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NIKKY FINNEY 13 The Greatest Show on Earth For Saartjie Baartman, Joice Heth, Anarcha of Alabama, Truuginini, and Us All Under glass and tent floating in formaldehyde jelly curled in a deadman’s float live the split spread unanesthetized legs of Black women broken like the stirrups of a wishbone somebody got their wish and somebody didn’t. The lilac plumage of our petaled genitalia in all its royal mauve and plum rose with matching eggplant hips that pull the ocean across itself each night boats of peanut skin folded and rolled like the new fur all proof of our pathology all cut away by pornographic hands fascinated with difference and the spectacle of being a Black woman and the normal pay their fifty cents to see what makes a freak a freak Go ahead walk around her she won’t bite see her protruding mass steatopygia. We don’t have to be dead first to be cut into a manageable size, one that fits their measuring rods their medicine chests will not rest until we are properly pried it has always been about opening us up experimenting on Black women but never dissecting their own desires. The side show was pitched on our backs the speculum hammered out between our legs modern medicine was founded on the operation of our hips we were the standard patterned girth of every bustle ever made Black women as spectacle wanting to but afraid to die knowing death would never quench such sterling silver lust. Bodies quake whole lifetimes in a national geographic tremble until the obituary arrives: Please. Bury me behind the mountains So they will never find me again. But they do find us Do dig us back up, retrieving the last swatches of soft skin the last twig of curved brown bone. Our opened pirouetting vaginas, our African music boxes are whittled down to perfect change purse size, For the normal who will always pay their fifty cents to be sure and see what makes a freak a freak. 148 Nikky Finney Credit: This poem originally appeared in The World Is Round, InnerLight Books, 2003). ...

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