The Tip (Round 6)
Let's workshop this poem (with audio from the poet) where two men debate what constitutes going too far during a session with an infant prize paid for with fentanyl to a junky mom
The Tip Two men stand around a thrice-curbside coffee table— words, symbols, dug into its sticky body like jail walls; folded cardboard from Tasty Hunan under the short leg. Jeans and boxers slumped to baby blue Nikes on carpet colored by cigar guts, cracked vapes, and a lime teether (its vibrancy stomped by the detritus of indifference)— top notes of street-ball perinea plume over stale Glade. Their dispute, its casual air (as if but “Would you rather battle a horse-sized duck or . . . ?”), contradicts more than just the candlelit mood of Bobby Brown’s “Roni.” The younger man—who supplied that fentanyl key to the heart of the pockmarked mother, now sedate in its broken pulse against the under-toilet linoleum— remains firm in the siren-laden section eight of trash turned trashier by the guileless gurgles of innocence, the coos: “Big Cuz. You talkin bout killin this bitch!” “How you figure? Little bitch suckin like she hungry. Got that mah-fuckin instinct. Look: like mom dukes and shit.” The younger man shakes his head, but still stroking his rope. “I’m talkin size. Shit too tight, Cuz!” In the manner of a guardian baby-wiping chubby creases before diaper-change talcum, each wifebeater man cups a “tenderoni” foot—coarse thumbs, matchstick strikers, soft against the pliant arches. The nonpenetration rule (reaffirmed by the mother before her bathroom dash) the free-rider, bandana blue, takes as mere suggestion: “Trust, Young Cuz.” Unperceived from the cellarage, an irrelevant factoid gained in juvie health class—how girls are born with all their eggs—syringes conviction into his numb stance, one still facing furrowed brows. “On God, Cuz. Shit born ready to stretch crazy.” “Nah, I’m good on that.” “Ain’t even hearin me! Lil nigga, how you think they gon have babies?!” “Nigga, she ain’t ready to have no fuckin’ baby!” “Shit be born stretchable, Cuz. Just can’t hit deep.” After a teabag into the suckling reflex to restore that baby-arm rigidity, he snatches the other foot (“Tsk”)—rotating its rashy butt to the missionary edge. “Just the tip.—See? Steady cooin for that chocolate! Slut like mom dukes. Bet she take two pipes, nigga!"
