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Back Bluest Nude Save as PDF
Chapters (44)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. I.
  4. Blueprint
  5. On Seeing and Being Seen
  6. Two Girls Bathing
  7. Marigolds of Fire
  8. Labor
  9. Poem After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima
  10. Diamondback
  11. After the __________, I yearned to be reckless. To smash
  12. Detail from “Poem After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima”
  13. Primordial Mirror
  14. Le Sacre du printemps
  15. After the __________, I had the urge to dance
  16. II.
  17. She Said
  18. III.
  19. Posing Nude
  20. Burying Seeds
  21. At the Fish House
  22. Why I Left the Garden
  23. After the __________, I mothered my mother,
  24. Facing Off
  25. After the __________, time turned like a mood ring.
  26. Resembling Flowers Resembling Weeds
  27. Of Being in Motion
  28. After the laughter subsided the crying kept after we held hands
  29. Heaven as Olympic Spa
  30. IV.
  31. Bluest Nude
  32. Bathers with a Turtle
  33. Slow Drag with Branches of Pine
  34. Lotioning My Mother’s Back
  35. Aubade
  36. A Family Woven Like Night through Trees
  37. Etymology of a Mood
  38. Poem After an Iteration of a Painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Destroyed by the Artist Herself
  39. Head on Ice #5
  40. After a Year of Forgetting
  41. There is a scar near my right eye no lover ever noticed
  42. Notes
  43. Acknowledgments
  44. About the Author

until it is ocean and I’m its muddy saint. I will baptize

myself in silt and December. I will become

a pungent, earthly bulb. I’ll pillar to salt. I’ll remember

the pain of childbirth, remember being born.

There is a scar near my right eye no lover ever noticed

or kissed, a faint mark: split skin sewn.

And so, and now, there was never a before. Never

a time when the wind did not smell of dust

or storm or brine or blood. Never an hour when I entered

a field of bluebells without trampling at least one fl wer.

And so, and then, on the day I was born, a stampede

of horses filled my chest. Astronomers can only guess

how the universe formed. The planet is dying:

the horses, the mothers, the farmers, the bees. I am

the ground, its many grasses and wild clover.

My teeth grow yellow, ache, decay. I wash a plate,

polishing the moon’s face—both will outlast my brutal

hands. And so, in the minutes of after, the moon drips

on a silver rack and the plate fl ats, cracked with age,

in outer space … a stray soapsud sparkles then bursts.

Notes

  1. Epigraph 1: “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” by Lorraine O’Grady.
  2. “Seeing and Being Seen”: In full, the Susan Sontag quote from On Photography reads, “A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened.” The Elizabeth Bishop quotation is from “In the Waiting Room.”
  3. “Poem After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima”: The engine of the poem and the concluding italicized phrases are taken from the spiritual “Down by the Riverside.”
  4. “She Said”: Italicized and quoted language in this poem are taken from the transcript in “Testimony of the Rape Trial of 1612” from Artemisia Gentileschi by Mary D. Garrard and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s written testimony delivered to the United States Senate Judiciary Committee on September 26, 2018 which concludes with the sentence: “At this point, I will do my best to answer your questions.”
  5. Epigraph 2: Interview, Carrie Mae Weems by Dawoud Bey. BOMB Magazine July 1, 2009.
  6. “Burying Seeds”: Some italicized language in this poem is from Ossie Davis’s eulogy of Malcolm X delivered on February 27, 1965 at the Faith Temple Church of God and Christ in Harlem, other italicized lines come from an interview of Betty Shabazz by Mal Goode of ABC News, conducted shortly after her husband’s assassination.
  7. “Facing Off”: The image of the young woman and man holding rocks is a quotation from the photograph Combat des amis avec pierres (1976) by Malick Sidibé.
  8. “Bathers with a Turtle” is after a painting with the same title by Henri Matisse.
  9. Epigraph 3: Interview, Mickalene Thomas by Sean Landers. BOMB Magazine July 1, 2011.
  10. “Bluest Nude”: Section six lines 3-4 remembers a fictionalized description of Jeanne Duval by Angela Carter in Black Venus, quoted by Griselda Pollock in Differencing the Canon: Revision, Critical Studies in the History and Theory of Art.

Acknowledgments