Patricia Smith Poems

The city's streets are densely shelved with rows
of salt and packaged hair. Intent on air,
the funk of crave and function comes to blows

with any smell that isn't oil—the blare
of storefront chicken settles on the skin
and mango spritzing drips from razored hair.

The corner chefs cube pork, decide again
on cayenne, fry in grease that's glopped with dust.
The sizzle of the feast adds to the din

of children, strutting slant, their wanderlust
and cussing, plus the loud and tactless hiss
of dogged hustlers bellowing past gusts

of peppered breeze, that fatty, fragrant bliss
in skillets. All our rampant hunger tricks
us into thinking we can dare dismiss

the thing men do to boulevards, the wicks
their bodies be. A city, strapped for art,
delights in torching them—at first for kicks,

to waltz to whirling sparks, but soon those hearts
thud thinner, whittled by the chomp of heat.
Outlined in chalk, men blacken, curl apart.

Their blindly rising fume is bittersweet,
although reversals in the air could fool
us into thinking they weren't meant as meat.

Our sons don't burn their cities as a rule,
born, as they are, up to their necks in fuel.
...

The storm left a wound seeping,
a boulevard yawning, some
memories fractured, a
kiss exploded, she left
no stone resting, a bone
army floating, rats sated,
she left the horizon sliced
and ornery, she left in a hurry,
in a huff, in all her glory,
she took with her a kingdom
of sax and dream books,
a hundred scattered chants,
some earth burned in her
name, and she took flight,
all pissed and raucous, like
a world-hipped woman
makin' room.
...

and spy whole lifetimes on the undersides of leaves.
Jazz intrudes, stank clogging that neat procession
of lush and flutter. His eyes, siphoned and dimming,
demand that he accept ardor as it is presented, with
its tear-splashed borders and stilted lists, romance
that is only on the agenda because hours do not stop.
Bless his sliver of soul. He's nabbed a sizzling matron
who grays as we watch, a thick-ankled New England
whoop, muscled to suffer his stifling missionary weight.
Earth-smudged behind the wheel of her pickup,
she hums a tune that rhymes dots of dinner trapped
in his beard with twilight. Is it still a collision course
if you must lie down to rest? Bless her as she tries
on his name for size and plucks hairs from her chin.
Bless him as he barrels toward yet another wife
who will someday realize, idly, that her only purpose
in this dwindling novella of his days is to someday
lower his heralded bulk, with little fanfare, into a grave.
...

My mother scraped the name Patricia Ann from the ruins
of her discarded Delta, thinking it would offer me shield
and shelter, that leering men would skulk away at the slap
of it. Her hands on the hips of Alabama, she went for flat
and functional, then siphoned each syllable of drama,
repeatedly crushing it with her broad, practical tongue
until it sounded like an instruction to God, not a name.
She wanted a child of pressed head and knocking knees,
a trip-up in the doubledutch swing, a starched pinafore
and peppermint-in-the-sour-pickle kinda child, stiff-laced
and unshakably fixed on salvation. Her Patricia Ann
would never idly throat the Lord's name or wear one
of those thin, sparkled skirts that flirted with her knees.
She'd be a nurse or a third-grade teacher or a postal drone,
jobs requiring alarm-clock discipline and sensible shoes.
My four downbeats were music enough for a vapid life
of butcher-shop sawdust and fatback as cuisine, for Raid
spritzed into the writhing pockets of a Murphy bed.
No crinkled consonants or muted hiss would summon me.

My daddy detested borders. One look at my mother's
watery belly, and he insisted, as much as he could insist
with her, on the name Jimi Savannah, seeking to bless me
with the blues-bathed moniker of a ball breaker, the name
of a grown gal in a snug red sheath and unlaced All-Stars.
He wanted to shoot muscle through whatever I was called,
arm each syllable with tiny weaponry so no one would
mistake me for anything other than a tricky whisperer
with a switchblade in my shoe. I was bound to be all legs,
a bladed debutante hooked on Lucky Strikes and sugar.
When I sent up prayers, God's boy would giggle and consider.

Daddy didn't want me to be anybody's surefire factory,
nobody's callback or seized rhythm, so he conjured
a name so odd and hot even a boy could claim it. And yes,
he was prepared for the look my mother gave him when
he first mouthed his choice, the look that said, That's it,
you done lost your goddamned mind. She did that thing
she does where she grows two full inches with righteous,
and he decided to just whisper Love you, Jimi Savannah
whenever we were alone, re- and rechristening me the seed
of Otis, conjuring his own religion and naming it me.
...

Interviewing Nelson Mandela, April 1994

I want to scream into the hearing aid nestled in his ear,
Where is your fist?

Thick-throated men in black coats scurry to the windows of the suite,
scour the landscape with slitted eyes, estimate the arc of bullets.
They move me from one chair to another to another until I am sitting
so close his breath sparks moisture on my skin. The pink contraption,
imitating another flesh, fills his ear and I want to startle, to prickle his
composure, but I see that he is not nearly the vapor I imagined.
I assumed his body would be temporary, with fingers, an ear,
an arm misting into nothing at odd intervals, a leg folding into dust,
his smile its own backdrop, the repeating escape of the recently caged.

He smooths a wrinkle in his gray suit, grins sheepishly,
leans forward waiting for a question.

I stare at his fist resting on the table, ask with my whole mouth.
He hears me perfectly.
...

When my grandma got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandpa does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis. That's love. —Rebecca, age 8

I.

She preferred frosted mochas, whispering blood wines,
hues that burst against her skin. It was all the color
she could manage, brash dollops of the lostago dribbling
their borders, smashed still wet into stern and sterner
lace-ups. Now, behind a bathroom door swollen shut,
she gasps and bends, prays light into her arms. The effort
breaks her, the clockwork of body stunning in wretched
loop. To drown her panting, she flushes, flips loose all
the faucets, whimpers beneath flow. After an hour, still
vaguely hooked but craving sashay, she limps to him,
unfurls on the couch and buries all of her fail beneath
the nappy chenille throw. No, there is no gorgeous here.

II.

Patient for my dinner of cream and meat, I grumble
caress toward the still, defeated bloom of her, brush
my mouth against the wisps escaping her silver braids.
Then, because I was born during a war and I am a man,
I grab the remote, disappear for a beer. I know so well
the wreckage to the south of my woman. I know her
ravage, her stilted muscle, the pain that roars through
her like the verb of something feral, I know the night
silence. So I lock into Bringing Up Baby, insane frolic
on the flickering Philco, and I steel against the fetid
blasts of sleep from her open mouth. She has given up
on so much of her engine. Reaching beneath the blanket,
I trace and re-trace the arch of a fat, unfinished foot.

III.

I am a stranger here. Faced with gummy bottles of coral,
ice, scar, fire engine, grape, redberry, carnation and earth,
I suddenly realize that being a man has siphoned away
the exploding in how I see. I am not privy to this stark,
these raucous pinchings upon a woman's dead flesh.
Envious of its blooming, I choose an improbable pink,
and move back to where she sleeps, spittle and whimper,
her body smalling. I work her toes like I am conjuring
the new—massaging, molding, drenched in her dim
disbelieving. I dip the brush deep and lift a thick bubble
of awkward spring, then sweep until she throws back her
head and weeps an O. The clock in my hand is kindled,
furious with this, but I am careful not to break my rhythm.
I stay to my task. Her hand rests on the back of my head.
...

In 1995, an employee of the Willard Asylum for the Insane, a mental hospital in upstate New York, discovered 400 suitcases left by patients between 1910 and 1960. The average stay was 30 years; most people who entered never left.

In her brown valise, gently aligned—a spurting
pen, shuttered throat, shreds of rose-rhythmed
lace, one blue important shoe pointed north.
A rusted canister of talcum had opened, and flat
redolence sugar-howled. Behind an unsnapped
lock cowered the sound wife—yes, the last time
she had giggled was the only reason for the lace.

He had carefully chosen dull medals, god-edged
and boastful, earned in the service of murder,
and photo booth snaps of rollicking hi-town gals
with Hair-Repped crowns and mouths rumored
violent. Just there, barely secured in a yawning
silk pocket, was his young son, crisply folded
and screaming. The packing had gone well.

Following directives from the light in their hands,
they prepared for holiday, for pledged sun and river
edge, while men in blooded coats barely squirreled
away scalpels, aching for quick path into the head's
looping lyric. Lashed to beds, back-floating down
shimmering headwaters, our travelers spit-shined
brass latches, sniffed sachet, and never wearied
of yesterday's faint explode, just there, just ahead.
...