Wow, Monica, that was gorgeous and gutting.
And it's such an honor to read with you tonight.
Thank you so much to the Poetry Center,
to Diana and to Tyler, and to everyone.
And TC, you stole my line.
I'm supposed to say, hey y'all.
I'm the one who--
I usually say it, but that's OK.
But thank you for that gorgeous introduction
and this does feel like a revival,
so I really appreciate that.
All right, I had a few requests.
Felt like a rock star, thank you.
So I'm going to start with a new poem,
it's actually a long poem.
And I'm so happy that you read your long poem, Monica.
I've been thinking about the long form and poetry and what
that means with the personal epic.
There's a really great podcast from Rachel Zucker called
Common Place, and she was interviewing
Roger Reeves and Natalie Diaz.
And Roger was talking about how he was writing long poems.
And she said, why are you writing these long poems?
And he said, because he's an African-American poet,
he said I found myself, in the real world,
that when a white woman walked next to me,
I was subconsciously moving out of her way.
And he said, I wanted to stop doing that on the page.
And I literally had to pull my car over
and I was like, what did he just say?
And I realized I had been doing that.
Especially after the 2016 election,
I felt that the world was trying to make me feel very small.
And I wanted to fight back against that wall and kind
of chase a lyric swagger.
That I didn't possess in my real life,
but that I could somehow chase in my work.
So this poem kind of barreled out
the first Black Bachelorette.
Anyone watch The Bachelorette series?
I didn't either until I found out Sharon Olds did,
so I was like, you know what?
If Sharon watches it, I can watch it.
"The First Black Bachelorette" When Brian was kissing Rachel
and slid his hand inside her hair, her long, long hair,
I wondered if he felt threaded tracks of weave.
And what he thought when he felt her weave.
Was he startled?
Or did he know.
But when he reached for her, I felt his fingers on my scalp
too.
I did, I swear through the TV.
I was wincing.
My white guy doesn't like fake things,
but I like my fake hair long and my real hair protected,
my glory tucked and hidden.
Something easy and fast.
I'm hoping it will grow too.
I wonder who does Rachel's hair on the show,
blending her leave out with her natural hair.
Who slips her edges down with good grease and a bore
brush when the wind blows back her baby hairs?
There was an episode once on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air
with the actress, Tisha Campbell.
The premise-- they were on a date
and stuck in a basement for hours.
She stripped off her weave, fake nails, contacts, and eyelashes.
She molted.
Will then asks, now what else on your body can
I get at the mall?
RuPaul says, we're all born naked and the rest is drag.
Derek has a list of funny drag names and I want one.
I want to be called what I really am.
Or what I pretend to be, which I guess, in a way, is me.
Or someone who I think might be beautiful enough
to be approached, discovered.
Someone who doesn't have to pay for movers.
Someone who walks into a party and doesn't have to be anxious
because the privilege of their beauty
makes them at rest and people find vacations in their faces.
I require something fake, woven and glued stuck to my body,
even not of my body.
How does a body even start?
Sometimes my eyes feel thick and weird
from fresh eyelash extensions.
In the beginning, my head hurt from the braided ropes of hair
encircling my scalp tight.
But you want it tight, she says.
You want the cornrows so small that your fake hair
looks passable.
And hope you take the pain.
It takes so damn long to be almost beautiful.
I've sat in salon chairs all day with Black women behind me,
laboring and taming my mane.
I like the pattern crop circles carved into my scalp right
before the wefts of somebody else's Brazilian hair
are sewn like human icing into mine.
Delicious.
I want the fire to smell a type of threat in me and back away.
I want the fire to know I was already consumed,
burn inside my belonging.
There is a hankering.
A hungry choir that craves money and porn, meaning my thoughts
are well lit, stage, and faking it too.
Even my soul is pre-oiled, fluffed, bleached, wax nubile
looking and staring down the camera to ash.
The trick is looking like you like it.
Like you enjoy getting slammed.
Which is why I like being groomed, getting yanked,
painted, cut, and plucked.
I've been on all fours as a woman ripped me from my center,
where I split in jeweled halves.
I did not yell as I bit my lip, grabbed the corners.
I enjoy how people look at me when they
think I might be beautiful.
I enjoy porn best when I think they might
be enjoying themselves too.
When there might be real pleasure at stake,
but who can say really.
Not showing pain gets you paid.
It takes a lot of money to look this trashy, Dolly Parton says.
And yet Rachel, Rachel who scratches
your dandruff like Teacake and Chapter 11 in Their Eyes
Were Watching God.
Who detangles and combs your hair with deep conditioner?
Who wraps your hair at night?
Has Brian seen you in your silk bonnet yet?
You know it's real when you're riding
on top with your hair wrapped.
Lala says she was never ugly, just poor.
I want my teeth fixed and chiseled,
but veneers are so expensive.
I hide my coffee stained crooked things.
Cardi B raps, got a bag and fixed my teeth.
Hope you hoes know it ain't cheap.
So I tried to hide the unevenness in my teeth
when I talk, which means sometimes I don't
talk when I can see myself.
I tried to hide the gaps and how sharp my teeth really are.
How animal, how lower class, how cash poor my mouth really is.
I don't look pretty when I come.
Mouth open, my jaw slack and sideways pulling spit,
my deadened eyes fixed on one object in the room.
This time a chair.
This time a corner half in shadow.
This time I just wanted to watch a Black woman
on TV fall in love for entertainment.
For escape.
The best cure for microaggressions
are shitty TV and, again, Cardi B.
Ahmaud says for us American Blacks,
we are post-apocalyptic.
The end is not near, but behind us.
We are what remains of our six million dead.
We are what was not hung, dumped or flung from the Zong.
Splashing and graveless, lest you
think the ocean a tombstone.
The ocean is not scared or sacred enough.
But we out here, anyway.
Trying to save ourselves still, sprinkling black pepper
behind our feet as we run away.
But there is no north now.
We find the drinking gourd within ourselves,
guiding stars within our own black- lit blood.
We glow.
Maybe it's true then.
That beauty is a type of survivor's guilt. A sack
cloth, I suffer an inch and injure from and for,
or rather that I am seen through sin.
Dirty Hottentot zoo is my body.
I was such a terrible Lady Macbeth in high school.
Her mania didn't make sense to me
until it was activated in me when a man left me
in my blood and 20s.
There's a type of grief I carry in my hands.
Some dark un-wipeable thought.
Some liquid other, like my daddy's DNA.
His spots, I'm trying to cover them with this talk of beauty.
I'm repenting for something, I don't know what.
I wasn't meant to be born but ain't I a beautiful bastard?
And doesn't everybody want to be cleaned by slices
of jailed light Yes, it's true.
I want my eyebrows microbladed for $700.
There are specific times when I don't want to be wanted.
Number one, at night.
Number two, when I'm walking alone.
Number three, at night when I'm walking alone to my car.
Number four, an empty parking lot.
Number five, a man approaches.
Number six, he sniffs me knowing that familiar scent
of pressure and piss from other men that have marked me too.
Seven, didn't they touch me because I
was beautiful or did they sense what was easy to poke?
I've always wondered what made a slave beautiful enough
to be raped.
What about their body made it worth it
to commit a sin on what they deemed a damned body?
Maybe beauty had nothing to do with it.
Of course, it's always about power,
but maybe there was a type of sheen lacquer on Black bodies
baking under the sun.
Or a funk from the field.
Or the house slave dilating from room to room.
A physiological scent that niggles perhaps.
How close desire is to a type of terror owned and familiar.
When I get ready with golden highlighters,
is that what I am?
What I accentuate?
For my cheekbone to sparkle in the spectral light of the dead,
belling inside me.
The sparkle of dead slaves is forever in me.
Still, so iridescent.
Keats wrote, beauty is truth, truth beauty.
That is all.
I don't know what that means.
I've had some dark inkling about it, succinct finality.
Even in class, I pretended to know
what the poem was about when my students would discuss
ekphrasis and The Grecian Urn, telling them
about art responding to art and how
to make a static image sing.
But even then, I was pretending.
I don't want to be dumb.
My worst fear, a bunch of students
would all point and call me a fraud.
I once asked Mark, my professor in grad school,
when I would stop feeling like an impostor.
He said I would feel this way for the rest of my life, which
I think is closer to some type of truth.
Which is attractive because it provides relief
to know everyone might be just as insecure and afraid
of others as me, and possibly watching the Bachelorette
on Monday nights.
Like when I found out on the podcast, Commonplace,
Sharon Olds loves the show too.
I squealed because I wasn't alone anymore.
I'm not writing for mastery or legacy, I could care less.
In fact, I might be writing against it.
A way of talking back to beauty, back
to the spoiled fruit on the altar of my body,
to the pressurized gaze on my skin every damn day.
I'm hyper aware that I'm hyper visible says Hope Oloye
20, from Newham East London.
The only Black biomedical student in her year at Oxford.
Who hasn't been broken by a touch?
Who hasn't been barbed by a glare?
You can't write poems about beauty
when the streets are full of racists and rapists
and the president is a pussy grabber.
I want to peg the canon.
Ceremony back and forth between the house of silence
and the house of shame, shouting over and over again
with ink stained fingers on days when I write [Inaudible]
one day no one can touch me.