Rice: Poems

The Butt of the Joke

103 The Butt of the Joke for Caryn Whoopi Goldberg Johnson You were that little girl on stage Made from different pieces of us all A one-woman show Mobile awning of melanin and goose down Lips with a long wavy towel propped For false dreamy hair Wanting life to be just as blonde And endless Asking God and anybody else listening in on The act for blue eyes Please And all the perfect moments That naturally come along And everybody dark laughed It was a real scene From many played-out Little Black girl lives And everybody light laughed Cause a funny Black woman On a well-lit stage Fastly becoming a rising star By remembering her real nightmares By making fun of her Wish-I-Mays-and-Wish-I-Mights Wish-I-turn-out-white-tonight Out loud Is so funny especially If you already are 104 Now here you are again stage right A grown-up rich and funny woman Who has come such a long way baby The first Black woman Invited to be roasted By the Brothers of the Friary You are not the first Black woman To arrive at her own bonfire Feet down instead of feet first Not the first who was not tied up and dragged in Screaming and kicking for help To the occasion of her roasting You are not the first who trusted That these times and flames were new ones and better Believing everything they said You thought these would differ from those That engulfed the corps of Black women before You are not the first Black woman Who walked on her own Into the occasion of her roasting Believing a new kind of fire would be set this time And took your seat up front in the reserved chair Wearing the ear chimes of the rich and famous That could not no matter how hard they tried Shimmer up the illusion of blue-eyed golden tresses You were a Black woman Invited to the Occasion of her Roasting Who came not wrist bound in a croker sack And gagged with shit but willingly Expecting cool laughter to wash you into An even lighter hue and cry for the icing evening 105 Lighter than you already felt yourself to be there On his arm And yet the evening was true It proved to be exactly more than it promised The same flames that your great mothers knew well That licked and finally bit their skin away At their own private roasting Licked and nipped you all night at yours An alabaster firestorm peeling back the skin And leaving your white bones bare You are not the first Black woman Who arrived by caterer Walked in stylishly late To the Occasion of her Roasting Nor will you be the last But you were the saddest in recent memory Enthroned there in the honor seat While your fellow funny lover stood just above Melting all over everything in blackface Spitting out all the old white classics Asking you and your plush African mouth Not to Nigger lip it As he kept rolling it out all over everything Spinning watermelon jokes at your feet While the flames caught your hemline And you jumped and danced whooped it up Trying to miss what was coming at you And keep your balance at the same time As he dearly delighted the crowd With everything from a coon’s age ago Including the description Of your inflamed private Black woman’s parts 106 Comparing the overused width of your womanhood To the sacred birthplace shores of the first continent And the Franciscan monks of the Friary lifted Their glasses clinking a toast the roast of you And the vintage kerosene flowed red gold And your white actor peers laughed And your Black model friends laughed Afraid they would be accused Of not being able to take a joke Worried they would appear to be overly sensitive Terrified they might be recognized as Black first Then whatever else if they didn’t No more the colorless universal-gray characters They had worked so hard to be They say some people with memories Got up and left But most stayed swallowing their nausea Only to ask us perpetually vomiting ones later “Can’t we take a joke” And further taking up the cause Of blackface humor at home By sporting more shoe-polished faces at...