For Patricia Smith
She rises from a chair and slides toward the stage
with satin feet over a worn-wood floor.
She bears down on the microphone
like a blues singer about to reveal
some secrets. A fever of poems in her hand.
She seizes the mike and begins her seduction.
I’m in the back of the bar, my head down.
The things she does to me with words.
I want to leave. I want her never to begin.
She starts with a poem about Daddy-love
and I feel like getting up right there
and yelling: Don’t read that poem!
That one that causes little bursts
of screams inside my head,
that makes tears come to my eyes,
that I refuse to let fall.
Don’t read that poem!
The one about a daughter raped and killed
in the shadow of a second’s dark fury.
I want to hide in the neon glare above me,
to swim away in the glass of beer
I hold close to me.
She does another poem
about her many mouths
and I want to howl:
Don’t read that poem!
That one that entices me
to crawl under her skin,
to be her heartbeat.
Oh, how she plunks the right notes,
rendering me as clay in bruised hands.
No, don’t do the one about
what it is to be a nine-year-old black girl,
the truth of it trembling at my feet.
Somebody should make her stop!
I should be home, watching TV,
blank-eyed behind stale headlines,
cold popcorn on the couch,
a dusty turntable going round and round and round.
I should be fixing a car. Or shooting eight-ball.
But I can’t leave. I need to taste the salt of her soliloquy,
to be drunk with the sobriety
of her verse quaking beneath my eyelids.