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Callaloo 26.3 (2003) 582-583


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( The Frame )

Kevin Young

Wearing silver like a screen

She stood, leaned,
purred words I waited

Wanted an audience to hear.
Throat-hearted,

I wore gin
as if it was cologne

Or cotton. Seersucker.

She spoke & her tongue forked
through that glorious gap

In her fronts.
She boohooed & cooed

I folded

& refolded my handkerchief
like a marked deck

I'd been dealt.
Ace, spade, one-eyed

Jack, I peeked out the blinds
at the streetlight silhouette

Her inevitable tail.

Blinded by those falsehooded eyes
her bright, boomerang smile [End Page 582]

I begged to choose her—

How could I know she wore
a wire under

Her bulletproof bra?

She tapped me good,
told anyone

Who would listen
my business—the 36,

26, 38 that clicked open
my fireproof safe.

Trouble's shot me down again

To the quarter where
the light stays scarlet

Where the blues share
your by-the-hour-bed

Where only green
speaks, cares, how

& who the hell you been.

 


Kevin Young is Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003), To Repel Ghosts (2001), and Most Way Home (1995), selected by Lucille Clifton as part of the National Poetry Series and winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares. His Blues Poems anthology will be published as part of the Everyman Pocket Poets series September 2003.

Copyright © 2003, Kevin Young.

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