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 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.
!200!I am forever in the wettest red.