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  • Spoken like a true, and: anodyne
  • Courtney Faye Taylor (bio)

Spoken like a true

Whichever rape brought quadroons to Chicago  is demanding to be archived.     Make me

feel the colors.   I go onwhistling. I’m trying to play

hard to tolerate   but Minnie was

arylide and   died easy (Microsoftred-underlines “Riperton.”) I walk to class

smelling of asparagus piss. No momin particular raised me to be accidental

or to feed Lady Speed Stick (parabens, aluminum)to the cabinet mirror. Pray towards having a name

to lose while creeping near preventablehistories like interracial dating or breast

cancer. I let go too early for the toilet.     Syllabus day, I enter    the room and my students arrive, still eyeing the hall    for a professor. Their assumption must be I’m

here to learn.   Black girls learn forever.   How elsedid we own the seventh octave for

three decades with no chest? [End Page 8]

anodyne

INSTRUCTIONS: In this part, you will be given a list of statements regarding race and health. Some of these statements are true while others are not. Please read each statement and rate the extent to which you believe it is true, from Definitely Untrue to Definitely True.

◉ I kept my eyes open when he     pierced my nose     just to prove I could

    watch this white man mar me and     not blink once.

Whites, on average, have larger brains than Blacks.

◉   Each time Nana pancaked a centipede to beige for scaring me    she’d go   Mean ‘ol centipede, you bleed like me!   My embarrassment    still cringes. Serenading ‘bout-to-be-ghosts seems a waste. A thin    obsidian life is heaving on a time limit you’ve set. Why sing at that?

Black people’s blood coagulates more quickly–because of that, Blacks have a lower rate of hemophilia than Whites. [End Page 9]

◉   I thought septum piercings were African. I thought getting one    would make Lucky Dube an artery through my Saturdays. I survived    single-mother daughterhood and for that I’ve earned the courage    to blast holes through my appearance. I’ve earned this bodily door.

Whites are less susceptible to heart diseases, like hypertension, than Blacks.

◉   There was, for a brief time, a time    where boys made a sport of sprinting    behind me on my dusk jogs. The winner    was whoever caught up and slapped my    ass first. Once it happened right as I went    to wrench my undies from the crack. Me and a    blond touched hands back there, right on    the brilliant bluff of my brown sexuality.

Blacks are better at detecting movement than Whites.

◉   Centipede is a delicacy, a pasta soup in wider countries. But in the country of my hurt,    a centipede can never be delicate. I want badly for centipede to be a verb — to aggregate,    to concentrate, to serenade the time limit I’ve set.

Black people’s nerve-endings are less sensitive than White people’s nerve-endings. [End Page 10]

◉   My favorite stereotype is, “They’re so violent!”–- not methodically, but    ad-libish; a think-on-your-feet type knockout. Though I’ve never gone    to blows, I hope that within me, somewhere along the carotid, my African    American inadequacy could shiv its acrylics into power.

Racial bias in perceptions of pain…does not appear to be the result of racist individuals acting in racist ways. To date, then, it is unclear what beliefs account for disparities in pain assessment…

◉   I wasn’t mad enough to violence the boys. Sometimes, if I ran    earplugged and vinyl-layered, I couldn’t feel the winner make a finish line    of me at all.

Black people’s skin has more collagen (i.e., it’s thicker) than White people’s skin. [End Page 11]

Courtney Faye Taylor

Courtney Faye Taylor is the winner of the 92Y Discovery / Boston Review Poetry Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2020, Joy and Hope and All That: A Tribute to Lucille Clifton, and featured in journals such as Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Courtney is a graduate of the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers...

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