OK, so you move out of the tropics
and then what do you do?
How do you write about landscape when you live
in a major defense complex?
I went from Baton Rouge to San Diego,
and it's taken a long time to get that voice.
In general the poems that I write out of that place,
my friends on various coast like very much,
editors on various coasts like them very much,
and people in Montana hate them.
So now you're going to get to hear a few of them.
This is called "Because the Body is Not a Weapon."
A few years ago we had a fiction position open,
and I wanted to hire Toni Cade Bambara.
So I called her, she'd just moved from Atlanta
to Philadelphia to be in a more vital Black community.
And she said, I was living in La Jolla, and she said, "Well,
tell me about your Black community."
And I said, "Well, let me put it to you this way.
Where I'm living, even being a brunette
puts me in the minority.
So I'm not so sure about our Black community."
Anyway.
"Because the Body is Not a Weapon."
"In this town of date palms and expensive pastry,
everyone wears pastels.
Everyone owns a sports car and speeds.
I leap with blondes in a gymnasium of steely leotards.
No one speaks to me.
No one catches my eye.
I eat ill-conceived Mexican takeout, pasty beans
with chopped beef.
In my dreams all the crepes of my life call me.
I swear the only person who spoke
last week had three inch toenails
curled over his sandals.
Oh yes, and at the grocery, a little girl in coveralls
studies me when I smile.
"You're not my mother."
She kicks her thick legs through the cartwheels.
"You're not my mother."
Still, I pass slightly as a dust diamond
through my pink sea cottage.
And how should I take this omen?
Stalled in traffic, a van of boys barks at me.
12 years old, they lick the windows,
they moon their half formed buttocks, they wiggle
their shell-like genitals.
Do I laugh?
Have I become a foreign country?"