She gave her opinion on each image.
“Ooooh this one with flowers,” she pointed. “I like this.”
The next was an image of a man with cock and balls out,
“I don’t like this one,” she said.
She persisted onto the next image.
“Pregnant butch,” she said out loud and giggled.
“A pregnant butch,” she said again as if fascinated by the idea.
“I don’t see yours, oh but here it is!”
She fastened on a blue and red watercolor of figures gathered in grief
titled, 6 times.
“It’s the family of Stephon Clark,” I explained. “That Black kid from Sacramento
police shot in the back six to eight times, unarmed in his backyard.
They said he was a burglar.”
“I wanted to paint the pictures of his family grieving because they had no voice
and were made invisible.”
My mother got quiet, mouthed something like a ha
Her eyes narrowed and full, like when I visit and we watch shows
about slavery together/like in Roots when Chicken George has to leave his
son at the crossroads to gain freedom.
My mother wants to cry but doesn’t.
She commands me to show the catalogue to my father.
Later she asks to take a picture because she wants to show my
ninety-year-old aunt.
In New York this year we are celebrating,
The 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.
My queer friends complain about all the festivities as
“The monster that ate New York,”
But I say I’m excited by it all
If only because I can go home to my family
(Because of all of those queens and kings before me)
Marked safe.
WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF
FOR NTOZAKE SHANGE
The internet has transformed our grieving patterns
Everything comes and goes so quickly
After death there’s a tremendous outpouring and then a few
weeks later months years later nothing
I have come now to watch all who shaped me die
Never got to write about or even register Prince
Then Aretha
Ntozake
People without whom I couldn’t have formed my voice
My identity
I joke now there’s probably not a Black girl alive who came through
a theater program in the United States who hadn’t encountered
the work of Ntozake Shange
In fact, I know some University Theater Programs ban For Colored Girls
from being performed “Choose something else,” they say
because it’s been performed so much
I chuckle thinking about how many times Ntozake’s words were
used by Black girls as audition monologues for a theater
“And I will be presenting the lady in green/or the lady in yellow”
And then them skipping around the room talking about Toussaint Louveture
Or the infamous somebody almost walked off with all of my stuff
Or if they were really dramatic they might perform the lady in red
with the perils of Beau Willie Brown, a crazed Vietnam Vet
and that infamous last line
About how he dropped the kids out of the window
In our college production, I was the lady in blue
a character that was rather obscure in compare to the others
I remember the beginning of the choreopoem playing
childhood games and then being frozen while a woman came around
and tagged us awake “I’m outside Houston …”
“I’m outside Chicago …”
And “this is for colored girls who’ve considered suicide/but moved to
the ends of their own rainbows”
The play was such that you could memorize everyone else’s lines
I struggled initially with how to pronounce Ntozake’s name
and read her Black vernacular and slash mark punctuation
But it was like reading Morrison’s Beloved which I tried at least five times before
I understood but then the codes gave way to an ecstasy and understanding
Her words became mine
And the kinds of male partner violence that Ntozake spoke of was foreign to me
Later in a conversation at her house she remarked she didn’t want
older women to perform For Colored Girls
As the words became too bitter in their mouths
A point we starkly disagreed on
But ’Zake’s words were the first to unlock an experience in literature
A pool, a mirror by which Black girls could see themselves
like Tubman
She freed a lot of souls
That said, she was a hero of mine
And so when I first had the chance to meet her
as an adult many many years after undergrad
I was honored and floored
A friend of mine from Boston managed her
I went to meet her at Nuyorican Poets Café
It was after her second stroke
And she was dancing with her hands and hair
Her arms were raised above her head and she moved wildly to the music
her dreadlocks with gold beads moved with her
Afterward we hugged and were like old friends or sisters
I saw her many times after that
Once she came to see me perform
And I couldn’t believe I was performing for the woman who’d given me words
that was a beautiful moment when my mentor became an equal
I don’t think I could ever impart what she’s meant
but I will always remember her
after two strokes
with her hands over her head
raised to the sky god
Dancing.
A TALE OF TWO PANDEMICS
The headline in yesterday’s news blared A Tale of Two Pandemics
Shocking Inequities in the Healthcare System
what got me was use of words shocking and two
Those of us who lived through through the 1980s early ’90s AIDS crisis already knew about the existence of two New Yorks
Two twenty thirty forty fifty Americas maybe more
Depending on age race class citizenship status
Entirely different systems for those who aren’t white straight
middle class
Those of us who saw our brothers friends sisters die at the hands of system that shunned
Refused to treat
Threw away the unwanted
Still can’t forget a gay friend waiting
For Medicaid to treat HIV
He got sicker and sicker.
I asked why Medicaid took so long
He said they’re waiting to see if I’ll die first
That wasn’t the America I learned about in elementary school
I was instructed to put my hand over heart
and salute
That wasn’t the free America we sang of
People who are LGBTQIA already know there are two Americas
A doctor who kept forcing me to take a pregnancy test
Even after I insisted at the time
I only have sex with women
I saw his scorn/still a test
He made me pay for
And those women who were forcibly sterilized
Had wombs their life force taken
Left dry barren by doctors
who never even stopped to explain
Felt entitled to take scar women’s bodies
Breasts cut off no options or consolation given
Women who aren’t rich and white already know invisible lines you can’t cross
; With no insurance or Medicaid
Forced into black markets for drugs
A land of botched care botched procedures
Black people already know
separate doors
separate entrances
treatments
options
Existing long after Jim Crow
And I have kept waiting for this moment
This time of a medical #MeToo
When those who’ve suffered from botched procedures and the indignities
Step out from shadows
Speak and name the atrocities committed
medical malpractice
I won’t blame all doctors
some are good
just middlemen like so many in a broken system doing what they can
and I’m grateful for the good ones in this pandemic risking
their own lives
But the image of medical researchers that we see in movies and on television who understand a complex problem
pour through medical books and science journals
Stay up all night burning midnight oil to find a cure
Who weep with concern
are mostly false
rare like ones who find cures
and refuse to patent
or personally profit
Those days have become myth
what’s replaced them are businessmen
wanting status amongst peers
entry to country clubs and power
Gaslighters hustlers actors like Trump
There is a doctor at Mount Sinai
star of his field
charged with drugging and raping his patients
No one believed til it was proven
his victims
were only Black women
the rest he left alone.
I CAN’T BREATHE
I suppose I should place them under separate files
Both died from different circumstances kind of, one from HIV/AIDS and possibly not having taken his medicines
the other from COVID-19 coupled with
complications from an underlying HIV status
In each case their deaths may have been preventable if one had taken his meds and the hospital had thought to treat the other
instead of sending him home saying, He wasn’t sick enough
he died a few days later
They were both mountains of men
dark Black beautiful gay men
both more than six feet tall fierce and way ahead of their time
One’s drag persona was Wonder Woman and the other started a Black fashion magazine
He also liked poetry
They both knew each other from the same club scene we all grew up in
When I was working the door at a club one frequented
He would always say to me, “Haven’t they figured out you’re a star yet?”
And years ago bartending with the other when I complained about certain people and treatment he said, “Sounds like it’s time for you to clean house.”
Both I know were proud of me the poet star stayed true to my roots
I guess what stands out to me is that they both were
gay Black mountains of men
Cut down
Felled too early
And it makes me think the biggest and blackest are almost always more vulnerable
My white friend speculates why the doctors sent one home
If he had enough antibodies
Did they not know his HIV status
She approaches it rationally
removed from race as if there were any rational for sending him home
Still she credits the doctors for thinking it through
But I speculate they saw a big Black man before them
Maybe they couldn’t imagine him weak
Maybe because of his size color class they imagined him strong
said he’s okay
Which happened to me so many times
Once when I’d been hospitalized at the same time as a white girl
she had pig-tails
we had the same thing but I saw how tenderly they treated her
Or knowing so many times in the medical system I would never have been treated so terribly if I had had a man with me
Or if I were white and entitled enough to sue
Both deaths could have been prevented both were almost first to fall in this season of death
But it reminds me of what I said after Eric Garner a large Black man was strangled to death over some cigarettes
Six cops took him down
His famous last words were I can’t breathe
and now George Floyd
so if we are always the threat
To whom or where do we turn for protection?
WHY I CLING TO FLOWERS
I was trying to think of what it means
why I keep painting and posting flowers and trees in the pandemic
I know they’re beautiful
And they assert amidst any chaos and confusion
Life on the planet
Every spring
Despite climate change every natural disaster
Purple crocus push up out of the ground determined
I’m fascinated by their colors striped purple violet and white
Red blue and yellow
I love that some humans place wire nets over them to protect their growth
so they don’t get trampled on
I sometimes think of Brooklyn streets as fashion runways
All the flowers model for humans trying to look their best
in various poses showing off their blooms
Each trying to outdo the other with fabulousness
Like Black women on Easter
wearing an array of hats
I love pink purple magenta magnolia blossoms
How each bulb occupies a separate branch looking and pointing to the sky like an elegant candelabra
I love the daffodils red orange yellow faces
and one daffodil that I pass each day pushes its neck through
an opening in a metal garden gate
I identify with how it breaks apart
stands separate
As if refusing confines of a cell
I struggle to understand what this all means
Why I cling to flowers
When the newsfeed reports COVID-19 death after death
and fear
They say the pandemic most affects Black people migrant workers and poor Brown people globally, the aged and those with underlying conditions
And your friends are still dying from AIDS even when you thought hoped and prayed the worst was over
They say the next two weeks will be the pandemic’s greatest peak in America
People are yelling and fighting
in grocery stores
on the street
there is so much fear
And the life you knew good or bad may never return
But finally talking to my father today I
understood my connection to flowers more
Over the years, anticipating his demise he’s given me messages
Said, You’ve never given me any problems
You went off and did things on your own
You did everything all by yourself
You decided to go to New York and never looked back
You’ve made it on your own.
Today we are talking about the pandemic
I try to find masks and hand sanitizer to send to my family
Touched and impressed by my efforts, my father said
You still look out for us
You’re a beautiful girl
I’m glad you’re my daughter
I am here for you
And then I understand what it all means
If we can survive
have equipment means money
support conditions
There are also other possibilities
We can heal.