When My Mother Was Eartha Kitt, and This Is Not a Gentle Poem
- When My Mother Was Eartha Kitt, and This Is Not a Gentle Poem
When My Mother Was Eartha Kitt
Along the bottom of a forgotten banker’s box:a pair of black patent stiletto boots,knee-length and, somehow, once my mother’s.The woman who bought these boots:twenty and nubile, she smokes Caprisand throws back her head, laughing at off-colormen who broadcast their broken attemptsto woo in languages just as foreign to her—konnichiwa, ni hao ma.She is impervious and breezy and says things like,“Now I bet you’d never try that with Julie Newmar!”Her world, onomatopoeic: heels staccatoupon Detroit’s salt-ground pavement; men droptheir highballs of bourbon—Bam! Pow!Kaboom!—as her slight frame slinkspast rows of wooden barstools. She purrs.When I found those boots in the sixth grade, I knewmy own feet would never unlock their magic.My own body monstrous and lumberingcompared to the petite contours from which I came.I knew men would never whimper to tongue my boots.Eartha Kitt mother, what would you sayto the woman before you today?Would you understand your daughter’sself-fulfilling prophecies? Her needfor distance, her proclivity forthe third person. Her intoxication withthe power of a man she cannot nameemptying himself inside her,the hollowness of his embrace. [End Page 42]
This Is Not a Gentle Poem
The larynx, pinched pliers.The mouth a purple feather.
A circle of mushrooms, the heart;smashed glass, the smile, littered
along chainlink. You cataloguethe world this way; that is to say,
the man you learned to unlovetaught you yourself, a new blazon:
ankles as handlebars, the facea plate to lick clean. Breasts
uncompromising as bruises.Do you regret the breath you lost
here, the frantic skin on carpet?Look to your hand become a gun.
Run away on two rusted nails and listento the concrete cry out beneath you. [End Page 43]
Michelle Peñaloza grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Asian American Literary Review, TriQuarterly, Hobart, Hyphen, and INCH. She is a 2014 Jack Straw Writer and the recipient of the Miriam McFall Starlin Poetry Award from the University of Oregon and fellowships from Kundiman, the Richard Hugo House, and Oregon Literary Arts, as well as scholarships from VONA Voices, Vermont Studio Center, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She lives in Seattle where she is at work on her latest project, landscape / heartbreak, forthcoming from Two Sylvias Press in Spring 2015.
