after Romare Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt (1969)

My back is turned from him again,
but this time I’m not hunched
over the quilt—his rough thumbs
gripping my waist—I’m standing
in the middle of a room constructed
with pencil, adhesive, and paper.
One foot in the basin, I will scrub
his cigarette hands and yellow eyes
off my skin. I will clean my sex
and start again. Another will come
and I’ll forget the coat hung gently
on the hook—different than the way
he took me. He shook like a startled
fish caught in a great blue heron’s beak.
Yes, a woman of my kind
has seen the sea. The first time, I gasped
at its glistening mouth.
Endlessly the waves replaced themselves.
I launder my nakedness like a uniform
with water from the pitcher.
Soon another will arrive who I will
wash away. There is a man who dares
to face me, he considers
every angle. He built my form
with precise lines and foraged scraps
of brown. From the harsh shape
my elbow makes, the builder knows
this is a portrait of work,
not pleasure. I love how softly
he touches me, though all I want
is to be left, to spend a morning in bed
alone with the images of dream.

Ama Codjoe

There’s a body marching toward mine.
I can feel its breasts and stomach, hot

against my back. Its breath in my hair.
I accumulate bodies—my own.

The tattoo braceleting my wrist.
My earlobe like a pin hole camera.

My vagina, untouched. My vagina,
stretched. So many bodies treading

toward the others. And the bruises I conceal
with makeup and denial. The scars I inflict

on myself, and the ones I contort
with a mirror to see. I didn’t always know

we’d be joined like this—that I couldn’t
leave any of myself behind.

In Trisha Brown’s Spanish Dance
a performer raises both arms like a bailora

and shifts her weight from hip to hip, knee
to knee, ankle to ankle, until she softly

collides with another dancer. The two travel
forward, pelvis to sacrum, stylized fingers

flared overhead, until they meet a third woman
and touch her back like stacked spoons.

Dressed in identical white pants and long
sleeves, the dancers repeat the steps

until, single file, five women shuffle
forward-they go no further.

The dance lasts the exact length of Bob Dylan’s
rendition of “Early Mornin’ Rain.”

How many versions of myself pile
into the others, arms lifted in surrender,

torsos twisting to the harmonica?
But the dancers—I’m moved by their strange

conga line. A train of women traversing
the stage, running gently into a wall.

Ama Codjoe

I feel naive when I think of it now,
how carelessly I stood before him,

like a ballet dancer in a dressing room
bright with the backs of other girls.

This was before the coldness he nursed
and kept warm between his thighs.

I waited too long for a thaw—he waited too.
Taking him into my mouth, I knew the ache

of winter. I heard the silences
grow as a field of stones between us.

When I look back at my body, young
in the bedroom dark, lit by a perpetual city,

I am gripping a rock in my right hand
and he is gripping a rock in his right hand.

We face each other, muscles poised for sex
or war. Who dropped the rock?

Who cast it? I’m unsure,
even now, who cried mercy first.

Ama Codjoe

I was newly naked: aware of myself
as a separate self, distinct from dirt and bone.

I had not hands enough,
and so, finally, uncrossed my arms.

In trying to examine one body part,
I’d lose sight of another. I couldn’t

imagine what I looked like during
the fractured angles of sex.

At the river’s edge, it was impossible
to see all of myself at once.

I began to understand nakedness
as a feeling.

It was a snake, loose and green;
it was the snake skin, coiled and discarded.

The shedding chained itself
like a balloon ribboned to a child’s wrist.

Morning’s birdsong reminded me
of the sloughing off of skin.

The rumored beauty of my husband’s first
wife never bothered me before.

I missed the sensation of being fixed
in amber. Then the hair in the comb,

fingernail clippings, the red mole on my
left breast grown suddenly bigger.

I perceived my likeness in everything:
the lines on my palm as the veins

of a leaf, my mind as a swarm of flies
humming over something sugary or dead,

my vulnerability as the buck
I’d kill, then wrap myself inside,

my hair as switchgrass, twine, and nest,
a roving cloud my every limb.

Ama Codjoe

What if, Betye, instead of a rifle or hand
grenade—I mean, what if after
the loaded gun that takes two hands
to fire, I lay down the splintered broom
and the steel so cold it wets
my cheek? What if I unclench the valleys
of my fist, and lay down
the wailing baby?
Gonna burn the moon in a cast-iron skillet.
Gonna climb the men who, when they see my face, turn into stony mountains.
Gonna get out of the kitchen.
Gonna try on my nakedness like a silk kimono.
Gonna find me a lover who eats nothing but pussy.
Let the whites of my eyes roll, roll.
Gonna clench my toes.
Gonna purr beneath my own hand.
Gonna take down my hair.
Try on a crown of crow feathers.
Gonna roam the wide aisles of the peach grove, light dripping off branches like syrup, leaves brushing the fuzz on my arms.
—You dig?—
Gonna let the juice trickle down my chin.
Gonna smear the sun like war paint across my chest.
Gonna shimmy into a pair of royal blue bell-bottoms.
Gonna trample the far-out thunderclouds, heavy in their lightness.
Watch them slink away.
Gonna grimace.
Gonna grin.
Gonna lay down my sword.
Pick up the delicate eggs of my fists.
Gonna jab the face that hovered over mine.
It’s easy to find the lips, surrounded as they are in minstrel black.
Gonna bloody the head of every god, ghost, or swan who has torn into me—pried me open with its beak.
Gonna catch my breath in a hunting trap.
Gonna lean against the ropes.
Gonna break the nose of mythology.
—Goodnight John-Boy—
Gonna ice my hands in April’s stream.
Gonna scowl and scream and shepherd my hollering into a green pasture.
Gonna mend my annihilations into a white picket fence.
Gonna whip a tornado with my scarlet handkerchief.
Spin myself dizzy as a purple-lipped drunkard.
Gonna lay down, by the riverside, sticky and braless in the golden sand.

Ain’t gonna study war no more.
Ain’t gonna study war no more.
Ain’t gonna study war no more.

Ama Codjoe

The earth said
remember me.
The earth said
don’t let go,

said it one day
when I was
accidentally
listening, I

heard it, I felt it
like temperature,
all said in a
whisper—build to-

morrow, make right be-
fall, you are not
free, other scenes
are not taking

place, time is not filled,
time is not late, there is
a thing the emptiness
needs as you need

emptiness, it
shrinks from light again &
again, although all things
are present, a

fact a day a
bird that warps the
arithmetic of per-
fection with its

arc, passing again &
again in the evening
air, in the pre-
vailing wind, making no

mistake—yr in-
difference is yr
principal beauty
the mind says all the

time—I hear it—I
hear it every-
where. The earth
said remember

me. I am the
earth it said. Re-
member me.

Jorie Graham

In this life,
I was very minor.

I was a minor lover.
There was maybe a day, a night
or two, when I was on.

I was, would have been,
a minor daughter,
had my parents lived.

I was a minor runner. I was
a minor thinker. In the middle
distance, not too fast.

I was a minor mother: only
two, and sometimes,
I was mean to them.

I was a minor beauty.
I was a minor buddhist.
There was a certain symmetry, but
it, too, was minor.

My poems were not major
enough to even make me
a “minor poet,”

but I did sit here
instead of getting up, getting
the gun, loading it.

Counting,
killing myself.

Olena Kalytiak Davis

Even water
changes its mind mid-
drip from
the bearded
skull of a
streetlamp
strange to
be given
proof sound
comes from
movement
and noise
chaos—I
am the still-
fumed center
of the world
holding its
breath on a
burned thing
cooled

John Freeman

Every day at lunch the gray heron
canters down from her branch in the brook

leaving behind turquoise eggs. There were
two birds, but kids killed one with a slingshot, so

now she hooks alone, casting with her giant
beak. Stirring the water with a foot. The legends

tell of what revenge nature will wreak, we’ll
be torn limb from limb, they’ll feast on our necks.

None of this seems true of the heron in the
brook, using her wings to create shade, lure

small fish into the coves made by trash
visitors dump amidst the glades. Cans of Coke,

T-shirts, a dishwasher, an old skirt. It’s become
the breakfast table for her. And us, what are we for?

To watch, mourn, to exclaim gladly?
I’ve nothing to hunt, to trap, nothing

to own, walking these woods with a fading
map, miles from my suburban home.

The heron looks up, and seeing I am neither
prey nor threat, returns to her disguise,

vanishes again in the weeds, standing so still she
is simply a reed, a white bill, two eyes.

John Freeman

I stand before it
All that I own
What kind of heaven
would it be if
I couldn’t take you

John Freeman