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FUNERAL DIVA
FUNERAL DIVA
PAMELA SNEED
Copyright © 2020 by Pamela Sneed
All Rights Reserved
Cover art “Self Portrait Abstract” by Pamela Sneed, acrylic on canvas, 2019.
Cover design by Linda Ronan
ISBN: 978-0-872-86804-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sneed, Pamela, author. | Scholder, Amy, editor.
Title: Funeral diva / Pamela Sneed ; Amy Scholder, editor.
Description: San Francisco, CA : City Lights Books, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020009381 | ISBN 9780872868113 (trade paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Sneed, Pamela—Poetry. | Autobiographical poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3569.N34 A6 2020 | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009381
Greatest thanks and heartfelt love and gratitude to Amy Scholder, for vision, belief, agenting, editing, and helping to bring this book to fruition.
Great thanks to Elaine Katzenberger for her work, support, and saying Yes. Many thanks also to Stacey Lewis at City Lights for all her work, and to everyone at City Lights.
Many thanks to Natasha Shapiro, Karen Finley, Gregg Bordowitz, Kyle Dacuyan, Nicole-Dennis Benn, Claudia Rankine, Sarah Schulman, Erica Cardwell, Tommy Pico, Avram Finkelstein, Dorothy Allison, Eric Pliner, and Jonathan Bloom, Alisa Yalan, Jenny Keyser, Matthew Buckingham, and Anselm Berrigan at The Brooklyn Rail.
Shout-outs to Jane Ursula Harris, Shelley Marlow, Ellen Goldin, Sur Rodney Sur, Zach Seeger, Franklin Furnace, and Denniston Hill.
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133
www.citylights.com
CONTENTS
1.
HISTORY
2.
ILA
3.
FUNERAL DIVA
4.
NEVER AGAIN
5.
UNTITLED
6.
RUTH VICK
7.
THERE IS ME/THERE IS MY MOTHER
8.
MYSTI
9.
SIDEWALK RAGE
10.
YOU CAN’T GET OUT FROM UNDER
11.
TWIZZLERS
12.
PARABLE OF THE SOWER
13.
PARABLE OF THE SOWER 2
14.
BEY
15.
UPRISING
16.
POST-ELECTION
17.
ROPE-A-DOPE
18.
SILENCE=DEATH
19.
FOR DONALD WOODS
20.
HOLD TIGHT
21.
SURVIVOR
22.
CITIZEN
23.
CIRCUS ACTS
24.
BLACK PANTHER
25.
MASK
26.
PROPHECY
27.
BORN FREES
28.
A NEW STORY
29.
MARKED SAFE
30.
WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF
31.
A TALE OF TWO PANDEMICS
32.
I CAN’T BREATHE
33.
WHY I CLING TO FLOWERS
HISTORY
UNCLE VERNON WAS cool, tall, hazel-eyed, and brown-skinned. He dressed in the latest fashions and wore leather long after the 1960s. Of all of my father’s three brothers, Vernon was the artist—a painter and photographer in a decidedly non-artistic family. To demonstrate his flair for the dramatic and avant-garde, his apartment was stylishly decorated. It showcased a faux brown suede, crushed velvet couch with square rectangular pieces that sectioned off like geography, accentuated by a round glass coffee table with decorative steel legs. It was pulled together by a large ’70s organizer and stereo that nearly covered the length of an entire wall. As a final touch, dangling from the shelves was a small collection of antique long-legged dolls. This was my Uncle and memories of his apartment were never so clear as the day I headed to his apartment with my first boyfriend, Shaun Lyle.
It was the ’80s, late spring, the year king of soul Luther Vandross debuted his blockbuster album, Never Too Much, with moving songs about love. If ever there was a moment in my life that I felt free, unsaddled by life’s burdens, and experienced in the words of an old cliché, “winds of possibility,” it had to be the time with Shaun Lyle heading upstairs to my Uncle’s house as Luther Vandross blared soulfully out from the stereo, “A house is not a home.”
Of course Shaun was not the first or last person with whom I’d experienced feelings or sensations of unbridled freedom. Like seasons, freedom came in cycles, like in fall, in college with no money, chumming around with my best friend and school buddy Michael. We spent late afternoons wandering Manhattan’s East and West Village, searching for cheap drinks and pizza at happy hour specials, ecstatic in our poverty. Michael was a blond Irish Catholic punk rocker from Boston. We met when I was an RA at The New School’s 34th Street dorms at the YMCA. They were narrow tiny rooms like closets and some floors served as a hostel for homeless men. Punk music blared from Michael’s room. I would knock on the door commanding, “Turn it down.” Eventually, we united over the fact he put a towel under the door to block smells of weed smoke that frequently leaked from his room into the hallway. Michael and I were both writers, astute critics, and teacher’s pets. In fiction writing class, we formed a power block. No piece of writing done by another student escaped our scathing critique. Professors deferred to us. “Michael, Pamela, what do you think?” We sat next to each other with arms crossed. A student writer friend confessed to me later, “I was terrified of you two.” We were obsessed with Toni Morrison. I will never forget the last lines of Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, which Jane Lazarre, our fiction teacher, made us read out loud as a class together.
“And Nel looked up at the trees,” said “Sula, girl, girl, girl, all the time I thought it was Jud I was missing, but it was you.”
Jane’s eyes welled up as did mine and the whole class cried. Sula was a story of women bonding and friendship and longing and loss. “It’s a truly feminist novel,” Jane would declare. Feminism was her favorite topic. She was a straight woman with kids. She had grey hair and admitted she smoked pot. She was so cool, she’d write things on the board and say out loud, “Oh, I can’t spell.”
Michael and I were both work-study students. We covered for each other. He would call me after a night of drinking and partying and say, “I just can’t do it. I can’t go in. Will you go?”
“Sure,” I’d say.
One day Michael and I skipped school and hung out near the entrance of 72nd Street and Central Park West.
