praise for bone
“yrsa daley-ward’s bone is a symphony of breaking and mending. this whole book is an ache. and a balm. daley-ward effortlessly mines the bone. the diamond from the difficult. the things that are too bright and taboo. she lays her hands on the pulse of the thing. and gives wide air to the epic realities of women. the unfamiliar. the familiar. sexuality. poverty. sex work. sadness. joy. damage. and restoration. assigning them all the grace. all the nurturing. and all the love they deserve. an expert storyteller. of the rarest. and purest kind—daley-ward is uncannily attentive and in tune to the things beneath life. beneath the skin. beneath the weather of the everyday. her poetry and prose are intimate and distant. sonorous and staunch. delicate and metal. unwilling to yield and wondrously supple. daley-ward’s extraordinary talent. ability. to both see and write the veins of the true life. the true lives. is a gift. a breath.”
—nayyirah waheed, author of salt. and nejma
“[Yrsa Daley-Ward] is at the realm of a new wave of contemporary poets who inspire an unprecedented level of empathy and accessibility through their honest and raw approach. . . . [A] powerful collection of a woman facing tumultuous inner and external battles head-on, delivered with a hard-hitting directness, yet with inflections of optimism throughout that are bound to touch readers to their core.”
—i-D Magazine
“The actor, author, model, and poet draws from her own experiences as well as issues affecting today’s society throughout her work and is truly a storyteller (‘some tall, some dark’) of the soul.”
—POPSUGAR
PENGUIN BOOKS
bone
Photo: Kirill Kozlov
Yrsa Daley-Ward is a writer and poet of mixed West Indian and West African heritage. Born to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, Yrsa was raised by her devout Seventh-Day Adventist grandparents in the small town of Chorley in the North of England. She splits her time between London and Los Angeles.
Kiese Laymon is the author of a critically acclaimed novel, Long Division, and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He has two books forthcoming: Heavy, a memoir, and And So On, a novel.
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Original edition published by the author 2013
This edition with additional poems and a foreword by Kiese Laymon published in Penguin Books 2017
Copyright © 2014, 2017 by Yrsa Daley-Ward
Foreword copyright © 2017 by Kiese Laymon
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
“it is what it is” and “some kind of man” first appeared in On Snakes and Other Stories, published in 2013 by 3:AM Press.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Daley-Ward, Yrsa.
Title: Bone / Yrsa Daley-Ward.
Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017031004 (print) | LCCN 2017031016 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525504528 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143132615 (paperback)
Classification: LCC PR6104.A456 (ebook) | LCC PR6104.A456 A6 2017 (print) | DDC 821/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031004
Cover design by M. Phoenixx
Cover art by Lynn Buckley
Version_1
because writing is a soft and a hard place,
all at once.
contents
praise for bone
about the author
title page
copyright
dedication
foreword
intro
emergency warning
liking things
a fine art
bone
this was the story
battle
when it is but it ain’t
skill
you don’t know the half of it
secret
community
the not quite love
lesson
artichokes
heat
relief
the good work
a test—things our bodies have been
girls
sthandwa sami (my beloved, isiZulu)
she puts cinnamon on tomatoes
I’ll admit it, I’m drawn to the wolves
there will always be your heart
legacy
it is what it is
panacea
mental health
nose
issue
what is now will soon be past
why you love her and what to do
q
another tuesday
the biggest tortoise in the world
now that it’s all over
what love isn’t
body
things it can take twenty years and a bad liver to work out
lipsing
revelation
sabbath
not the end of the world, but almost
waiting for the check to clear
a
some kind of man
true story
breathe
karma
14
prayer
impending dialogue
the stupid thing about it
new
quirk
up home
mum
kid
inconvenience
coordinates
who was doing what and where
on hearing he hit his girlfriend
when they ask
to the elders
history
untitled 1
poetry
wine
another thing that happened
untitled 2
dankyes (Mwaghavul)
acknowledgments
foreword
but that
When I was eleven years old, I was sent to stay with Grandmama in Forest, Mississippi, for the third time because Mama didn’t know what to do with me. After church, Grandmama told me to write a response, no doubt Jesus-fearing, to what she called the “Book of Poetry” in the Bible. The “Book of Poetry” was really the Book of Psalms, specifically Psalms 23:5.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
“Dear Grandmama,” I wrote, “I do not know who ‘you’ is in this poem or why they would prepare a table for me if my enemies were watching when they know good and well that enemies will eat all the food off your table. I do not know why they want my head to be greasy or my cup to overflow on your carpet either unless they want me to get a whupping. But that last line does sound good compared to the whole poem.”
Grandmama told me that my breakdown of the “Book of Poetry” was shameful, but she encouraged me that day to write my own poems. I filled long yellow legal pads with boastful verses about my how my adolescent fatness was the new fineness and girls who didn’t re
cognize the new “fineness” must have been an old kind of “mindless.” I started trying to write my own version of love poetry to the same imaginary mindless young woman.
But three years later, I found and obsessed over the brilliance of subject-verb disagreements in the fortunes of fortune cookies. Four years later, I found and obsessed over the “wait a minute” truths of horoscopes. Six years later, I found and obsessed over the sustained jerky exploration of the essay. Eight years later, I found and obsessed over the importance of dramatic irony in unreliably narrated short stories. Ten years later, I found and obsessed over the magic of multiple narrative threads in the novel.
Thirty years later, I was given bone.
But that.
bone works forward and backward, alerting me of yesterday and reminding me of tomorrow. bone is the fortune, horoscope, essay, short story, and novel we all want to write, and all hope to have written to us. At the end of the piece “Poetry,” Yrsa Daley-Ward writes,
The bruising will shatter.
The bruising will shatter into
black diamond.
No one will sit beside you in class.
Maybe your life will work.
Most likely it won’t at first
but that
will give you poetry.
By the time bone was given to me, I’d written ten thousand sentences, hundreds of thousands of words, two books, three unpublished manuscripts, but somehow, some way, I’d forgotten that all along I’d been given poetry thirty years earlier.
I’d been given poetry at twelve when Grandmama read my poem about my experiences with sexual abuse. When I got off my knees praying with her that night, I watched the back of Grandmama’s sixty-one-year-old body heave in, pause, and heave out. When I finally placed my thumb lightly on the small of Grandmama’s back, and she jerked forward and clenched the covers tighter around her body, she gave me poetry.
But that.
I’d been given poetry at sixteen when all I could think to do was steal all the wheat bread, white bread, cinnamon rolls, pitas, and hot dog buns from the bread truck after the Rodney King verdict.
But that.
I’d been given poetry at seventeen when I heard Mama tell someone on the other end of the phone that being alive was harder than she thought.
But that.
I was given poetry when I’d starved and run myself from a 319-pound heavy black boy to a 161-pound skinny black man. But that heart, and those bones, were the same. Poetry was lodged in the memory, and the memory was lodged in the bone.
Yrsa Daley-Ward makes all of us, and all of our different sensibilities, know that bruises give you poetry, and we give you poetry, and you give we poetry, and loveliness gives you poetry, and first days give you poetry, and warnings give you poetry, and emergencies give you poetry, and bones, bones have no choice but to give us poetry.
The trick is to accept what’s offered.
Kiese Laymon
June 2017
intro
I am the tall dark stranger
those warnings prepared you for.
emergency warning
clear, who needs help. I think you
should stop speaking in a low attractive
voice whenever you call. Stop
making me think of velvet and
fragrant tobacco and that first sip
of bourbon. Stop inciting
stirrings, movements between us,
little rebellions, causing chaos in all
of my darker places. The top half of
my body is at gross political warfare
with the lower. One part of me is
roaring and the other wholly
disapproves. You are a beautiful
danger. Do not force me to
open up. Some books are bound
tightly for years for reasons. Some
books are burned for their own
good, Love. Stop wearing clothes the
way that you do. Don’t allow them to
cling to your body like that. Do not
follow these effortless fashions where
everything looks just so, because,
really . . . who could resist
such a thing? The Lord knows you
are beautiful and unfair. I think perhaps
you should spare a thought, dear,for those
who are sick over you, burning up with
you, damp with you. You know what you
do. You’re a slow fever. Don’t be so very
engaging, amusing or witty or bright.
You are causing confusion and jams in
tight spaces. You are an accident in
waiting. The type of accident with
casualties spanning from me to you and
here to there, a potential tragedy, a
stunning unborn disaster. Should I touch
you, I will suffer and you will suffer and
she will suffer. You are a danger zone.
I must not enter. I should not enter.
But I might.
liking things
Women who were brought up devout
and fearful
get stirred, like anyone else.
Want men. Want
other women. Stink under the arms at the end of
the day.
Get that all too familiar mix of fear and discontent
in the night. Want to do the things
that they Must Not Do.
Those dirty, bloody attractive things.
a fine art
You may have learned from your
mother or any other hunted woman.
Smiling at devils is a useful,
learned thing.
Swallowing discomfort down in
spades
holding it tight in your belly.
Aging on the inside only.
Keeping it forever sexy.
bone
From One
who says, “Don’t cry.
You’ll like it after a while.”
And Two who tells you thank you
after the fact and can’t look at your face.
To Three who pays for your breakfast
and a cab home
and your mother’s rent.
To Four
who says,
“But you felt so good
I didn’t know how to stop.”
To Five who says giving your body
is tough
but something you do very well.
To Six
Who smells of tobacco
and says, “Come on, I can feel that
you love this.”
To those who feel bad in the morning
yes,
some feel bad in the morning
and sometimes they tell you
you want it
and sometimes you think that you do.
Thank heavens you’re resetting
ever
setting and
resetting.
How else do you sew up the tears?
How else can the body survive?
this was the story
This was the story according to her, but then she
could never be trusted. It was safe to say that we
had established this by now.
We had established this on a very regular basis.
On this particular morning, her story and its
various possibilities did corroborate with stories
she had told before, but everything else was out of
sorts.
We were dr
inking whisky on two stools by the
window.
It was freezing cold and the moon was a tiny slip
of a thing in the sky.
She had woken me up for school far too early or
far too late again. Also, we were trying to avoid the
view.
She was house-proud but not at all garden-proud
and the garden was an embarrassment, even at the
wrong, pitch-black time of day.
Now she was saying that she met my father
somewhere on a large boat. She was working on
the Gold Leaf Cruise liner in nineteen eighty-four.
The way she put it, I could be the child of one of
four, possibly five, but the fifth was not likely due
to timing and the fact that they were interrupted
before the Point of No Return.
However, as she put it
(and never tactfully enough)
accidents do happen.
So here were the four, plus the very slim
possibility.
The Captain’s mate
The dark-skinned man behind the
bar, or
his friend, or
his other friend . . . owing to the
fact that it had been a crazy night
in the middle of a set of six lost,
crazy months and she was a) going through a great deal.
Heartbreak, namely
b) drinking far too much far too often.
Furthermore, she did not
subscribe to the theory of
regretting anything. If she did,
she might regret not having more
control over the situation. Also,
most cases like this won’t stand
up in court.
(Least likely) The One she loved.
I felt that I should get up (although you couldn’t
stand up to your full height in our house—do I
call it a house?)
and make a point about going to school, because
she was likely to forget.
“Anyway,” she went on. “This fettered concept
of motherhood is outdated. You can go and come