All right, I'm going to read a few poems from my book,
I Can't Talk about the Trees without the Blood.
Let's start with Rihanna.
I'm feeling a little sassy tonight,
so I'll tell you a little backstory on this poem.
When I wrote this in grad school, one of my professors
said, this scares me.
You should never published it.
Which was my sign that I should publish it,
and then I won a Pushcart prize, so.
"BBHMM" (after watching the music video.)
I too want to be naked, zebra-striped
in the almost dried accountant's blood,
sticky and sucking a fat blunt inside Louis Vuitton
suitcase, brimming with the newest money.
This is another way to see myself too.
And the way Rihanna nooses a white woman up
by her smooth feet, a blue-blooded pendulum swinging,
as her beautiful tits look more perfect than ever.
Why did that image excite me so?
No, not the tits, but the simulated lynching.
It feels so damn delicious to say bitch,
bitch better, bitch better have my money inside my mouth.
I hate it when people talk about Black artists
being capitalists.
Why can't we thrive in something rich and green too?
And let us be loud about it.
Let us be loud without consequence.
Remember when we were dating, I wanted
you to pay for every meal, and yes, the movies
taught me that love was someone reaching for the check first.
But there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Someone has to pay with the fruit from their body.
Yeah, I'm spreading my legs for someone else
because I'm hungry and always at the end of some kind of altar.
Even now, I'm paying for my doctor to reach
and scrape inside me to say I don't have cancer.
She tells me I need to start thinking
about babies because of my age.
I think, bitch, I'm not ready.
There will always be tithes and offerings.
At my church, they called it first fruits.
My mother gave me quarters, and as a kid,
I waited for the clink at the bottom
of the bucket being passed.
I believe God heard this too.
Somewhere, someone is counting the cash
behind a velvet curtain.
Once, a boy said, suck it bitch, with this heavy dense hand
at the back of my head, pushing, pushing as another way to mean,
pay me what you owe me.
I didn't forget.
Yeah, I see the total at the bottom of the receipt.
I have so much debt.
I'm forever in the wettest red.