ISSUE: Fall 2009
DJ
She’s always been a tomboy, Mama Vic says, Mouthy.
Runnin’ the roads. Not comin’ home, and as she speaks
DJ slicks back her yellow mane into a ponytail where it rats,
her slight thighs packed into tight khakis and her chest
lost in a baggy green workshirt from the Hess,
no makeup, all attitude, one hand grabbing her imaginary
dick and the other ripe with gasoline, newly evicted,
her lazy eye wandering over the Babel of seven kids
now occupying her mother’s living room—My bitch,
Mama Vic calls her, my baby bitch—and when this bitch rages,
the woman who made her daughters pick their own switch
for a bare-bottomed whuppin’ she deemed The Peabody Special
takes her grandkids in, ambles toward the ailing
couch to pick out their nits with a comb.
DJ spits into her phone, Dat bitch better step back
or I’ll beat her ass, hangs up, lights another Newport
as her name surely immolates in the mouth of the girl
on the other end of the line, and the children scream over
three porkchops and a slab of mac and cheese she’s fixed
after her shift, her anger a fast-rising balloon in this room
where her mother’s Madonna of the Dolphins
opens her porcelain arms over the television to bless
Maury Povich and his inglorious guests. Days later,
DJ will fidget in the pumped-up vinyl chair
contemplating her wet hair like a favorite pet or maybe
cursing it just for being there, sour because she knows
that when the snips come, they come fast, they will cut
and cut like her tongue can cut, faster than the cry of
any child who may need her, her mother’s glower, her temper
shorter than summer; in her mind revs a van filled with
dollars of gas and clothes in the back, a narrowing list of houses
she could run to and the narrowing roads she might drive
to reach that beautiful fair-haired girl
she was before her years as a woman—years which,
after the cut is over, she will sweep
into a dustpan with the length of a broom.
In Verse is supported by Public Radio Makers Quest 2.0, an initiative of AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio. This project is made possible with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by a broadcast partnership with Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.
