Simone Savannah
MORNING
When I awake this morning
I immediately want the red wine I began last night.
I skip meditation and just journal, just put on Drake
and ask God why I didn’t take the white man home
or fuck him last night.
I watch an episode of Broad City (the one where
they confront patriarchy and Western medicine)
four more times and think about the coconut curry
I left behind at the restaurant.
If I go back there today, order a full meal,
I wonder if he will be there with some other woman
talking universe and how he reads seven books at once
(15 minutes a day on each book).
I wonder if he would bore the fuck out of her.
By afternoon, one of the men I used to love in Ohio
asks me about the dinner after I posted a funny story
about it to Facebook: he says nothing about me has changed:
that I still go on dates just to get fucked.
I do not respond to his messages.
I have no feminist response, no black feminist response.
He is just trying to be important.
He wants his sleepy eyes on my breasts
and his baby momma with my name in her mouth.
When I pray this morning,
I tell God I want my last lover
because he said he knew me for real
and always had a smile and brown skin for me at his door.
He always fucked me and said thank you.
The first time we met, we stood at each other’s bodies
talking directions and humidity.
He said my sweaty brown looked good in pink
and before he left me, he said he had asked for my number
because I said something with my eyes and because I stood
with my hip out in the middle of Kansas—
I decide I want to keep black men:
how I am obsessed with their thick browns facing mine
their pearling bodies when they walk on concrete
their thick stories about how their fathers
used to love their mothers curdling in their throats
behind the yelling and reaching to touch my pretty brown
behind their tongues curving up the side of my neck when we get there.
I tell them, my father, I think, still wants me to love him
but I have stopped answering his calls since he dropped
his needles at my feet during my visit home.
And really because he could never distinguish
between my mother’s body and my own.
