I was in Philadelphia, and I had been writing poems
about violence against women.
And because my life is what it is,
every time I do that, something--
if I call out to the universe in some kind of way,
something comes back to me.
I'm not sure how that happens, but it does.
And so I was finished-- finishing
a reading in Philadelphia in an auditorium.
It was a snowy night.
And as soon as I got to the last poem,
the back door opened, and a woman walked in.
And she stood in the back by the wall,
and she kept her coat and her boots on.
She didn't get comfortable.
And after the book signing, she came up to me,
and she asked me one question.
Or she told me something.
She didn't ask me something, and I'd never seen her before.
And she said, hey, you write like a Black woman who's
never been hit before.
And that's the epigraph for this poem called "The Girlfriend's
Train."
I read poetry in Philly for the first time ever.
She started walking up all the way from in back of the room.
From against the wall, she came, big coat, boots,
eyes soft as candles in two storms blowing.
Something she could not see from way back there
but could clearly hear in my voice, something
she needed to know before pouring herself back out
into the icy city night.
She came close to get a good look,
to ask me something she found in a strange way missing
from my Black woman poetry.
Sidestepping the crowd, ignoring the book signing line,
she stood there waiting for everyone to go,
waiting like some kind of representative.
And when it was just the two of us,
she stepped into the shoes of her words.
Hey, she said, you write real soft,
spell it out kind, no bullet holes,
no open wounds in your words.
How do you do that, write like you've never been hit before?
I could hardly speak, all my breath
held ransom by her question.
I looked at her and knew there was
a train on pause somewhere, maybe just
outside the back door where she had stood listening,
a train with boxcars that she was escorting somewhere when
she heard about the reading and came in, a train with boxcars
carrying broken women's bodies, their carved up legs and bullet
riddled stomachs momentarily on pause
from moving cross country.
Women's bodies, brown, black, and blue,
laying right where coal, cars, and cattle usually do.
She needed my answer for herself and for them, too.
Hey, she said, we were just wondering how you made it
through and we didn't.
I shook my head.
I had never thought about having never been hit
and what it might have made me sound like.
You know how many times I've been stabbed she asked me.
She raised her blouse all the way above her breasts,
the cuts on her resembling some kind of grotesque wallpaper.
Hey, she said, how many women are there like you?
Then I knew for sure she had been sent in from the Philly
cold by the others on the train to listen,
stand up close to make me out as best she could.
She put my hand over top hers, asked
could we stand up straight back to straight back,
measure out our differences right there,
and then she gathered it all up, wrote down
the things she could, remembering the rest
to the train load of us waiting out back for answers,
full to the brim with every age of woman,
every neighborhood of woman whose name had already
been forgotten.
The train blew its whistle.
She started to hurry.
I moved towards her, and we stood back to back,
her hand grazing the top of our heads,
my hand measuring out our same widths,
each of us recognizing the brown woman latitudes,
the Black woman longitudes in the other.
I turned around, held up my shirt,
and brought my smooth belly into her scarred one,
our navels pressing, marking out some kind
of new equatorial lines.
[APPLAUSE]