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    Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
    Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
    Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
    Ebook142 pages1 hour

    Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

    By Patricia Smith

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    About this ebook

    Winner of 2013 Wheatley Book Award in Poetry

    Finalist for 2013 William Carlos Williams Award

    "Patricia Smith is writing some of the best poetry in America today. Ms Smith’s new book, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, is just beautifuland like the America she embodies and representsdangerously beautiful. Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah is a stunning and transcendent work of art, despite, and perhaps because of, its pain. This book shines." Sapphire

    "One of the best poets around and has been for a long time." Terrance Hayes

    "Smith's work is direct, colloquial, inclusive, adventuresome." Gwendolyn Brooks

    In her newest collection, Patricia Smith explores the second wave of the Great Migration. Shifting from spoken word to free verse to traditional forms, she reveals "that soul beneath the vinyl."

    Patricia Smith is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. She lives in New Jersey.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCoffee House Press
    Release dateNov 18, 2013
    ISBN9781566893671
    Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
    Author

    Patricia Smith

    Patricia Smith is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art;Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration ion with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Smith is the winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. She is a professor at the College of Staten Island and in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, as well as an instructor for Cave Canem, the annual VONA residency and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Writing Program.

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      Book preview

      Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah - Patricia Smith

      1

      OLD BACKDROPS DARK

      HOW MAMAS BEGIN SOMETIMES

      For my mother, Annie Pearl Smith

      Raging tomgirl, blood dirt streaking her thick ankles

      and bare feet, she is always running, screech raucous,

      careening, dare and games in her clothesline throat.

      Playing like she has to play to live, she shoves at what

      slows her, steamrolls whatever damn thing won’t move.

      Aliceville, Alabama’s no fool. It won’t get in her way.

      Where’s that girl going? Past slant sag porches, pea shuck,

      twangy box guitars begging under purple dayfall. Combs

      spitting sparks, hair parted and scalps scratched, mules

      trembling the back road, the marbled stares of elders

      fixed on checkerboards. Cursed futures crammed into

      cotton pouches with pinches of bitterroot, the horrid parts

      of meat stewed sweet and possible. And still, whispers

      about the disappeared, whole souls lost in the passage.

      Frolicking blindly, flailing tough with cousins, sisters,

      but running blaze, running on purpose, bounding toward

      away. She can’t tag this fever, but she believes it knows

      her, owns her in a way religion should. Toes tap, feet

      flatten out inside the sin of shoes. She is most times

      asking something, steady asking, needing to know,

      needing to know now, taking wing on that blue restless

      that drums her. Twisting on rusty hinge, that old porch door

      whines for one long second ’bout where she was.

      But that girl gone.

      STILL LIFE WITH TOOTHPICK

      For my father, Otis Douglas Smith,

      and the grandparents I never knew

      Maybe his father grunted, brusque and focused as he

      brawled with the steering, maybe there was enough time

      for a flashed invective, some hot-patched dalliance with God.

      Then the Plymouth, sounding like a cheated-on woman,

      screamed into hurtled revolt and cracked against a tree.

      Bone rammed through shoulder, functions imploded,

      compounded pulse spat slow thread into the road.

      His small stuttering mother’s body braided up sloppy

      with foliage and windshield, his daddy became

      the noon’s smeared smile. For hours, they simply rained.

      It is Arkansas, so the sky was a cerulean stretch, the sun

      a patient wound. The boxy sedan smoldered and spat

      along the blistered curve while hounds and the skittering

      sniffed the lumping red river and blood birds sliced lazy over

      the wreck, patiently waiting for the feast to cool. The sheriff

      sidled up, finally, rolled a toothpick across his bottom teeth,

      weighed his options. It was ’round lunchtime, the meatloaf

      on special, that slinky waitress on call. He climbed

      back into his cruiser and drove off, his mind clear. Awfully nice

      of those poor nigras to help out. Damned if they didn’t

      just drip right into the dirt. Pretty much buried themselves.

      KEEP SAYING HEAVEN AND IT WILL

      Otis is orphan in a very slow way. Relatives orbit the folded him, paint his parents to breath with stories that take the long way around trees, stories about the time before the two of them set out in the rumbling Plymouth, going somewhere, not getting there.

      Otis is orphan in a very one way. Only one him. Only the solo with only happy stories to hear, no one says car. No one says crash or never or dead now. Everyone says heaven. They pat his head with flat hands, say heaven with all their teeth, say heaven with their shredding silk throats. They say heaven heaven heaven while their eyes rip days down.

      Otis is orphan in a very wide way. They feed him dripping knots of fatback, bowlfuls of peppered collards, cheap chicken pieces sizzled thick and doughy, stewed shards of swine. They dip bread in bowls of melted butter, fry everything, okra and tomatoes, fish skin, gizzards, feet. And the women shovel sugar and coconut meat into baking pans, slosh sweet cream into bowls and stir and bake and it is all everything for him for his little empty gut. They feed him enough for two other people, though no one says two other people.

      Finally someone says bodies. Something about the souls having left them and thank God for that. Someone says maybe just one casket. He is eating peaches drifting in a syrup. They think he is a little boy too overloved to hear. But he knows days. And this new sound, orphan, which means that mama and daddy are too close to be pulled apart. They are in one pretty place. But only one him, too adored and fattened. There will be a home for them to come back to. He is widening, practicing with his arms. He will be their first warm wall.

      BEFORE ORPHAN UNEARTHED THE MIRROR

      He was

      always told that he looked like everyone, everything—

      his mama’s brother and sister, that loopy

      cockeyed chicken, that droop-tittied store girl.

      Nosy folks even said he resembled Earl Lee’s

      circling mule, or that crumpled picture of Jesus

      stapled to the kitchen. When you are not in

      the way that he was not, no one admits a root.

      Everyone had a hand or paw on him, steady

      testifying to the miracle of his standing,

      his dogged insistence upon breath. So one

      morning he just up and said good-bye.

      He swept his eyes slow over the spider

      cracks swallowing the crop, the toppled milk

      cans and slivered barn roof, his uncle’s flat

      face, the pummeled tops of his own shoes.

      He said good-bye to a shred of his father

      folded into the trilling heart of a tree. I’m

      leaving for Chicago he told his aunt and uncle

      and they didn’t even try hiding their hallelujah.

      All his nose, hands, and stride ever did were

      remind them of dead. They hated telling him

      how he looked like anything else, everything

      else. They were tired of pretending that his face,

      scratched and black, wasn’t a record that just

      kept on skipping, playing that, that song.

      FIXING ON THE NEXT STAR

      Between 1916 and 1970, more than half a million African-Americans left the South and migrated to Chicago.

      Mamas go quietly crazy, dizzied by the possibilities

      of a kitchen, patiently plucking hairs from the skin

      of supper. Swinging children from thick forearms,

      they hum stanzas riddled with Alabama hue and promises

      Jesus may have made. Homes swerve on foundations

      while, inside, the women wash stems and shreds of syrup

      from their palms and practice contented smiles,

      remembering that it’s a sin to damn this ritual or foul

      the heat-sparkled air with any language less than prayer.

      And they wait for their loves, men of marbled shoulders

      and exploded nails, their faces grizzled landscapes

      of scar and descent. These men stain every room

      they enter, drag with them a

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