playing second banana
to our bodies, as if playing second fiddle is too respectable,
as if the timbered glow of maple, spruce and willow
played by horsehair on sheep guts, is. It’s impossible to stop
people from watching a crow and its chosen profession
of turning a wrapper over and over in the street for an hour
until it’s found whatever isn’t inside wasn’t worth the effort.
Crows live in neither one of two moments of contemplation.
The transparent thoughts of their starless lifetimes
have yet to cross the endless reach of their one contiguous mind,
and before we count every step we’ve never taken back to home,
they’ll pull each day from our thinning hair as needed,
while we watch amused, happy we’re not so stupid.
Very often one crow gets what another crow wants.
Same goes for people. God can’t tell us apart either.
Just watching the trick, the magic,
the reveal of how many ways the same thing
may be done to great or little effect, we, who are
so easily drawn to any mindless exhibition, end up
postponing strategies that could cure or move the world.
After a while, if we’ve lost our way and have deferred
the objective that we’d promised to commit to fully
for a crow’s age, and another crow’s age, and another
and another, we turn around and paste the blame
on the odd habits of a clever bird with fifty billion twins
that seems so happy unearthing a useless treasure
from a paper bag, and then shamefully admit
that watching its never-ending gig
is no less interesting to us, the very same,
who threw the bag on the street,
in the first place.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention
Pushcart Prize Nominee

Heather Bell

LOVE

The truth about Klimt is: when he painted “The Kiss,”
he was also beating his beautiful wife. He beat her
with one hand and painted with the other. He got
two sad blisters on his right palm from this. His wife
sometimes slowly pulled up the roots to his favorite
willows and cut them, delicately, and then buried
them again. He jokes, “that’s what I get for marrying

a woman from a sanitarium!” but she was from
Vienna, they met in the street, he stopped her and
she believed his eyes said, “I do not want to die,
do not let me die,” so she touched his face, there,
in the street, as a person touches a comma on a
page after they have returned home from a place
that has no commas. On their wedding night, she

ran him a lukewarm bath and his testicles looked
like overripe plums. He raped her until a low moan
seemed to come from the walls, as if wolves were
angry and coming and Klimt went to bed forcefully
and his wife went to bed with dirty blood around
her nostrils and mouth. It goes on like this for years,

just as it goes on for years for everyone who marries
someone they cannot love. You step, body over
body, into the kitchen to kiss your sweat and rot
good morning. “Let me tell you something,” she
says on the day that he paints “The Kiss” and he
hits her in the head before she can remember the
something. She thinks it might have been important.
It might have been something. When he shows

the painting to his friends, they say he must be
the most romantic man in the world and she nods.
And the man in the painting pushes the woman
down further, flows into her, gold and angry, and
her eyes are shut and they do not look clenched
and this is puzzling, but no one else seems to notice.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Pushcart Prize Nominee