Rice: Poems

Acquanetta of Hollywood

94 Acquanetta of Hollywood Acquanetta of Hollywood never answers doors and jumps when she hears bells (It might be me come knocking) not for a baby switched at birth but for a fleeing woman a choice between her family or a sidewalk star She jumps her fear now in its seventies she is one side of the domino that can’t add itself up it is first the forgotten second the unknown that keeps her jumping being both it might be me come for her and her made-for-TV-movie life It will be me unimpressed with reel-to-real drama Me with my family asking-why eyes me with my homespun hair out burning like a bushfire in the marquis of the real family tree simply my being here is giving her away I, Black woman constable me with her silky snowflake Blackness always kept underneath the skin of my treasure-map palm tattooed to the inside of my open hand 95 She is talking to the camera in a dream naturally denying I am kin I stare at her hiding inside my mother-cousin’s face a three-in-one puzzle popped in place at last and under the camera’s oath she states she has no idea who I am or where I have come from Oh yes, boys, furthermore, the resemblance is purely coincidental. (She is right about the pure) I am so still (all but my bouncing Geiger twitching knee which can never keep quiet through a family lie) Uncle Dickman is riding it now he and every day of his six months of hard labor time given for slapping a white man back to the future when Jesus had woolly hair and queens came in brown except his fist was closed and dense as stone hitting wild was a pretty Black man with nothing to lose And grandmother Bea who walked dirt roads calling to cows as she hiked her skirt over barbed wire walking everywhere she needed to go all because her Black might rub off on the public plastic bus seats She has caught a horsey ride with me too I ride them all who never had a free ride from Blackness 96 the brave dead of us who did not make it even this far who could have passed but wouldn’t dare I think of all those and my leg becomes a genealogical jackhammer I have not come and brought my licorice memory to make a scene This is lost family losing and I know she is a Butterfly McQueen with broken wings I have come for her ashamed at myself for even looking for the well-swept trail with my gluey family how-could-you eyes Acquanetta of Hollywood must have imagined it believed all these years that time would come and she would be offered a final role the only one she has never played A Black woman with a family All these years she must have heard my knockings in the night looked out her window to find me there and looked quizzically my radar bat legs candy wrapped around her sweet gum tree the wizard niece still holding on not willing to lose even her even as the dream airs she tries to kick my gooey toes a loose 97 Hanging there in her air line by line alive a Black woman no more no less all of me the final revised script for her to read the one who would not blend or go away or accept her disappearance as normal no matter what color of the invisible they dressed her in The shark child would always be me always swimming away from the rest and towards blood towards the red the good stain Family into the darker water where sleep sweet and frenzy the air Acquanetta of Hollywood knew the role would be written and the writer would come for her she just didn’t know the writer would be me and, too, would I subject the story I have come for Acquanetta with her cloisonné Blackness painted in my hands to give back to her after all these years of being without to give back to make sure she has it before she tries to die anything but a Black woman’s death I am her living will she cannot leave without what we both know being handed to her...