February 21st, 2012
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Patricia Smith
NEXT, NEXT
he is the only white boy in lawndale
and who could blame him, searching
for a line of commerce that could save
his life? he starts hanging in the shadows
of our apartment building, pulling down
his pants and charging us a dime to look,
a quarter to touch. stubbed fingers, dingy,
pinkish, thumbing it. the slowly writhing
nub hooded and winking sly neon, here,
here, here, go on, touch it, go on be startled
by its whispered little rhumba, its soft
arrogance. the long line of wait, colored
and curious, snakes washington street
with giggles electric, our one stomach
throbbing with this stupid magic. white boy
shifts from Ked to Ked, corporate bigwig
under the overhang, and if not for his
clipped command, next, next, we would
not even notice him attached to the thing.
three dimes sticky in my fist. i’m two
unraveled braids, grape bubble gum smash,
newly baptized into the wrong world.
i do not know the name of my immediate
future, wouldn’t recognize the hot snap
of the word cock, i don’t have a clue
to that thing’s unerring purpose. but ouch,
a vessel deep in me is already calling.
i move forward, impatient, my touch
outstretched for a stranger, blood money
straight from my hurt to his. still, i’m blue
with shame because i’m sure i’m the only one:
he has to take my hand and guide it there.
–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
September 2nd, 2011
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Patricia Smith
TAVERN. TAVERN. CHURCH. SHUTTERED TAVERN,
then Goldblatt’s, with its finger-smeared display windows full
of stifled plaid pinafore and hard-tailored serge, each unattainable
thread cooing the delayed lusciousness of layaway, another church
then, of course, Jesus pitchin’ a blustery bitch on every other block,
then the butcher shop with, inexplicably, the blanched, archaic head
of a hog propped upright to lure waffling patrons into the steamy
innards of yet another storefront, where they drag their feet through
sawdust and revel in the come-hither bouquet of blood, then a vacant
lot, then another vacant lot, right up against a shoe store specializing
in unyielding leather, All-Stars and glittered stacked heels designed
for the Christian woman daring the jukebox, then the what-not joint,
with vanilla-iced long johns, wax lips crammed with sugar water,
notebook paper, swollen sour pickles buoyant in a splintered barrel,
school supplies, Pixy Stix, licorice whips and vaguely warped 45s
by Fontella Bass or Johnny Taylor, now oooh, what’s that blue pepper
piercing the air with the nouns of backwood and cheap Delta cuts—
neck and gizzard, skin and claw—it’s the chicken shack, wobbling
on a foundation of board, grease riding relentless on three of its walls,
the slick cuisine served up in virgin white cardboard boxes with Tabasco
nibbling the seams, scorched wings under soaked slices of Wonder,
blind perch fried limp, spiced like a mistake Mississippi don’ made,
and speaking of, July moans around a perfect perfumed tangle of eight
Baptist gals on the corner of Madison and Warren, fanning themselves
with their own impending funerals, fluid-filled ankles like tree trunks
sprouting from narrow slingbacks, choking in Sears’ Best cinnamontinged
hose, their legs so unlike their arms and faces, on the other side
of the street is everything they are trying to be beyond, everything
they are trying to ignore, the grayed promise of government, 25 floors
of lying windows, of peeling grates called balconies, of yellow panties
and shredded diapers fluttering from open windows, of them nasty girls
with wide avenue hips stomping doubledutch in the concrete courtyard,
spewing their woman verses, too fueled and irreversible to be not
listened to and wiggled against, and the Madison St. bus revs its tired
engine, backs up a little for traction and drives smoothly into the sweaty
space between their legs, the only route out of the day we’re riding through.
–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Rattle Poetry Prize Winner
Pushcart Prize Nominee
September 20th, 2010
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Review by Moira Richards
TEAHOUSE OF THE ALMIGHTY
by Patricia Smith
Coffee House Press
27 North Fourth Street, Suite 400
Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA
ISBN: 978-1-56689-193-6
2006, 91 pp., $16.00
www.coffeehousepress.org
This book hums dozens of different voices, like a crowd in a late night pub. Just as people in the streets of a city, these people and their stories span the spectra of hope and despair; their stories are of love and pain, of music and of the blues – oh, these blues. Many of the poems, such as “Mississippi’s Legs,” bear dedications and in this way, create vibrant biographies of people such as the Queen of the Blues who escaped her small home town as fast as she could fly. And who kept on fleeing until:
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.
…“flowered me”… mmm…mMm…
Patricia Smith is probably known best for her spoken word poetry and as champion slam poet. Her poem “Down 4 the Up Stroke” pays tribute to a fellow champ and best friend in a time of need. Words like these beg to be said loud–they leap, almost, from the page in search of the nearest microphone:
You drove in from the city and backhanded me
with your clunky rhymes, your limp couplets,
your falterings, your leaps for the sky,
your lean and joyless works in progress.
You jumped up and down on my heart,
yelling beat beat,
when I was June’s only sin, you screeched
beat beat,
There are sad, sad stories of sons in jail, young girls raped, babies beaten to death, women murdered by their partners and in this poem–“Building Nicole’s Mama (for the 6th grade class of Lillie C. Evans School, Liberty City, Miami)”–forty worldly-wise sixth graders who
…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.
yet, during their lesson with a poet-in-schools…
Can poetry hurt us? They ask me before
snuggling inside my words to sleep.
Many poems are of writers and writing and there is a long tribute–“Related to the Buttercup, Blooms in Spring”–to a young school teacher, Ms. Stein, who introduced her class to the word, anenome. And, says the narrator of the poem,
That one word was sweet silver on my new tongue,
it kept coming back to my mouth,
it was the very first sound I wanted to own,
…Anemone.
A sweet beginning I can hide in my mouth.
I live on its taste when my pen won’t move.
A recurring presence in Teahouse of the Almighty (there is a poem by this name in the collection too but, no space, you’ll have to read the rich delights that title promises from your own copy of the book) is Patricia Smith’s father who died too soon, from a bullet to his head– but not before he had taught his daughter how to dance, and that she could be the writer she wanted to be, and how to bake hot water corn bread just right…
When you smell the burning begin, flip it.
When you smell the burning begin again,
dump it onto a plate. You’ve got to wait
for the burning and get it just right.
…But remember that sometimes the burning
takes such a long time,
and in that time,
sometimes,poems are born.
(“When the Burning Begins”)
It’s the music, as much as the stories in this collection, that grabs me and nowhere does it play so beautifully as in the four erotic pages of love song dedicated to Smith’s husband and which I would so love to hear read aloud by someone other than me, alone here with my laptop:
don’t play me
that way
the way the saxman plays his woman,
blowing into her mouth till she cries,
allowing her no breath of her own.
Don’t play me that way, baby, the way
the saxman plays his lady,
that strangling, soft murder—notes like bullets,
riffs like knives and the downbeat slapping
into her. and she sighs.
into her. and she cries.
into her.
and she whines like the night turning.(“Map Rappin”)
July 23rd, 2010
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Patricia Smith
BIRTHDAY
On this bed of chilled steel, I am the morning’s work,
your project after coffee and, oh yes, some woman’s son.
Whistling to break the ice in the room, you hold
most of my head in your hands. Your shaping fingers
gently adjust an ear, probe a hollow eye socket,
flick chips of dried blood away from a blown-open
hairline. No one but you and I hear as you inhale
and, without exhaling, whisper the name I once had.
Grimacing, edging slowly toward overwhelm,
you clutch the photo, glancing from the grinning grad
to the exploded boy. Now the only sound in the room
is the flat hiss of the blade as you whittle a dim smile,
free fluid from my blue mouth. You reach into your bag
and pull out a nose, a sliver of chin, a ragged scalp,
and see them as just that—a shard of skin, that scalp.
You touch with the stark slowness of a lover, but you
don’t cry out from that lover’s deep bone. Just how
did you die your soul enough to be this temporary god,
stitching conjured light into the cave of my chest?
My mother sat across from you, tangled her hands
and re-scripted my days, wailing that the bullet
was meant for someone else, not me, not me, no,
not me, and would you please make him the way he was,
as close as you can to not dead, not dead, not gone,
and you said yes. You promised she’d be able to gaze
upon me and say, with that liquid hope in her voice,
He looks like he’s sleeping. She’s the reason you carve
and paste and snip with such focus, why you snap
my bones only to reset them, why you drag a comb
through the
I can’t hear her voice anymore.
I can’t hear the bullet slicing the night toward me.
I can’t hear anything now but you,
whistling your perk past numb ritual,
stopping now and again to behold your gift
to the woman who first told you my name,
just before she handed you a picture
and begged you please, as best you can, My baby.
–from Rattle #32, Summer 2009
2009 Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention
February 21st, 2010
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Patricia Smith
52
Baffled by stark ache and symptom, I get in my bed
beside the bearded charmer who is yet in my bed.
As graying denies and dims me, I vaguely recall
the line of whimpering whiners I’ve let in my bed—
every one of them goofy with love, dazzled by curve
and color, until I screeched, “Oh, just get in my bed!”
The could-be queens, pimpled wordsmiths, thugs and mama’s boys,
porcine professors, all casting their nets in my bed.
Valiantly, they strained to woo with verse, acrobatics.
One fool dared a pirouette, on a bet, in my bed!
(We dated for months.) But like the rest, he finally
did things I would much rather forget. In my bed!
So, all that leads to this. Me, a slow, half-century
woman, turning toward he who conjures sweat in my bed.
“Patricia,” he whispers, stroking me young, unnaming
the men. Then my husband turns the world wet in my bed.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
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