The World Is Round: Poems

The Girlfriend’s Train

62 The GIrlfrIend’s TraIn You write like a Black woman who’s never been hit before. —patience rage I read poetry in Philly for the first time ever. She started walking up, all the way, from in back of the room. From against the wall she came, big coat, boots, eyes soft as candles in two storms blowing. Something she could not see from way back there but could clearly hear in my voice, something she needed to know before pouring herself back out into the icy city night. She came close to get a good look, to ask me something she found in a strange way missing from my Black woman poetry. Sidestepping the crowd ignoring the book signing line, she stood there waiting for everyone to go, waiting like some kind of Representative. 63 And when it was just the two of us she stepped into the shoes of her words: Hey, You write real soft. Spell it out kind. No bullet holes, No open wounds, In your words. How you do that? Write like you never been hit before? I could hardly speak, all my breath held ransom by her question. I looked at her and thought, maybe, there was a train on pause somewhere, maybe just outside the back door where she had stood, listening. A train with boxcars that she was escorting somewhere, when she heard about the reading and came in. A train with boxcars carrying broken women’s bodies, their carved-up legs and bullet-riddled stomachs momentarily on pause from moving cross-country. Women’s bodies; brown, black-and-blue, lying right where coal, cars, and cattle usually do. 64 She needed my answer for herself and for them too. Hey, We were just wondering how you made it through and we didn’t? I shook my head. I had never thought about having never been hit and what it might have made me sound like. Guess how many times I been stabbed? She raised her blouse all the way above her breasts, the cuts on her resembling some kind of grotesque wallpaper. How many women are there like you? Then I knew for sure. She had been sent in from the Philly cold, by the others on the train, to listen, stand up close, to make me out as best she could. She put my hand overtop hers, asked could we stand up straight back to straight back, measure out our differences right then and there. 65 She gathered it all up, wrote down the things she could, remembering the rest to the trainload of us waiting out back for answers. Full to the brim with every age of woman, every neighborhood of woman, whose name had already been forgotten. The train blew its whistle, she started to hurry. I moved towards her and we stood back-to-back, her hand grazing the top of our heads, my hand measuring out our same widths, each of us recognizing the brown woman latitudes, the Black woman longitudes in the other. I turned around, held up my shirt, and brought my smooth belly into her scarred one; our navels pressing, marking out some kind of new equatorial line. ...