after Céline Sciamma’s film Girlhood (2014)
Don’t act like you never met them—
withering bright across
the Atlantic’s resistance to time.
At our age, this tall Rican girl kissed
my neck to Pon de Replay out in public
which made me just small enough
to dance, and it didn’t hurt how
I was taught to imagine.
Who hasn’t cathected to these
Black girls just one little ocean away—
if I’m crying, it indicates at least a
minor investigative effort—like, there is
something between the subject
of this film and the rules for
observing ecstasy.
My own mother would agree
having stripped me of any girlhood
for what she knew. Chili was too thin, and
I liked and also looked then, too much
like her. Puberty bears down
on my own daughter, and she looks
to me and this movie for comfort.
I’m not indifferent to the production
of Diamonds, but more hung up with
their institution of feeling:
like the fake ones worn
in one ear, the left, on a boy child’s quest
to procure the affections of the baddie
next door, Almasi, whose name he could
never pronounce. I ignored this song til
four girls who look like my mom and
them thrummed it through the hotel
hallways; let this also be a renaissance
in light, damn right they were beautiful.
But if we could remove all the horrible shit…
Nevermind. I felt fine too, for Rihanna’s
big ol’ beautiful forehead, for Pon de Replay
that night, for having snuck into the after
hours death knell, into some sign of myself
with hips and thighs that wants and needs
color, beyond the prominence of this or
that line, like, my niggas don’t dance, they
just—
used to be gold-lit. You know what, I like
to watch
all kinds of things unfold in the slender
complexities of just a few minutes,
and I never tell. Sometimes difference
is wearing down as it builds my one
son up, at seven, furious for the discovery
of his boyhood. Someone taught him not
to dance. And I did not kill them, despite
my being an American man. We call that
restraint.
Who among us has the strength
to extend this scene?
For what I’m worth, one shaggy
hotel bed too many and licks
on the neck to tender everything
til we meet in that upper room, I’d like
to see it before it’s gone,
before it costs too much.
