ELEGGUA AND ESHU AIN’T THE SAME

I’m listening to Alice Coltrane to feel Blacker than God

while I pull gray hairs out my head. One wish, two wish.

I can’t stand my own body. My body can’t stand itself

so my head hair spirals like rivers storming up

to the sky. My hands are ashy and Jergens don’t help,

might as well use water. Might as well turn my fingers

into the rivers my sister’s ex-boyfriend taught me.

The strange ways men touch each other, the codices

writing themselves in tribes. Don’t forget. You can’t forget.

What colors could I wear more dangerous

than the one I was born with, collard greens

and cigarette smoke in my clothes, Johnny Walker

strutting down my uncles’ throats. When one wilds out

his brother rubs his back. You a damn fool. Some blues

got in the potato salad. Some “Wang Dang Doodle”

found a home in my ten-year-old hips. My body don’t

give a damn about me like my mind do. Growing up,

I snapped Barbie’s head from her body. I snapped

like Chaka Khan at the end of “Through the Fire.”

There is rage in the chicken fried so hard

the bones edible. I suck on the marrow to blacken

my gums. Somebody pulled out the Crown Royal

bag to find a quarter and a shirt button, sewed

that shit in on the spot and gave a neighbor bus fare.

“I’m Going Down” is playing and I can’t tell which

woman is singing it. Must be Rose Royce cause her sorrow

don’t sound like Mary’s dirge though they both got two

sets of wings sprouting from their lips. All God’s Chillun Got…

and someone reneges at the table and we all ignore

the gunshots down the street. Our names not on

the bullets. They aim around here. Spade cut a heart

now a heart’s on the table breaking hearts. When am I?

I’m sixteen and watching a friend rub the blue dye

off a boy’s jeans onto her white pants, ass looking

like a spring sky. His face humiliated with lust.

Was it Aaliyah or Outkast that got her jinxing color

from cloth, coaxing a boy into manhood that faded

swiftly? Me and you…your mama and your cou-sin too,

sneaking us liquor on the back porch, birthday cake

and shit talk in the air, somebody back inside

raging about high school beef. Kick his ass

out the party. Let him stand by the door, be security.

Can’t let everybody in the house. I’m back

with my family and my sister’s playing with the dead

again, crying to the glossolalia of “Tha Crossroads.”

The one white boy we had on the block got shot.

They called him Cornflake. I don’t know

what year I’m in anymore. Eazy-E dead,

Tupac and Biggie still breathing. The Isley Brothers

sing “Make Me Say It Again Girl” and my sis and I sing

what we know: Make me say—so you won’t be lonely.

The generations have conspired against me.

River in my head. I’m pulling and pulling. Somebody

in my head want out. I stopped singing in church

when the songs didn’t make the dead come back.

My rage stopped working, too. The cursing in shadows,

the shadow boxing. The house so safe it wasn’t

safe no more. I must’ve hid that part of me under

the doorstep outside. Went back to look and I was gone.