I know I'm pretty cuz the Boys' tell me so
(a poem for any woman or womangirl seen as little outside of a fetish, or even freedom.)
by Angel Nafis
My sister and I are two uttered words
back flipping out of white lips
pronounced wrong.
By the pale men that don't love us.
And sometimes by the ones that do.
I got the feeling their skin is about the same color as my pale yellow bones
and there is everything ironic about that.
On a bad day I fall in love three times
on a good day, I lose count, and my mind,
stuffing hand written letters and my backbone, postmarked, into mailboxes
Hope them to be received by some land or hand that I can memorize sweet.
Putting parachutes on all my sentences
so that the skulls of my sounds may find themselves un-shattered.
And this must be how all the women in my family love
and get loved.
By dark men too
Spinned from night and knuckles.
Like Delci, mama, she's been dead almost 19 years
and her name still slides off of my dads bottom lip,
the way only property can.
I hung one of her portraits on my wall the other day
the charcoal stained my fingers blue, as if still fresh.
And this is the closest I have let myself get to her.
The homeless black men
congregate under the tallest trees in the plaza,
on my way to work,
I cringe when they pronounce my name the way my dad does,
all thick like, with cities I've only been to twice,
and split personalities I've never been formally introduced to.
like: no, I don't have a nickel or a dime, or time to
listen to my name with Brooklyn and Queens tangled up in it.
These hands of mine are still blue with the closest I'll ever be to either of my parents.
Except
now I'll trace the cadence of that blue smudge
to the spot under my pillow,
where I'll keep a dollar for every time he called her out of her name.
And a prayer,
for my sisters white boyfriend, who too often, mistakes her name for dirt.
Doesn't even check the temperature of each syllable
Nor the angle by which we un-bend our backs to stand eye-level with our reflections.
With my face reflecting hers, swelled in gilt, my girl told me a week ago,
she couldn't unhinge her heart from her body long enough to swallow her man whole.
And it's sounds like those, that get this girl feeling heavy or heat covered.
or ugly.
But I know I'm pretty because the boys tell me so,
watch my legs move fast past'em cuz I hear
them yell: my thighs or my hips
these curves, that I'm about.
and I don't like the sound of my shapes in their mouths.
or these blue hands.
She must've loved her blue charcoal,
that indigo space
and don't my daddy be the bluest place.
Who told you to climb these mountains?
Who told you to let the butterflies out of my closet?
Who told you, you could hide in my jaw,
disguised as a song.