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Underpitched & underpublished
there is more love
in the bus driver's thumb
when he covers the slot
it's okay, go ahead
as my card chirps from hunger
as I stall and my purse coughs
than the thousand soft sighs,
rising wonders and longings
forming cloudlands for dreamed selves
of downcast-eyed boys
you are the cutest little boy asleep
like a heathen legs wide & sheet-tangled
a bed of rainbows & donuts & all your best friends
(are silent) no Deco artist designed you
gangly neotenous elbowed& kneed thing
til death adolescent the plaid skirt itself
breaks curfew ah! it rises and swirls
like the first ever turns red-black stripe red-black
baby-halty eyes widen
the discovery of girlhood that wet
of a body still being learned--another naked dance
for a body still being learned--the first personal language
the last cartwheel is far too distance
the sand that drips from your underfoot
is sandiegan the hands' undertan knows
the blue-brown mix of beach
(& this can be a song in Robinese)
for applemound breasts & pearbottom
peachvellum tree brown yes & blue & future blue
the afro sprouts has become a halo
of strangers' caught compliments our thought cloud
in the glow of somewhere else you carry
& will one day return to a star or sun isn't that right?
Sometimes, I want to tell a really unflattering hot mess bachelorette story about myself, like the time I was cooking half-naked on my second floor apartment and I heard someone call my name--but then i remember that the concept of “hot mess” belongs to young white women who are deemed attractive enough that their self-deprecating “mess” is forgivable because their lives have an underlying expectation of goodness and success regardless of their peccadillos whereas my mess as a black girl is not seen as charming but an endemic representation of the failings of my race whose negative stereotypes i must fight with declarations of royalty, fierceness, and beauty if not an 24/7 facade of respectability due to the societal expectation of me being low enough that the mess is assumed while the success is not, the success must be seized, the competency must be asserted, the intelligence must be proven, the confidence must be tested, and with all the time i must devote to these small tasks, i will scarcely be allowed the luxury of a benign mess. But still, I was cooking half-naked in my second floor apartment and I heard someone call my name. Of course I freaked out, thinking that 1) someone could see into my second floor apartment, 2) they recognized me, and 3) they now knew that I habitually went about my day in a state of undress. What else had they seen? Who else had seen me?
But as they continued to call my name, it occurred to me that they might have been calling for a different Maya. And yep, I eventually met a little girl with her hair in barretted braids who lives in the same complex I do. Meanwhile, I bought a frilly black apron to fend off the oil spills and still wear whatever I want at home.
what it first meant was:
the strongest buildings still announce bomb shelter
sturdy tan boxes where
before i was born
my parents cousins possible friends
learned to hear sirens and crouch under desks
what it really meant was a blue for freedom
like the seas between us
an arbitrary line drawn in bullet or tank track
red over there, for blood we still desire
what it means now is that a children's tv show
told me to save water.
i choose not to i like the fizz of its pressure,
white with excitement after brushing my teeth
& after the first spit, i cup my hand,
lower my mouth
lips to the water,
ah! how tasty how endless beautiful clean & free
I was an impressionable child, overimaginative. I caught the sadness of anything near me, even if it was supernatural. After my dad told me about yajuj and majuj, and how Allah made humans of fire (jinn) and light (malaikah), I would idly look for angels in filtered sunbeams or listen for the voices of jinn leading me on--although I'd been told they were not at all like shoudler demons from cartoons, that they were most interested in minding their own business. Still, my dad was so sure that the end of the world was near that I looked for signs as a sort of impulse I still haven't entirely kicked.
Once, when Deadheads in town, my mom got lost on the way from the hospital and I cried of fear that she'd wandered into some other world, taken by ghouls or zombies. I didn't know what Deadheads were. I pictured something like a roving band of conjurers who worshipped the late Jerry Garcia, a baccanal Wild Hunt devoted to a 40-year old rock band. Maybe they even revived him during concert ceremonies--hey, I didn't know what their concerts got up to. All I knew is that the smells and looks of the nomadic van-living dreaded folks who overtook my familiar neighborhoods overnight made it feel as if a gate to the other world had opened. And mightn't Mom have wandered into it?
When Tupac died, I was torn between thinking he would haunt us or that he would rise again. I lived in San Diego while Pac lived and died in Los Angeles, but the mythology around the man was too large for a single city or county. I felt that the fate of the West Coast was tied to the fate of Tupac. He was our lamb and lion, while The Notorious B.I.G. was the martyr for the East Coast.
I didn't understand the difference between Tupac and Makaveli but the fact that Makaveli's album came out after Tupac's death was reason enough to believe in his return. The video for "Hail Mary" was a warning: the spirit of Tupac could act through others and punish those he loved, punish the state he loved for failing him.
The West/East rap rivalry took place largely through lyrical snipes and diss tracks, but I hadn't heard the songs in question. I saw the West/East rivalry as a cross-country gang war in which an underground network of color-coded national alliances, claimed territories, clans and dons and secret passwords. My brother had to assure me that Tupac wouldn't haunt us, that we hadn't betrayed him--because anyway we liked West Coast rap better, right? It was better.
(Well, even now, I prefer Odd Future to the A$AP Mob.)
So I refused to listen to Biggie to preserve my soul, and (when I became less superstituous) as a matter of pride. Total Request Live didn't care about my soul, however, and I couldn't help hearing and seeing the hits from Biggie's Life After Death. I wondered how his greatness had shaped his half of the country. B.I.G's posthumous album sounded not like revenge but like a celebration of a buried harchet. His best friend Puff Daddy mourned with Faith Evans but then they all popped champagne and went dancing in outer space. It sounded like and end and my brother verified that yes, Tupac's and Biggie's death meant the end of the West Coast/East Coast war.
(We would watch the videos for cameos that signified alliances. When Snoop Dogg signed with No Limit, that was irrefutable proof.)
So I wasn't particularly concerned about the y2k bug (we didn't yet own a computer when everyone else was panicking), the year of 1999 was beautiful to me. The apocalyptic symbolism of it, the magnitude of what it could mean... The zeitgeist had shifted from the 90s to the 00s: we'd gone from the hard-knocks and poverty of gangsta rap to the money, power, and sex of party rap.
Listening to "Mo Money, Mo Problems" felt like being in a national sweepstakes: I'd get a car, you'd get a car, they'd get a car, we'd all get cars! I thought that when Diddy said 'we' he meant 'black people,' not just his friends and labelmates. I thought he was wishing into being a world that finally loved black people. I had seen enough Mo-Town documentaries to know the history of black music, and I knew that we were often copied, unpaid, uncredited, erased. But here we were, front and center, successful and loud, top of the charts! Brandy's "Top of the World" told me where we were headed. Mya's Ghetto Superstar" was written with me in mind. The world finally loved black people.
Missy, Janet, TLC wore armor and jumpsuits to summon the future with love songs, bye songs, and synced dances. Computer graphics was younger but came closer to replicating our world with every new game and film. Cell phones were still yet twinkles in investor's eyes, and all technology shone with hint & possibility. Black people were front and center in the media, happy and copied and admired by the world. And yet...
I don't know how much money my family had at that time. I know that we moved to the East Coast (Providence, Rhode Island, to be specific) around that time, and we seemd to have moved right into the music. I was ten, tuning my ear to hear the production differences between Swizz Beatz, The Neptunes, and Timbaland. Some part of me knew I would be rich someday, I knew it, because I was a good person and a hard worker--A student without even trying). I was creative and I was young and it was about time. I had everything the world said I needed to be rewarded.
The world was new and new and new no matter where we went and I would be one of those pretty naked girls in Cancun one day, no doubt! I wasn't allowed to wear swimsuits and show that much skin but it would be a matter of course that I would meet Carson Daly.
This was just before politics mattered to me, when everyone was corrupt in a way that didn't matter because everything was fun and everything was fine. Who cared!? The future was coming on. I don't remember how long we were second-hand rich, how long I had the future. I do know that it was gone by the end of 2001. By the end of that September, definitely, it was gone.
Even now, I am one of those impressionable, overimaginative people who think there might be an alternate world in which Bowie and Prince are still alive, a world with more balanced energies in which Trump was not elected. In that world, the FBI caught the hijackers when they were simply names on a watchlist, Bush was not a wartime president and thus not re-elected, the nation that Obama inherited was not a limping thing but a spritely hyperpower arcing towards peace & progress, there was no housing crisis or Great Recession or need for Occupy, and the world really did love black people and the hiphop hit party never ended.
or doesn't touch
or will or should, like
the cork-hat or the cork-hatted man,
his sons: Irwins, Kratts, Hanna
in safari tan, all.
or the mother of watching, who crouches
hidden recording & watching a band
or family troop or community that--
(how does she rank them? a step above us? me a step below her?)
in the light of the college's chapel
what did she think when i raised my hand and voice:
'i think their rights are not as pressing
for now'? or the plant-fed girls seated around me
or the father of altruism, sitting tenured
over his envisioned drowning child,
hands forming professorial barrels
around something like 'liberation'
--i want to say he stole that word
just as his young infiltrate a farm quicker than a prison,
free cattle sooner than a man
before all that, i lay before the tv
(9 or younger
(legs swinging
(hair still braided)
with my animal books & a notepad
sketching the photos of roseate spoonbills
pallas cats
fennec foxes
endangered and extinct:
that whales this pigeon that tigers
i am not Black yet
when we are all beasts
a human onscreen talks of warmth and breasts
& i realize my mothers (& my own someday)
but i don't yet weigh men's bodies
against dogs or lions;
link the wildness of the Motherland
to my own blood
or recognize the yokes or cages & colonies in it no
i learn somethings of Human Nature,
build my morals it brick by fact by brick
they tell me something about tooth and claw
violent innocence green wonder
black theory has yet to address
Back around 2011, when I bought an up-to-date Guide to Literary Agents and did market research while sincerely believing I could sell a middle grade book despite my utter distance from the literary market, I read that there was a gap in the market for book about homeschooled kids.
As a homeschooling grad, I thought (and still think) I could fill that gap. But not right now; right now, I don't know what the Great Homeschooled Novel looks like. I'll probably be fumbling towards that as I continue to write, for adults as well as for kids.
There are a couple of things that resonated with me as a homeschooled grad, and I feel like these influences will bring me closer to figuring out how to portray the experience:
