Breadcrumb #621
ELWIN COTMAN
I
Bitch, you lucky.
It is three o’clock in the afternoon
and a young black woman who could be mistaken for my sister,
not yet my daughter, is enraged at me,
spit flying off her lips, her finger in my face,
telling me how lucky I am;
that she’s trying to hold back her rage
after I supposedly stole her phone charger;
I don’t feel lucky but feel like a failure,
that at thirty-three years old I am still going through this;
her fire some sign of my monumental fuck-up,
a fall from grace I didn’t see happening
until I hit the pavement of this backyard,
her voice rising over the fresh-shorn lawns
and ominous American flags of this suburb.
II
Bitch, you lucky.
Which is true, I think
as my heart roars in my ears like a sound of F-14s
that drown my voice as I try to teach;
my students are her peers, only a few years younger,
bearing the unseen scars this country makes on brown skin,
grown up in the world she comes from,
one she thinks I have no knowledge of;
a world that wants my bone like this girl just wants me gone,
her tears spilling to think she told me about
her addicted mother, her uncles in jail;
and I come from the syrupy sweet spot before crack
would have swooped like a black-taloned vulture
on my mentally ill mother and debt-ridden father.
III
Bitch, you lucky.
Especially on a day years before when
I pass by a boy who drops his swisher
and it bounces off my toes under a car;
he tells me to get it and makes threatening gestures,
and I won’t fight him, not even with the pot I’m carrying in a plastic bag
for some performance art I’m doing at school;
I won’t make it a weapon colliding with his skull;
his girlfriend across the street yells, Trey, stop being bad,
so he backs away to pick up the cig
and my calming heart tells me I’m lucky;
until a few weeks later when on the bus a dark girl from England
tells me she can’t stand lightskinned hoes;
dark skin, light skin, like turkey meat.
IV
Bitch, you lucky.
Her friend in the house is a white boy
who voted for Trump,
who smokes pot with her;
he goes to the landlord and says I called him a name,
which I did, several of them, because motherfucker voted for Trump;
his is the vote that gets me put out the house
where I never wanted to live anyway,
and still this sticks in my craw like a bone;
because a disagreement between blacks
is an agreement between white men.
V
Bitch, you lucky.
After another round of drama at yet another house,
I have to concede it is me:
how many women who I barely know
will end up telling me to go fuck myself?
My father calls it low-class nigger shit:
not a thing he grew up with, a new type of cancer,
because he comes from the woods,
no running water until she was five;
His family, and the deer, and the jack-in-the-pulpit and sedge
populated those acres,
his neighbors were farmers.
We didn’t have a lot of money, but we were never poor.
Not like blacks today, he says,
Their spirits wooden nickels.
VI
Bitch, you lucky,
My man tells me there’s no black movie to describe my situation;
neither Martin Lawrence nor Tyrese
nor even Morris Chestnut had such a dilemma,
getting screamed on by some woman I’m not even fucking;
but she had to have been scoping me out, wanting me for something.
She’s thirteen years younger than you,
and you’re a doctor.
He says you have to be cold to people sometimes;
ration your smiles or don't give them at all,
make familiarity something they have to earn;
and I tell him, I know, out here by myself,
friendless in this new city,
desperate for someone to hear my voice.
VII
Ugh, you look like a leprechaun.
Maybe that’s why I’m so lucky
with that rape-made drop of DNA that put
stars on my face and blood in my beard.
All y’all lightskin niggas the same.
You look like my dad.
Because black people don’t live with each other,
we live about each other;
to be for each other an excuse or a disgrace,
our minds a locked room with
mammy and Jezebel posters on the walls;
in her hate-spewing mouth I see the pain I don’t want,
but today I must get in triplicate,
a dirge at a neverending funeral.
VIII
i don’t give a fuck fuck y’all light skin niggas you is a drunk i gotta clean up after your fucking ass i ain’t nobody’s maid i ain’t nobody’s tia you bitchass motherfucker i can’t stand you bitchass nigga shut your little dicksucker i don’t give a fuck what you have to say nigga you look like a leprechaun you look like my dad i swear i’m about to go to jail for the first time nigga you lucky you lucky bitch you lucky
IX
And because I cannot call the cops,
because they would see a domestic dispute,
a tortured yet beautiful love they could shatter
forever with their bullets, I open my backpack
to show her there is no charger;
and the hate in her turns cold,
so for a second we can hear each other,
a single exhausted breath.