Spoken like a true, and: anodyne

Abstract

Spoken like a true, and: anodyne Courtney Faye Taylor (bio) Spoken like a true Whichever rape brought quadroons to Chicago is demanding to be archived. Make me feel the colors. I go onwhistling. I’m trying to play hard to tolerate but Minnie was arylide and died easy (Microsoftred-underlines “Riperton.”) I walk to class smelling of asparagus piss. No momin particular raised me to be accidental or to feed Lady Speed Stick (parabens, aluminum)to the cabinet mirror. Pray towards having a name to lose while creeping near preventablehistories like interracial dating or breast cancer. I let go too early for the toilet. Syllabus day, I enter the room and my students arrive, still eyeing the hall for a professor. Their assumption must be I’m here to learn. Black girls learn forever. How elsedid we own the seventh octave for three decades with no chest? [End Page 8] anodyne INSTRUCTIONS: In this part, you will be given a list of statements regarding race and health. Some of these statements are true while others are not. Please read each statement and rate the extent to which you believe it is true, from Definitely Untrue to Definitely True. ◉ I kept my eyes open when he pierced my nose just to prove I could watch this white man mar me and not blink once. Whites, on average, have larger brains than Blacks. ◉ Each time Nana pancaked a centipede to beige for scaring me she’d go Mean ‘ol centipede, you bleed like me! My embarrassment still cringes. Serenading ‘bout-to-be-ghosts seems a waste. A thin obsidian life is heaving on a time limit you’ve set. Why sing at that? Black people’s blood coagulates more quickly–because of that, Blacks have a lower rate of hemophilia than Whites. [End Page 9] ◉ I thought septum piercings were African. I thought getting one would make Lucky Dube an artery through my Saturdays. I survived single-mother daughterhood and for that I’ve earned the courage to blast holes through my appearance. I’ve earned this bodily door. Whites are less susceptible to heart diseases, like hypertension, than Blacks. ◉ There was, for a brief time, a time where boys made a sport of sprinting behind me on my dusk jogs. The winner was whoever caught up and slapped my ass first. Once it happened right as I went to wrench my undies from the crack. Me and a blond touched hands back there, right on the brilliant bluff of my brown sexuality. Blacks are better at detecting movement than Whites. ◉ Centipede is a delicacy, a pasta soup in wider countries. But in the country of my hurt, a centipede can never be delicate. I want badly for centipede to be a verb — to aggregate, to concentrate, to serenade the time limit I’ve set. Black people’s nerve-endings are less sensitive than White people’s nerve-endings. [End Page 10] ◉ My favorite stereotype is, “They’re so violent!”–- not methodically, but ad-libish; a think-on-your-feet type knockout. Though I’ve never gone to blows, I hope that within me, somewhere along the carotid, my African American inadequacy could shiv its acrylics into power. Racial bias in perceptions of pain…does not appear to be the result of racist individuals acting in racist ways. To date, then, it is unclear what beliefs account for disparities in pain assessment… ◉ I wasn’t mad enough to violence the boys. Sometimes, if I ran earplugged and vinyl-layered, I couldn’t feel the winner make a finish line of me at all. Black people’s skin has more collagen (i.e., it’s thicker) than White people’s skin. [End Page 11] Courtney Faye Taylor Courtney Faye Taylor is the winner of the 92Y Discovery / Boston Review Poetry Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2020, Joy and Hope and All That: A Tribute to Lucille Clifton, and featured in journals such as Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Courtney is a graduate of the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers...