Beneath the Perfume

Let's workshop this bitch!

Beneath the Perfume

If as a kid, for fun (but ultimately out of rage
against what you did not fully understand
to be a mirror), you night chucked beer bottles
at whores (at least one of whom would
a few years later, perhaps recognizing the boy 
beneath the dealer, blow you for crack); 

if as a kid you were foster-homed by CPS
more than once due to “an unhealthy home”
of wall-punch holes and dog-shit carpet,
of plastic taped over sharded windowpanes;

if as a kid you bathed from the coffee pot
between bar-soap dips in the Texaco creek
from which you bucketed water back home;
 
if as a kid, among soda cans and scratch-offs,
you all huddled around the oven for warmth
while a father-figure accused you with hits,
before puberty even, of trying to grope 
the tits and pussies of a mother or sister; 

if as a kid you dove fast-food dumpsters
and got caught, by haunting parental eyes 
of pity-disgust, stealing tuna and sardines  
from classmate cupboards for nutrition
beyond jelly trays and pork and beans
and the just-add-water of powdered milk,
of ramen and grits and potato flakes; 

if as a kid you suffered the humiliation
of having to tuck bologna in your pjs  
at the supermarket, or of having to tell 
the waiter you are nine despite the hair
above your lip, or of having to make up 
(with a humming black eye, of course)
see-through tales for teachers, for classmates, 
of what your mom does or where you went 
on vacation, or of having to fill up 
two-liters inside fast-food restaurants 
(always making a mess, given the nerves 
electric through thin arms and the eyes 
shut to vanish, on the soda-fountain floor); 

if as a kid your people called you “pussy,”
called you “faggot” and “bitch-ass nigga,” 
for reading or for finally getting glasses 
(after years pretending to see chalkboards) 
or for refusing to kidnap dogs to serve, 
through taped snouts, as fight practice 
for pit bulls, clubbed for every kindness—

if any of these antecedents are true, how
could there not be some je nais se quois
about you, some offness that lingers
no matter the decades of scrubbing: 
no matter the fixing of crooked teeth
and the slang and the drag-step bop;
no matter the participating in 5ks;
no matter the inverse rows and face-pulls
(exercises to reverse the depression hunch);
no matter the abstinence from “Henrock”;
no matter the classical art and music;
no matter the self-hypnotizing denials 
of how good, of how home, it feels
eating Vienna sausage from the can
and hearing wet-hacking winos shriek
(through their sunken pumpkin faces) 
bottle-smash curses into the night
and seeing tit-flapping hood-rat fights 
(especially when at least one is pregnant
and kicks are clearly gunning for the gut)
and smelling stale cigarettes mixed with 
stale malt-liquor breath mixed with 
stale piss from unflushed toilets mixed with
stale armpit sweat mixed with stale Raid 
and clutching the pen (ready to temple stab 
someone who might try to rob your jacket); 
no matter the tie (the bowtie) and the slacks;
no matter the BA and even the PhD? 

However good you look on paper, how 
could your past (city, block) fail to radiate
through how you enter and walk the room, 
through how you shake nonunderclass hands,
through the cadence of your gait and voice,
through your inflections and phrasings,
through your very stance (perhaps torso
turned away as if to guard your genitals),
through how you sit (perhaps feet 
locked around the chair legs, hands
rubbing the suprasternal notch, palms
rarely shown)—or whatever the signals?
However many “top-tier” publications,
you would have to check every token box 
in vogue for these teary white “progressives,” 
the rape-eye-blocking scarf their metonym,
to let you enter the academic tenure track—
and at Wellesley, of all goddamn places! 

Just being black good enough now only 
in circles shrinking in size and number, how
could it be tolerated in person (during 
an interview)—that creepy reek of squalor?
The reek of you—diverse in spirit (a liability)
and non-diverse on the surfaces that matter 
(non-flamboyant in wrist, non-wheelchaired,  
non-atrophied in muscle, non-dark in skin,
non-troubled by birth sex, non-obese)—
the reek of you is all-too-easy for the scarves, 
so gung ho in the war on safe-space threats
that they banish even from course readings 
portrayals of hurt (rape, racism, self-harm),
to misinterpret (some perhaps knowingly,
seized by that chimp-reminiscent eroticism
of gang-stomping those already beaten down)
as the “problematic” reek of an “oppressor”?

*This poem is unpublished (and dear to me)

*Photo by Aly-Al