“Cruisin’,” Smokey Robinson plays for Glynis
the genes in my family are strong. everybody got a doppelganger. at least 10 years their senior
take my sister, sam. got my mama whole face 33 years later. look like my brother spit my nephew zay right out his left nut. and he aint even his boy. bricyn make it seem like akil was born twice. all the way up to the autism. me,
i lent my likeness to joe//in more ways than one. he got my gap-tooth’d smile
the twinkle in my eye & the twinkle in his
wrist too.
me, i look so much like my aunty glynis, in my gramma’s last years there wasn’t even a chance she’d tell us apart. aunty say i’m her bonus daughter. in secret. out of wedlock. say she let my mama borrow me on account of what they say about women with kids but no man.
no man. i ain’t never seen her with no man.
baby daddy dead.
husband dead.
dead, years before my mama even thought of havin’ a baby girl.
aunty got a daughter of her own tho. a pretty brown- skin thang with a gap like the best of us and eyes light something like Smokey Robinson.
& ain’t no man aunty love more than light-eyed smokey.
no man.
i seen her eyes light
up at his tender pitch. a perfect kind of soft and bright.
i ain’t saying she never longed for a loving touch. that she never rolled over to an empty bedside
and wept a river of lonely.
i’m saying she make flying solo look like a drop-top drive down the pacific coast.
i’m sayin i ain’t never felt more felt than when watchin’ her live out her every dream with a passport in one palm and unlimited freedom in the other.
You’re gonna fly away, glad you’re goin’ my way
I love it when we’re cruisin’ together