WEBVTT

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I was in Philadelphia, and
I had been writing poems

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about violence against women.

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And because my
life is what it is,

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every time I do
that, something--

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if I call out to the
universe in some kind of way,

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something comes back to me.

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I'm not sure how that
happens, but it does.

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And so I was
finished-- finishing

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a reading in Philadelphia
in an auditorium.

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It was a snowy night.

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And as soon as I got
to the last poem,

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the back door opened,
and a woman walked in.

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And she stood in the
back by the wall,

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and she kept her coat
and her boots on.

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She didn't get comfortable.

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And after the book
signing, she came up to me,

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and she asked me one question.

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Or she told me something.

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She didn't ask me something,
and I'd never seen her before.

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And she said, hey, you write
like a Black woman who's

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never been hit before.

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And that's the epigraph for this
poem called "The Girlfriend's

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Train."

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I read poetry in Philly
for the first time ever.

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She started walking up all the
way from in back of the room.

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From against the wall,
she came, big coat, boots,

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eyes soft as candles
in two storms blowing.

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Something she could not
see from way back there

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but could clearly hear
in my voice, something

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she needed to know before
pouring herself back out

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into the icy city night.

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She came close to
get a good look,

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to ask me something she found
in a strange way missing

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from my Black woman poetry.

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Sidestepping the crowd,
ignoring the book signing line,

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she stood there waiting
for everyone to go,

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waiting like some kind
of representative.

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And when it was
just the two of us,

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she stepped into the
shoes of her words.

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Hey, she said, you
write real soft,

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spell it out kind,
no bullet holes,

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no open wounds in your words.

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How do you do that, write like
you've never been hit before?

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I could hardly
speak, all my breath

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held ransom by her question.

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I looked at her
and knew there was

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a train on pause
somewhere, maybe just

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outside the back door where
she had stood listening,

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a train with boxcars that she
was escorting somewhere when

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she heard about the reading and
came in, a train with boxcars

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carrying broken women's bodies,
their carved up legs and bullet

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riddled stomachs
momentarily on pause

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from moving cross country.

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Women's bodies, brown,
black, and blue,

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laying right where coal,
cars, and cattle usually do.

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She needed my answer for
herself and for them, too.

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Hey, she said, we were just
wondering how you made it

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through and we didn't.

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I shook my head.

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I had never thought about
having never been hit

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and what it might have
made me sound like.

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You know how many times I've
been stabbed she asked me.

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She raised her blouse all
the way above her breasts,

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the cuts on her resembling some
kind of grotesque wallpaper.

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Hey, she said, how many
women are there like you?

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Then I knew for sure she had
been sent in from the Philly

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cold by the others on
the train to listen,

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stand up close to make
me out as best she could.

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She put my hand
over top hers, asked

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could we stand up straight
back to straight back,

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measure out our
differences right there,

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and then she gathered
it all up, wrote down

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the things she could,
remembering the rest

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to the train load of us
waiting out back for answers,

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full to the brim with
every age of woman,

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every neighborhood of woman
whose name had already

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been forgotten.

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The train blew its whistle.

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She started to hurry.

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I moved towards her, and
we stood back to back,

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her hand grazing the
top of our heads,

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my hand measuring
out our same widths,

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each of us recognizing
the brown woman latitudes,

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the Black woman
longitudes in the other.

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I turned around,
held up my shirt,

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and brought my smooth
belly into her scarred one,

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our navels pressing,
marking out some kind

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of new equatorial lines.

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[APPLAUSE]

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