me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun.

Aziza Barnes

Contents (25)

me, Aunt Jemima, and the nailgun.

Aziza Barnes

poems

Exploding Pinecone Press

Minneapolis, Minnesota

2013

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ISBN 978-1-943735-02-0

Where you going? I don’t mind.

I’ve killed my world and I’ve killed my time

…if I live too long, I’m afraid I’ll die.

—The Kinks

I got a head with no screws in it—what can I do?

—Tupac Shakur

Contents

Aziza meets Charlie Parker in an unspecified bar on 52nd Street

in a jar

consider the hand

1997

hypnophobia

brown girl alien

my mouth

a small act

Aziza meets the 4 women: Aunt Sarah, Safronia, Sweet Thang, & Peaches at the Cotton Club afterhours

imitation of life

the picnic

moanin’: ode to Charles Mingus

a small autobiography

at a Mississippi crossroads, Robert Johnson’s daughter gets her blues

the love unlimited orchestra

Juicy (an erasure)

Aziza meets the nailgun

lullaby for my unborn daughter

Addie Parker speaks to Charlie Parker, a mother’s lost advice

a small translation

at what/hits stop

The Gettysburg Address (an erasure)

no country

Sing about Me, I’m Dying of Thirst (an erasure)

how the world will end/slavery returns to the black man

Notes

So,

me and Aunt Jemima walk into a bar, right?

And she had bit on a mason jar for her nose to fall in,

but her teeth fingers and ears all leapt in the glass,

migrating from their rancid host. By the time

she sat at the bar, ole girl barely had a face.

And my dumb-ass starts giggling right, and I go—

oh no!

I know you.

You bottled shuck-n-jive! You Uncle Tom

with-a-side-of-pancakes!You Maid-in-Gone-with-the-Wind

You Bojangles-for-breakfast!

You Amos-n-Andy-lite!

You self-hate-syrup! You slave-gone-corporate!

You black-power-fist-wit-a-hole-in-it!

You minstrelsy’s-mistress! You blackface-on-blackface-on-butter!

You Uncle-Ben’s-shawty-on-the-low! You everybody-mammy!

You—

Her skin has melded to the bar by now

and I can see thru Auntie J. The muscle

she got left shivers on her bones like a saltfish

trying to understand air. She sits now the one way

I never pictured her:

thin and white. Without eyes, she looks at me hard,

applies a set of lips to her skull, spits—

quit talking like you know black

and the box it came in.

You don’t know what it is.

To smile for all them folks.

To rot in everybody home ‘cept yours.

To watch they children.

To hear them call you ‘mama.’

To be hated by your own for trying

to find a way out. To feed your enemy

for a century and a quarter.

To have them profit off you

while you die slow.

You don’t know me.

I try to console the has-been of Blackness.

Tell her I didn’t mean it.

That I’m just a brown girl,