A COLORED GIRL WILL SLICE YOU IF YOU TALK WRONG ABOUT MOTOWN

The men and women who coupled, causing us, first

arrived confounded. Surrounded by teetering towers

of no, not now, and you shoulda known better, they

cowered and built little boxes of Northern home,

crammed themselves inside, feasted on the familiar

of fat skin and the unskimmed, made gods of doors.

When we came—the same insistent bloody and question

we would have been down South—they clutched us,

plumped us on government cereal drenched in Carnation,

slathered our hair, faces, our fat wiggling arms and legs

with Vaseline. We shined like the new things we were.

The city squared its teeth, smiled oil, smelled the sour

each hour left at the corner of our mouths. Our parents

threw darts at the day. They romanced shut factories,

waged hot battle with skittering roaches and vermin,

lumbered after hunches. Their newborn children grew

like streetlights. We grew like insurance payments.

We grew like resentment. And since no tall sweet gum

thrived to offer its shouldered shade, no front porch

lesson spun wide to craft our wrong or righteous,

our parents loosed us into the crumble, into the glass,

into the hips of a new city. They trusted exploded

summer hydrants, scarlet licorice whips, and crumbling

rocks of government cheese to conjure a sort of joy,

trusted joy to school us in the woeful limits of jukeboxes

and moonwash. Freshly dunked in church water, slapped

away from double negatives and country ways, we were

orphans of the North Star, dutifully sacrificed, our young

bodies arranged on sharp slabs of boulevard. We learned

what we needed, not from our parents and their rumored

South, but from the gospel seeping through the sad gap

in Mary Wells’s grin. Smokey slow-sketched pictures

of our husbands, their future skins flooded with white light,

their voices all remorse and atmospheric coo. Little Stevie

squeezed his eyes shut on the soul notes, replacing his

dark with ours. Diana was the bone our mamas coveted,

the flow of slip silver they knew was buried deep beneath

their rollicking heft. Every lyric, growled or sweet from

perfect brown throats, was instruction: Sit pert, pout, and

seamed silk. Then watch him beg. Every spun line was

consolation: You’re such a good girl. If he has not arrived,

he will. Every wall of horn, every slick choreographed

swivel, threaded us with the rhythm of the mildly wild.

We slept with transistor radios, worked the two silver knobs,

one tiny earbud blocking out the roar of our parents’ tardy

attempts to retrieve us. Instead, we snuggled with the Temps,

lined up five pretty men across. And damned if they didn’t

begin every one of their songs with the same word: Girl.