A Groupie’s Love Song
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Hermine D. Pinson
Callaloo © 2012
[End Page 585]
I send her chocolate covered almonds, my favorites. I send her my best heart dressed in sandrolled cottonballs flecked with colored glitter, pressed on canvas streaked with ginger, robin’s egg blue, or orchids shaped in a profile of her face.
I send her songs I made up or heard on the radio, on youtube, on Pandora. I give her perfume or oils and incense sold on the corner uptown I send her ah ah ah and artichokes, emails, blogs of my dreams about her.
I send her my abacas which sums up my adoration for her add this and this and this and this and this and this and so
I idolize her I have a hero complex a mother complex a father complex she doesn’t need me doesn’t know me . . . really at all only she knows my best heart you choose because what, you say, because it is so and so [End Page 586]
when she bathes I call her Erzulie, I call her Venus when she dances salsa I don’t call, I dance when she sleeps, I call her softly when she wakes, I call her beauty aye
until I have nothing left to give, unless you count these words. Go ahead and count ‘em all then please send them to her. [End Page 587]
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Callaloo journals on display
Princeton © 2012
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Conference Audience
Princeton © 2012
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Conference Audience
Callaloo © 2012
[End Page 588]
Hermine D. Pinson is author of three collections of poems—Dolores is Blue/Dolorez is Blues: New & Collected Poems, Mama Yetta and Other Poems, and Ashe—and two CDs entitled Deliver Yourself and Changing the Changes in Poetry & Song (in special collaboration with Yusef Komunyakaa and Estella Conwill Majozo). She has also published literary criticism and poetry in journals such as Signs, African American Review, Valley Voices, Sage, and Callaloo. She is an associate professor of English at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.
