For Gwendolyn Brooks
Winter, with its numbing gusts and giddy twists of ice,
is gone now. It’s time for warmth again.
So where is Gwendolyn Brooks?
Its huge shoulders slumped, Chicago craves her hobble,
turns pissed and gray, undusts her name.
To know her,
you need to ride her city’s wide watery hips,
you need to inhale an obscene sausage
smothered in gold slipping onions
while standing on a chaotic streetcross
where any jazz could be yours.
Walk the hurting fields of the West Side,
our slice of city burned to bones in ’68:
Goldblatt’s, the colored Bloomingdale’s, gone.
Lerners, where we learned pinafore, gone.
No more havens for layaway, no more places
to plop down a dollar a week for P.F. Flyers
or wool jumpers with seams glued shut.
The meat market with its bloody sawdust, torched,
its Jewish proprietors now crisping languid
under Florida sun. And flap-jowled Mayor Daley,
our big benevolent murderous daddy,
gifted us with high-rise castles crafted of dirty dollars,
battered cans of bumpy milk, free cheese.
To know Gwen, you need to know the Alex,
the only movie theater West, where frisky rats
big as toddlers poked slow noses into your popcorn,
then locked red round eyes on Cleopatra Jones
and sat, confident and transfixed.
After the movies and any street corner’s fried lunch,
we’d head to “the store in back of that fat man’s house”
to surrender hoarded quarters for the latest 45,
stripped licorice in black or red,
pork rinds, Boston Baked Beans,
or fat sour pickles floating in a jar in the corner.
The fat man’s wife, Miss Caroline,
plunged her hammy forearm into the brine,
pulled out the exact pickle you pointed to
and shoved it deep into a single-ply paper bag.
Only the truly Negro would then poke
a peppermint stick down the center of that pickle
and slurp the dizzy of salt and sugar.
We gnawed rock-stiff candy dots off paper columns,
suffered Lemonheads and Red Hots,
pushed neon sweatsocks down on Vaselined calves,
and my Lord, we learned to switch. For a dime,
the fat man would warm up the record player,
click reject and give us a hit of Ms. Fontella Bass’s
heartbroke heart clamoring for rescue,
or Ruby Andrews steady wailing in a woman way.
There were so many millions of each one of us,
ashy goddesses walking the wild West,
strutting past sloped storefronts where brown meat
and hog heads crowded the windows,
past shuttered groceries, and gas stations
with pump boys eyeing our new undulating asses,
past fashion palaces where almost no money
satisfied our yearning for hollow glamour
with cheap threads already unraveling.
Observe the kick-ass angle of our crowns.
Chicago girls just keep coming back.
They don’t hear you,
they don’t see you,
they ain’t never really needed you.
They got the Holy Ghost and Garfield Park,
on one city block, they got a hundred ways to buy chicken,
they jump rope nasty and barefoot in the dirt,
they got the ooh achie koo,
the pink plastic clothesline underhand,
they got the slip bone. They got the Gwen in them.
Any jazz could be ours, and her jazz was.
Unflinching in riotous headwrap
and thick, two-shades-too stockings,
she penned the soundtrack of we because she knew,
because she was skinny early church and not bending,
because no man could ever hold her the way hurt did,
because she could peer at you over those Coke-bottle specs,
fast gal, and turn the sorry sight of you into her next poem.
Each year she stays gone, we colored girls aimlessly bop
and search dangerous places for music.
Chicago bows its huge head, grudgingly accepts spring.
God, if there is a You, there must surely still be a her.
Stop the relentless seasons. Show us Your face,
explain Your skewed timing,
Your wacky choice of angels.