Call Me By My Name

https://portside.org/2017-05-19/call-me-my-name
Portside Date:
Author: Jamaica Baldwin
Date of source:
Rattle

Call Me By My Name

By Jamaica Baldwin

Between Nina Simone’s teeth and pendulum quiver—

                                                            A tiny white misery unfolds
                                                            from the Appalachian hills.
                                                            Men with black lungs

                                                            gather in red caps
                                                            for their right to descend
                                                            again. Polished white

                                                           of their wombs to a salmon-
                                                           skinned savior for a myth. 

Alternative fact: he will come for you too.

I’m the brown daughter
of a white woman who voted blue
and now has made a nest

called sorrow from twigs of left-
wing shame, from shards of blue
glass bottles and jellyfish,

from coral reef blue and eye bruise
blue, from her, there’s plenty of room
for you
blue, but how do I tell her

I cant live there too? How do I
tell her she named me after papaya
flesh and cornhusk, after sweet

juice of black women’s song,
whose only known border is water,
who dip sacramental bread in

Obeah chant? Slow churned
memories of the Arawak.
Did she know they were a poetic

people when she named me?
Did she prophecy the sap of Ackee tree
lingering in the ashen grooves

of my knees and elbows?
Their jerk and rock steady lilt.
What I don’t know of them

is the white space of every page
I’ve not yet written. What I don’t
know of my people is their name.

                                                          A tiny white misery smokes
                                                          meth in the alluvial plains
                                                         of Missouri. Make America great

                                                         again! slides through decaying
                                                         teeth dangling from threads
                                                         in the mouth of last-ditch hope.

Alternative fact: I will fight for you too.

I’m the brown daughter
of a black man who died
like black men do: too soon,

back broke, inevitably. In
retrospect we should have
buried him in the worn down

beanie he wore every day:
yellow, green and black—
Appropriation or premonition?

Were he here, he’d shrug, say,
ain’t no surprise. Them white folk
never meant us t’have too much

slack in that rope. How do I tell him
I can’t give up like that? How
do I tell him, he named me

after a place designed to resist:
cocoa leaves and tamarind breeze,
cutlass slash, and Parish streets.

Did he know my name
would call attention to
how very American I am?

                                                               A tiny white misery spread
                                                              disease-like from every he doesn’t
                                                              mean that,
each he tells it like it is,

                                                              and words are just words I heard
                                                              from all the well-meaning
                                                              white folk who voted him

in. Between Standing Rock
and Flint, Michigan  
—I am here.

Between refugee
and immigrant   
—I am here.

Between birth control
and rape control 
—I am here.

Between Nina Simone’s teeth
and pendulum quiver
—I am here.

Jamaica Baldwin is a graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Pacific University Oregon and a 2017 Jack Straw Writer’s Fellow. She’s had her poetry published in Rattle and the Seattle Review of Books where she was the March 2017 poet in residence. She lives in Seattle and is currently working on her first book.
 


Source URL: https://portside.org/2017-05-19/call-me-my-name