I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood by Tiana Clark

Author:Tiana Clark [Clark, Tiana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822986164
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

III. WITHOUT THE BLOOD

When I passed by you and saw you squirming in your blood,

I said to you while you were in your blood, ‘Live!’ Yes, I said

to you while you were in your blood, ‘Live!’

Ezekiel 16:6–7

BBHMM

after watching the music video

I, too, want to be naked, zebra-striped

in the almost dried accountant’s blood, sticky

and sucking a fat blunt inside a Louis Vuitton

suitcase brimming with the newest money.

This is another way to see myself, too,

in the way Rihanna nooses a white woman up

by her smooth feet, a blue-blooded pendulum swaying

as her beautiful tits look more perfect than ever.

Why did that image excite me so? No, not the tits,

but the simulated lynching. It feels so damn

delicious to say bitch. Bitch better/bitch better have

my money inside my mouth. I hate it when people

talk about black artists being capitalists.

Why can’t we thrive in something rich and green too? And let us

be loud about it? Let us be loud without consequence.

Remember, when we were dating? I wanted you to pay

for every meal, and yes, the movies taught me that love

was someone reaching for the check first.

But there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone

has to pay with the fruit from their body. Yeah, I’m spreading

my legs for someone else, because I’m hungry and always

at the end of some kind of altar. Even now, I’m paying for my doctor

to reach and scrape inside me to say I don’t have cancer.

She tells me I need to start thinking about babies

because of my age. I think, Bitch . . . I’m not ready.

There will always be tithes and offerings. At my church,

they called it first fruits. My mother gave me quarters

and as a kid I waited for the clink at the bottom

of the bucket being passed. I believed God heard this too.

Somewhere someone is counting the cash behind a velvet curtain.

Once, a boy said, suck it, bitch with his heavy, dense hand

at the back of my head pushing. Pushing is

another way to mean pay me what you owe me. I didn’t forget.

Yeah, I see the total at the bottom of the receipt.

I have so much debt.

I am forever in the wettest red.

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