“Naw.”
“Have you ever been kissed down there before?”
“Naw, and I . . .”
He said he was from new Mexico.
“What are you doing all the way over here?” I asked. “Traveling,” he said.
He asked me what I was doing all the way over here. I said I was traveling too.
He takes me up to an old room.
It is a dream.
“My name is Moses Tripp. I came to take you on a trip.”
He sits snapping his fingers. “Every trip. Every trip. Every trip.”
“How high do you want me to take you, honey baby?” James says he wants to get real high up in me.
“I been dying to.”
2
When I asked Otis what did Uncle Nutey do, he said he was sitting on the church steps naked. He just took off all his clothes and went and sat naked on the church steps. The cops came by and picked him up and put him in the asylum.
My breasts are rocks that turn to bread and then to milk.
Blood is inside my breasts.
What would you do if you broke bread and blood came out?
The gypsy Medina tells me: Toss his blood into the wind, and it will dry.
God is God, she says, because he can turn milk and sweat into blood.
The owl corners me, lays me on the floor, begins to dig and peck.
“Don’t let your man know.”
“I won’t tell him. If you don’t tell your woman.” There is a dead eel between his legs.
I am sitting in a restaurant. The men who work with my father ask, “What are you doing here, sweetheart?”
“That’s John Canada’s daughter.”
“I don’t care who she is. She’s sweet.”
“Naw, she’s nothing but a little bitch just like all the rest of em. Think they wont your love, and they wont your money.”
“Better not let John hear you saying that.”
“What? That she’s a bitch or she’s sweet?”
“Or that she’s a sweet bitch . . . Man I ain’t got no more ambition in life than chasin womens.”
“Making love and making money.”
They come over to me and look me over.
“Naw, you can’t tell them nothing,” Miss Billie says. “They got to learn for themselves. Got to get stung by the bee before they can see.”
“Mama, where does the bee sting?”
“Your heart,” Mama says.
“Down in your drawers,” says Miss Billie. Is your heart in your drawers?
3
Joanne said every time her father fucked her mother, her mother would say, Praise God Praise God. What would your mother say?
Nothing. She would just make little noises, and my father would make noises like he was soothing pain away.
Did you take my rubbers?
No.
She was under sand. And he came and put a hole—not for air—but so he could stick his thing in.
Why do you care for him so much?
He told me to look at his hand. He told me what his hand had done to women.
Suppose he had told you he would stay? He puts himself in me.
4
“Is this the savage woman?”
“Yes, here she is.”
They stare me in my eyes.
Did you have a bad night?
I dreamed an old man came with a canoe and he had a troubled expression, till he saw me, then he started smiling. He handed me one oar and he took the other one. I thought we were going to plunge both oars in the stream, but he lay me on my back in the canoe. Water seeping in my skin. He put one nervous hand on my belly, the other over my eyes.
When I woke up, he said, “I didn’t do it.” He kept saying, “I didn’t do it.”
Then he scooted down along my body until his head was at my waist.
“Did you take my rubbers?” he asked. “No.”
“Where’s your man?”
“I don’t have one.”
He said, “Things like this happen in hell.” He put his tongue on me.
The queen bee’s men had dice. They were asked what they were gambling. They said they were gambling their lives.
She kept telling one man to go. She kept telling him to go.
When he left, she got up on the table and spread her legs open like a book. The men tossed dice.
“Man, she told you to go. Man, you ain’t got what she need.”
“Whore,” he called her, then he took off his shirt and threw it between her legs. Then he left.
The men won the shirt first, and then the meat.
She was a river. There were fins. She’s a river. They keep coming back to her until she swallows them up.
Davis put his tongue on my navel.
“I don’t go any further than this. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“I’d only do that with a woman I’d lived with for years. I’d only do that with my wife.”
Semen in his drawers.
“A woman like you, what do you do to yourself?”
“Nothing you wouldn’t know about.”
What did Uncle Nutey do?
If he had told you he would stay?
“Once you close your legs, you keep them closed.”
5
Kiss me, the man says. Give me a kiss.
The woman does not.
The man says, loneliness, you feel loneliness when there’s no one you can go to, for anything—no one woman you can go to—I couldn’t find one woman.
He’s naked, on the church steps. The woman takes her clothes off too and holds her hand out to him. She tells him she has time in her hand, that time is a toy, something they can play with.
The man sits smoking wind. He tells her he is a son of flesh and thunder.
If I had you, I’d do more than eat and live, he says. I’d be able to love again.
He has no thumb on one hand, and the other hand is slashed red. It drips between his legs.
Your breasts are loaves of bread, he tells her. You look like a woman who’s been hurt by love.
Yes, I was hurt by love.
