x years
after sojourner’s question hung, in air
met with nervous applause by white women
and quiet murmurs by Black men
Black women were seen as seals
barking our selves to others’ jarred amusements
noisy clappers tossed the occasional dead fish
never silent, never nourished, never understood:
“ain’t we women?”
*
ida b. wells sued & won her train seat (until it lost appeal)
7 decades before rosa sealed hers
she journaled aloud red records of Black pulp bled and smoked
strained fruit hacked from our selves hung, in air
not content to watch and write, she worked
ida and her fellow club women so roared suffrage
sisterhood and social uplift to distraction
she told susan b. anthony she needed 3 months family leave:
“ain’t ida a woman?”
*
a bevy of bessies slung our blues
until we heard our selves sealed in jazz’s complications
singing the scattered notes caught hung, in air
between Black birds singing in the dead of night
broken wings in jagged flight
we rained a séance in harlem
transfixing art and sexuality ’neath zora’s chapeau
and ‘tween josephine’s legs:
“weren’t we women?”
*
with winks laced in loud laughter, we insinuated our gayness
& marvelous masculinities at private parties, balls, saloons & salons
passing salty secret selves in story & song
no longer willing to keep all of our lips sealed
believing risking death meant we were still alive
albeit with something to lose
for a deadened soul is simply dead
with nothing ever to breathe:
“we were we, weren’t we?”
*
so we picked from paths presented
civil rights & Black power for Black men women’s liberation & equal rights for white women
and pursued our sealed selves in bars under moonlit skies until pig-o-lanterns came to raid
Black machismo snubbed us as race traitors or silenced siphons of labor
white feminists crudely analyzed bits of our burdens for skewed critique
both telling us to wait on them as they weighed on us
preoccupied only with the vertebrae they sat on
neither noting our pain, our breath, nor our souls:
“we…ain’t we.”
*
my mother-mes sat a spell at the intersections in the seething sun
backs aching and bellies soured on rotted fish
when they noticed like-selves also peering out of shadow & in crossroads
more third world women in need of first world chiropractic care
together deciding, “there’ll be no more clapping for others. our hands are bloody & numb.
let’s unseal our stories & sound ourselves with kitchen tables as our drums.”
they laughed screamed cried flirted and sighed
fed truths, torched lies, cradled difference, mirrored lives
as their wombs spun spider eggs
of sisters-trans-brothers-genderqueers-spirits
weaving webs of worlds into the words:
“we ARE.”
alice coltrane’s “turiya & ramakrishna” from the album ptah, the el daoud:
http://blkcowrie.wordpress.com (~ with a doffed cap to the beatles)
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