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  THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES

  The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of five poetry books annually through participating publishers. Publication is funded by the Lannan Foundation; the late James A. Michener and Edward J. Piszek through the Copernicus Society of America; Stephen Graham; International Institute of Modern Letters; Joyce & Seward Johnson Foundation; Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation; and the Tiny Tiger Foundation. This project also is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.

  2005 COMPETITION WINNERS

  Steve Gehrke of Columbia, Missouri,

  Michelangelo’s Seizure

  Chosen by T. R. Hummer, University of Illinois

  Press

  Nadine Meyer of Columbia, Missouri,

  The Anatomy Theater

  Chosen by John Koethe, HarperCollins

  Patricia Smith of Tarrytown, New York,

  Teahouse of the Almighty

  Chosen by Edward Sanders, Coffee House Press

  S. A. Stepanek of West Chicago, Illinois,

  Three, Breathing

  Chosen by Mary Ruefle, Wave Books

  Tryfon Tolides of Farmington, Connecticut,

  An Almost Pure Empty Walking

  Chosen by Mary Karr, Penguin Books

  COPYRIGHT © 2006 Patricia Smith

  COVER & BOOK DESIGN Linda S. Koutsky

  COVER ARTWORK © Maurice Evans (mauriceevansart.com)

  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © Peter Dressel (peterdressel.com)

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, 1045 Westgate Drive, Saint Paul, MN 55114. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to: Coffee House Press, 27 North Fourth Street, Suite 400, Minneapolis, MN 554.01.

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals help make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  Good books are brewing at coffeehousepress.org

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Smith, Patricia

  Teahouse of the almighty : poems / by Patricia Smith.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-56689-366-4

  1. African Americans—Poetry.1. Title.

  PS3569.M537839T43 2006

  378. 1'06—DC22

  2006011899

  FIRST EDITION | FIRST PRINTING

  135798642

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications where these poems first appeared: Spirit and Flame: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Poetry: “Building Nicole’s Mama,” Asheville Poetry Review: “Map Rappin’,” Underwood Review: “Forgotten in All This,” Willow Review: “Teahouse of the Almighty,” Callaloo: “Her Other Name.”

  Special thanks to Edward Sanders, and to the benefactors and supporters of the National Poetry Series; to Luis Rodriguez, Michael Warr, and Marc Smith for an invaluable birth; to Stephen Dobyns and Tom Lux for the friendship, support, and unflinching guidance; to the national poetry slam community and the staff and students of Cave Canem, and to Kwame Dawes, the perfect “go-to guy.”

  For Mikaila, The Face, who lights every corner of my world and work.

  For Bruce, my doting husband and partner, the consummate editor.

  For Damon, my son, who will prevail.

  And for Boof! Fwa!

  CONTENTS

  Building Nicole’s Mama

  Giving Birth to Soldiers

  It Had the Beat Inevitable

  Mississippi’s Legs

  walloping! magnifying of a guy’s anatomy easily

  10 Ways to Get Ray Charles and Ronald Reagan Into the Same Poem

  The World Won’t Wait

  Listening at the Door

  The End of a Marriage

  Boy Dies, Girlfriend Gets His Heart

  Dumpsters, Wastebaskets, Shallow Graves

  To 3, No One in the Place

  Sacrifice

  My Million Fathers, Still Here Past

  How to Be a Lecherous Little Old Black Man and Make Lots of Money

  Hallelujah With Your Name

  Little Poetry

  Can’t Hear Nothing for That Damned Train

  Drink, You Motherfuckers

  Deltateach

  Creatively Loved

  Elegantly Ending

  Sex and Music

  Map Rappin’

  In the Audience Tonight

  Weapon Ultimate

  Scribe

  The Circus Is In Town

  Her Other Name

  Forgotten in All This

  Down 4 the Up Stroke

  Women Are Taught

  Look at ’Em Go

  Stop the Presses

  What You Pray Toward

  What Men Do With Their Mouths

  Dream Dead Daddy Walking

  Writing Exercise Breathing Outside My Binder

  The Thrill Is On

  Blues Through 2 Bone

  Fireman

  Psyche!

  Related to the Buttercup, Blooms in Spring

  When Dexter King Met James Earl Ray

  All His Distressing Disguises

  Teahouse of the Almighty

  Running for Aretha

  When the Burning Begins

  If thou be more than hate or atmosphere

  Step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves.

  Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves.

  —GWENDOLYN BROOKS

  BUILDING NICOLE’S MAMA

  for the 6th grade class of Lillie C. Evans School, Liberty City, Miami

  I am astonished at their mouthful names—

  Lakinishia, Fumilayo, Chevellanie, Delayo—

  their ragged rebellions and lip-glossed pouts,

  and all those pants drooped as drapery.

  I rejoice when they kiss my face, whisper wet

  and urgent in my ear, make me their obsession

  because I have brought them poetry.

  They shout me raw, bruise my wrists with pulling,

  and brashly claim me as mama as they

  cradle my head in their little laps,

  waiting for new words to grow in my mouth.

  You.

  You.

  You.

  Angry, jubilant, weeping poets—we are all

  saviors, reluctant hosannas in the limelight,

  but you knew that, didn’t you? Then let us

  bless this sixth grade class—40 nappy heads,

  40 cracking voices, and all of them

  raise their hands when I ask. They have all seen

  the Reaper, grim in his heavy robe,

  pushing the button for the dead project elevator,

  begging for a break at the corner pawn shop,

  cackling wildly in the back pew of the Baptist church.

  I ask the death question and forty fists

  punch the air, me!, me! And O’Neal,

  matchstick crack child, watched his mother’s

  body become a claw, and 9-year-old Tiko Jefferson,

  barely big enough to lift the gun, fired a bullet

  into his own throat after Mama bended his back

  with a lead pipe. Tamika cried into a sofa pillow

  when Daddy blasted Mama into the north wall

  of their cluttered one-room apartment,

  Donya’s cousin gone in a drive-by. Dark window,

  click, click, gone, says Donya, her tiny finger

  a
barrel, the thumb a hammer. I am shocked

  by their losses—and yet when I read a poem

  about my own hard-eyed teenager, Jeffery asks

  He is dead yet?

  It cannot be comprehended,

  my 18-year-old still pushing and pulling

  his own breath. And those 40 faces pity me,

  knowing that I will soon be as they are,

  numb to our bloodied histories,

  favoring the Reaper with a thumbs-up and a wink,

  hearing the question and shouting me, me,

  Miss Smith, I know somebody dead!

  Can poetry hurt us? they ask me before

  snuggling inside my words to sleep.

  1 love you, Nicole says, Nicole wearing my face,

  pimples peppering her nose, and she is as black

  as angels are. Nicole’s braids clipped, their ends

  kissed with match flame to seal them,

  and can you teach me to write a poem about my mother?

  I mean, you write about your daddy and he dead,

  can you teach me to remember my mama?

  A teacher tells me this is the first time Nicole

  has admitted that her mother is gone,

  murdered by slim silver needles and a stranger

  rifling through her blood, the virus pushing

  her skeleton through for Nicole to see.

  And now this child with rusty knees

  and mismatched shoes sees poetry as her scream

  and asks me for the words to build her mother again.

  Replacing the voice.

  Stitching on the lost flesh.

  So poets,

  as we pick up our pens,

  as we flirt and sin and rejoice behind microphones—

  remember Nicole.

  She knows that we are here now,

  and she is an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

  And she is waiting.

  And she

  is

  waiting.

  And she waits.

  GIVING BIRTH TO SOLDIERS

  February 1, 2005—Tabitha Bonilla’s husband, Army Captain Orlando A. Bonilla, 27, was killed Wednesday in a helicopter accident in Baghdad. Her father, Army Sergeant First Class Henry A. Bacon, 45, died in Iraq last February.

  She will pin ponderous medals to her

  housedress, dripping the repeated roses,

  while she claws through boxes filled with

  him and then him. The accepting of God’s

  weird wisdom takes place over forkfuls

  of rubbery casseroles and the snowy vows

  of newsmen who measure her worth

  in cued weeping. She offers her husband’s

  hands, a shrine of their mingled smells,

  a warm seat on a couch of napped corduroy.

  They offer one polished bone, scrubbed

  clean of war. And she babbles of links and

  irony, shrugs her numb shoulders, and feels

  dimly blessed as a door slams shut on both

  sides of her head. Suddenly, she is her

  only history. Smiling politely beneath a fierce

  salute, propped upright behind the crumpled

  ghosts of her men, she is the catchy logo

  for a confounded country. This day is the day

  she has. Tomorrow, she will touch her own

  breasts, she will dismantle a gaudy altar

  with her teeth. And she will ask a bemused God

  for guidance as she steps back into line,

  her womb tingling vaguely with the next soldier.

  IT HAD THE BEAT INEVITABLE

  It’s all right what Bobby Womack taught us, what Chaka growled,

  O.K. to flaunt the hard stone double dutch planted in our calves.

  Forgive Smokey for sending us off to search for that white horse

  and the half-white boy riding it. Go on, shove that peppermint stick

  down the center of that sour pickle, dine on a sandwich of Wonder

  and souse, take your stand in that black woman assembly line to

  scrape the scream from chitlins. It’s all right that Mama caught the

  ’hound up from Alabama, that Daddy rode up from Arkansas and

  you’re the only souvenir they got. We brown girls, first generation

  brick, sparkling in Dacron and pink sweat socks, we went the only

  way we could. Our weather vane, whirling in Chicago wind, was the

  rusted iron torso of a stout black woman. We vanished for a while.

  Gwen Brooks hissed Follow. We had no choice.

  MISSISSIPPI’S LEGS

  for Koko Taylor

  It was black out there.

  The starless Alabama night

  pressed against my skin,

  hard like a man, steam I couldn’t fathom.

  I was 14. I was trouble.

  My chest bulged with wrong moving

  and other women’s men lapped up my smell—

  the smell of a gun barrel

  once the bullet is gone.

  Fat flies, blood loony and irritated by the moon,

  nibbled at my ankles and buzzed sweet Jesus

  when they tasted the thick sweet oil

  I rubbed in to make my legs shine.

  I was 14. My hips were wide, keening.

  I had lightning bolts for legs.

  Wrinkled women, grateful for the sleeping sun,

  shucked peas, ripped silk from corn,

  rocked do-diddy rhythms on fallen porches.

  Boys with earth naps screeched crave into the air

  and waited for answers and somewhere

  a man named J.T. or Diamond or Catfish

  blew everything he had into a harp

  and hollered when he found his heart,

  still moist and pumping,

  lying at the bottom of a shot glass.

  Everybody wanted a way up and out of that town,

  a town so small, such a fist of heat and no stars,

  that I was able to tuck it all into my cheek

  before I stood on my long brown lightning legs

  and flew.

  The backhand slap that stopped me was called Chicago.

  I ran into the first open door

  and screamed Mississippi into a microphone,

  knocking out most of my teeth in the process.

  The men, long cool wisps of glimmer,

  fed me whiskey, dressed me red, called me baby,

  laid me down in their king beds,

  mapped my widening body, flowered me.

  At night I swallowed their cigarette smoke,

  swiveled my fat, and gave them Mississippi—

  the proper name for the growing larger,

  the blue black, the heavy ankles,

  the stiff store-bought auburn flip. By then,

  I had to be dead to leave.

  Now I sit and watch the white girls

  wiggle in to ask for my signing on something.

  They wait till they think my back is turned

  and they laugh at the black hole of my mouth,

  the spilling out, my red wig sweat-sliding.

  They wonder how I stuff all this living

  into lamé two sizes too gold,

  laugh at how I write my name real slow.

  I just tap my slingback, smile real grateful-like,

  wait till they try to leave. Then I grab one of ’em,

  haul her back by that stringy perfumed head,

  and growl what the city taught me:

  You hearin’ me? You hear?

  I might not have but one tooth left.

  But at least

  it’s gold.

  walloping! magnifying of a guy’s anatomy easily

  Subject line for a junk e-mail touting a “penile enhancer”

  Emmett was all pelvis, theatrics

  in lieu of heft and measure.

  I threw Rich out of bed

  and made him d
ance naked

  in the hall. His spurt was ludicrous.

  A.J.’s cocked to the left,

  dots of Hai Karate flowering

  his testes. And the bubbled one

  with gut smothering the stub.

  Florid dramas of the teeny weenie,

  the entertainments of strut,

  snug synthetic fibers, blustery spiels.

  And now this little yellow pill

  that grows even history huge.

  And easily. Yes, and damn.

  10 WAYS TO GET RAY CHARLES AND RONALD REAGAN INTO THE SAME POEM

  1.

  Begin with the rhythm of chapped hands traversing

  the naked hips of a Raelette. Begin with the whispered

  boundaries of a gone world. Forced to craft other English,

  men stutter with their surfaces, jump when they touch

  something raw. At birth, the cottony light of the real grew

  faint until music swelled its arcing arms and claimed him.

  At the very second of heaven, a history swerved close,

  teased, but did not return. He said good-bye to strangers.

  2.

  What heaven would have him, ashed, so much of hollow,

  now irritably whole? Imagine the gasping and gulping, the

  sputtered queries at the sight of sunflowers and foil. There’s

  a holy niche in hell for these harbingers of hard wisdoms,

  men with this strain of jazz in them, men who have seen the

  inward of women, heard colors settle, eased shameful things

  into their mouths. The Last Rapture is best without his kind,

  without his crazed seeing knock splintering the gilded wood.

  3.

  Which is the kill that repeats: To lose what you have seen, or

  never to see what you have already lost? And the ears become

  earth drums, huge hands, vessels. They rush to scream him

  everything, including dust, cerulean, the moist blinking of a

  woman’s hip. Even touch gets loud, shocking his long fingers,

  jolting him upright in the damnable dark. His days become

  his skin, blank and patient. Even when bellowed, many words,

  like today and never, translate to nothing truly seen or known.

  4.

  Sudden mothers, lying clocks, warm canes. Women are

  everywhere. He has buckled beneath their gazing, knowing

  how truly they see him, straining erect, eyes bop-do-ditty in

  a bobbing head. He allows them their pity strolls across his

  map while he moves his palms up and down, flat against their