Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah Read online

  My clanging harbor, almost overnight

  you’ve wooed me with the terrifying threat

  of bustling where I’m not. I crave your bite,

  the way your every touch tends to reset

  my temperature, that strut you strut beside

  me, arcing, shielding, sewing shut that seam

  where light leaks in. I’m one child, magnified,

  so many of us, thousands, suddenly seem

  so snug within your arms. I weep on cue.

  I finally found religion, named it you.

  3315 W. WASHINGTON, 3A

  This is heartbeat now—shadowbox, dinette

  purchased with slow nickels, skittering mice

  wedged beneath the stove, warbling their regret

  like balladeers. This patchwork paradise

  smells vaguely of impending sacrifice

  and admissions of defeat. Better yet,

  it stinks of chance, the brash tossing of dice.

  This is heartbeat now—shadowbox, dinette,

  paid for on time, such fashionable debt

  for thin and collapsible merchandise

  that’s prayed for, then thrown out. A safety net

  purchased with slow nickels. Skittering mice

  know no one will heed their feverish advice

  even as they croon in doomed, blue quartet.

  Their soundtrack of the slum, fractured, concise,

  intent beneath the stove, is warbled regret.

  Again, Chicago’s perfect silhouette

  reshapes the room, pretties up to entice

  the migrants, who sing city alphabet

  like balladeers. That patchwork paradise

  has vowed to save them—a jumble of vice

  and lies, northward promise, remembered sweat

  and sometimes dead mice might have to suffice

  before the revelation of sunset.

  This is heartbeat now.

  ALLIANCE

  All I wanted that year was one of those tall blonde

  dolls, always pale-named Susie something, a doll

  that bolted forward (“She’s magic! She walks! She

  looks just like you!”) when you squeezed her hand

  just so, one of those dolls with flat nightmare hair

  the color of exploded corn and a dress that glowed

  and crinkled and sparked. I wanted a perfect friend

  to stumble ahead with, an unyielding plastic to wrestle

  and wake against, all I wanted was blue flutter-lashed

  eyes flapping little voodoo, I wanted to fall in love

  with and be horrified by her, to search her mouth

  for a full tongue, to grow to resent her, to grant her

  mysticism and fury, to lock her up in my closet and

  watch the doorknob all damn night, waiting for that

  slow Twilight Zone twist. All I talked was Susie this,

  Susie that, scrawling her in tortured block-lettered

  pleadings with Santa, taking my father by the hand

  and leading him past rows and rows of her shelved

  at Kresge’s. I said I’d never ever ask for anything

  else again ever, not knowing that Barbie, just one

  aisle over, was sharpening her fashionable talons,

  sniffing the air for fresh breasts and menstrual blood.

  I wanted, wanted and prayed for something hard

  and possible. My fresh mute walking baby woman.

  But on Christmas Eve, when I snuck a peek through

  my wishing window into the starry, slanted snow

  and saw Daddy pull a want-shaped box from the trunk

  of his Buick, it didn’t stun my belief in the annual

  gospel of a porky, apple-cheeked Santa. You know,

  I wasn’t stupid—at eight, I’d already signed on for

  the miraculous black art of white men. They danced

  in my cereal, sold detergent to my mother, this one

  shimmied down tenement chimneys. I knew Santa

  was still coming, tugged by huffing reindeer, fooled

  again by my wide-eyed vow that I’d been an angel.

  This gift came from another place, for another reason.

  I folded my little body into the dark, kept watching.

  When I glimpsed pink knees and a sunshiny coif

  through the box’s cellophane front, I thought it was

  only right that my father loved hard enough to introduce

  Susie to the dim, resigned sigh of his daughter. All that

  frosted night, they must have huddled, plastic against

  pulse, discussing my sad soft, the out-loud mistakes

  in my walking. Actually, only my father spoke. Susie

  simply nodded, her stout legs thrumming, a warm

  purpose trembling behind her slammed-shut tempera smile.

  2

  WE SHINED LIKE THE NEW THINGS WE WERE

  A COLORED GIRL WILL SLICE YOU IF YOU TALK WRONG ABOUT MOTOWN

  The men and women who coupled, causing us, first

  arrived confounded. Surrounded by teetering towers

  of no, not now, and you shoulda known better, they

  cowered and built little boxes of Northern home,

  crammed themselves inside, feasted on the familiar

  of fat skin and the unskimmed, made gods of doors.

  When we came—the same insistent bloody and question

  we would have been down South—they clutched us,

  plumped us on government cereal drenched in Carnation,

  slathered our hair, faces, our fat wiggling arms and legs

  with Vaseline. We shined like the new things we were.

  The city squared its teeth, smiled oil, smelled the sour

  each hour left at the corner of our mouths. Our parents

  threw darts at the day. They romanced shut factories,

  waged hot battle with skittering roaches and vermin,

  lumbered after hunches. Their newborn children grew

  like streetlights. We grew like insurance payments.

  We grew like resentment. And since no tall sweet gum

  thrived to offer its shouldered shade, no front porch

  lesson spun wide to craft our wrong or righteous,

  our parents loosed us into the crumble, into the glass,

  into the hips of a new city. They trusted exploded

  summer hydrants, scarlet licorice whips, and crumbling

  rocks of government cheese to conjure a sort of joy,

  trusted joy to school us in the woeful limits of jukeboxes

  and moonwash. Freshly dunked in church water, slapped

  away from double negatives and country ways, we were

  orphans of the North Star, dutifully sacrificed, our young

  bodies arranged on sharp slabs of boulevard. We learned

  what we needed, not from our parents and their rumored

  South, but from the gospel seeping through the sad gap

  in Mary Wells’s grin. Smokey slow-sketched pictures

  of our husbands, their future skins flooded with white light,

  their voices all remorse and atmospheric coo. Little Stevie

  squeezed his eyes shut on the soul notes, replacing his

  dark with ours. Diana was the bone our mamas coveted,

  the flow of slip silver they knew was buried deep beneath

  their rollicking heft. Every lyric, growled or sweet from

  perfect brown throats, was instruction: Sit pert, pout, and

  seamed silk. Then watch him beg. Every spun line was

  consolation: You’re such a good girl. If he has not arrived,

  he will. Every wall of horn, every slick choreographed

  swivel, threaded us with the rhythm of the mildly wild.

  We slept with transistor radios, worked the two silver knobs,

  one tiny earbud blocking out the roar of our parents’ tardy


  attempts to retrieve us. Instead, we snuggled with the Temps,

  lined up five pretty men across. And damned if they didn’t

  begin every one of their songs with the same word: Girl.

  ANNIE PEARL’S ARETHABOPS

  1.

  She wakes up to the radiating of his curved body

  snapped to hers. Not wanting his eyes to open yet,

  she resists the urge to shift too suddenly toward

  the smudged window, its unwelcoming sun. Instead

  she links to the clock of his breathing, sniffs its sour

  relentless cream. Again, she’d dreamed of slapping him.

  One morning that chain is gonna break.

  ’Til then, I’m gonna take all I can take.

  How could he have saved her so deftly, charging

  up on a stallion the color of West Side slush, lifting

  her off her feet, vowing screwtop wine and reversals?

  Eventually Chicago would demand to be romanced,

  switching her formidable hip to a raucous duet

  of marked cards and mistaken clocks. Now, when

  he locks onto her eyes and mentions love, he sputters

  hollows. The O of his practiced mouth, still perfect.

  One morning that chain is gonna break.

  ’Til then, I’m gonna take all I can take.

  She finds the suitcase in the hall closet; still clinging

  to their first unfolding. It stinks of Alabama. While

  he sleeps, snorting in fractures, she tosses in wingtips,

  unmatched cufflinks, a Luckys pack, a pewter

  sharkskin suit, his ashed cantata hands, those lips.

  Aloud, she says I love you. Then forgets why.

  One morning that chain is gonna break.

  ’Til then, I’m gonna take all I can take.

  2.

  Get out! Her hair conks rivers, her eyes bulge.

  It doesn’t help that he is smiling sad crooked sugar,

  doesn’t help that he watches her raving from

  beneath hooded lids, mumbling Girl, c’mon now

  like she is just a hardheaded cur straining the leash.

  He says no way he’s leaving. She bares her teeth.

  No-good heartbreaker; you’re a liar, you’re a cheat—

  I don’t know why. I let you do these things to me . . .

  She thinks of his burnt-orange women, puff-lipped,

  deep-spritzed beehives, wiggled seams snaking down

  the backs of their legs, sadiddy asses dripping off

  the edges of barstools while he spoon-feeds them spirits

  and meat. She thinks of mouths thrown open, red octave

  cackles riding a surface of glass. And his hands on them,

  unthreading her language. Their hurried names, written

  in whiskey, had sweated out the lining of his pocket.

  No-good heartbreaker; you’re a liar, you’re a cheat—

  I don’t know why. I let you do these things to me . . .

  I ain’t going nowhere woman, and she sways,

  considers regretting, as he turns his wall of a back

  to the unsettled weather of her. Instead, she folds,

  grows small, hard, a brusque knot of what she was.

  She flashes her bricked torso, and he skips a beat

  in his breath. She could carry his ass out, and would.

  No-good heartbreaker; you’re a liar, you’re a cheat—

  I don’t know why. I let you do these things to me . . .

  3.

  Back when Alabama was a quick hot glance over

  her shoulder, when Arkansas numbed his calling

  tongue, they emerged, stumbling, from the exhaust

  of northbound buses and coupled on the warped

  hardwood of that first home. There was only the one

  and the one. Always the denying there would be others.

  My soul was in the lost and found.

  You came along to claim it.

  Imagine a savior not being forever. She had stitched

  her whole self to his forward, forward, his angled

  shoulders. Her tenement body craved his cures,

  the gospel of his denying nouns. And he said woman

  then, and he meant her, the way she was, thick

  and Southern. Remembering, she engines beneath him

  a final time, grieving, annoyed by his familiar burn.

  Aloud, he says Thank you, baby. Silent, she says good-bye.

  My soul was in the lost and found.

  You came along to claim it.

  Bellowed rebuttals, his shirt still off, chest scarred by

  the screeched road of a bitten, unpolished fingernail, one

  fevered You crazy, bitch? unanswered in the air, suddenly

  it’s all grind and blue juke, another English he has learned.

  He bangs and shivers the thin doorframe on the way out,

  stunning the stubborn beat of the thing he had rescued.

  My soul was in the lost and found.

  You came along to claim it.

  TRUE THAT

  In my neighborhood

  I got jumped

  because my daddy lived at home.

  Then,

  when he didn’t live at home anymore,

  I got jumped

  because he had the nerve

  to visit.

  SHEDDING

  She screamed when she saw the clumps of hair

  in my hand, the slowly uncrumpling wads stuffing

  the sink drain, the nappy tufts clinging to the slick

  white walls of the tub. In disbelief, she dragged

  her claw across my scalp, then stared at the thick

  tendrils that easily came away with her hand.

  “Girl, what did you do?” she demanded, deciding

  that the loss of my hair was punishment for some

  closeted purple sin, so then began the questions:

  Did you let anybody touch you? You been going

  to school every day? Have you been stopping off

  at that place where they sell candy? Girl, you been

  stealing stuff from Woolworth’s, slipping money

  outta my purse? Did you say something wrong

  to God? You call God out His name? You been

  cursing? I was eight. Nothing purple could find

  thread in me. All I knew was that the week before,

  my mother had stated, casually, while she chopped

  onions or tuned in to Petticoat Junction or shaved

  a corn on her toe with a razor, “Oh, your daddy

  ain’t gonna be living here no more,” and my halo

  shredded and my whole slice of sky started to hurt.

  LAUGH YOUR TROUBLES AWAY!

  Motto, Riverview Park, 1904–1967, Chicago

  1.

  Every city had one, a palace with a fried tint to its air,

  a hurting-hued screech of no underneath, everything

  plummeting or ascending, a monument to hazy flailing

  and sudden fun vomit. Swing the Riviera onto Belmont,

  and you see the Pair-O-Chutes rising to heaven on dual

  strings, headed for the pinpoint and release, then the sick

  whip and fall, the little public murder, a blaring grace

  so storybook gorgeous, suddenly flood in the throat.

  Revelers board creaking Fireball cars and slice the August,

  mistaking acid bubbling in their bellies for symptoms

  of glee, then stop to stuff quavering guts with plastic

  and syrup. Their quick sustenance has wafted all day

  all day on a river of grease. They hunger for white cakes

  curled stiff with sugar, sausages that pop huge heat,

  pink candy of cotton chomping rot down their throats.

  The jagged stains of compromised fruit circle screaming

  mouths and paint shadow across th
e teeth, making them

  horrible. Bulbs flash. Wet Polaroids are lifted and waved

  like church fans to etch and clarify in the summer steam.

  The aged horses are dizzied, diseased. Chained to a tilting

  stake, they blur through the drag, deferring to their brutal,

  squirming burdens. Potbellied flies, nasty to the point

  of charm, nibble passages toward the horses’ blue hearts.

  Above it all, the freak show M.C.—his shout an odd mixture

  of pity and sex—dares us to witness sweaty sloth, tiny floating

  corpses, so much skin unlike ours, more legs than allowed,

  and a Negro who can separate himself from his eyes.

  While on the midway, your father will never win the thinly

  stuffed neon grinners—the bears, dolphins, curlique serpents,

  Kewpie dolls, and counterfeit Mickey Mice that leer from shelves.

  He hurls balls at weighted milk cans, blasts at a measured parade

  of bobbing ducks, guns water into a pinpoint, guesses a woman’s

  weight. Finally, he just buys something soft and ugly, a token

  you will clutch and sing to until, too blackly loved, it melts.

  At dusk, he steers you away from the midway’s squalling edge,

  where everything seems to be happening, where the hooting

  and laughter have a raw, unmeasured throat. You pout, he pulls,

  and, not for the first time, you wonder what he hides.

  2.

  I am their pickaninny, dressed in a repeating river.

  All of me is droop and sustain.

  My drenched dungarees are gravity on me.

  I have learned to smile at the several versions

  of my name, my face is complete in its teeth.

  and studied dumb ogle. Oh, woe is me I say

  while the white boys wind up, and damn if they

  don’t always smack that huge disc, dead center.

  I rise laughing from my clockwork baptisms,

  the canned river funked with my own spit and piss,

  just to see another man clutching the red ball,

  his eyes harder than the first of these. Sometimes

  an awed Negro dots the crowd, his numbed smile

  a link chained to mine. I spot one using his body

  to block his little girl’s view of me, so I make

  my voice louder: I oh sweet jesus kind suh no,

  I lawd ham mercy suh I I believes I might drown

  I please let me dry off in this sun a little I mercy

  me you sho does look strong suh until she twists