Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit

—for Katie Mead

My friend, we die mid-
sentence. En medias res.
We die half-delirious in labor
reversed. You expected
poignant last words but
instead came a heap
of trash
from your mother’s mouth:
bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,
she said, a bullshit
to halos, a bullshit
to wings, a bullshit
to golden god mansions,
celestial beasts sharp-fingering
bullshit harp strings.

Because of this, I want
to say I was once
in a car with another car a sliver-
second from severing
my throat. What I remember
most is my glorious
last thoughts
would have been a dark
green dress, something in velvet,
something exotic,
a tad racy, with a slit
to reveal
my sides just so, but really now,
what shoes would I wear?

Because of this, let me
tell you
a true story turned sad
joke: a woman has gone
the color of shadow
on snow, bloated with chemo,
and the priest
with his last rites
asks her religion.
None, she says,
then, smart-ass to the last,
spells it for him:
n-u-n.

Because of this,
my grandmother
spent her last days bitching
up a storm: the sage had turned
the Thanksgiving dressing
gourd green, nothing tasted right.
She cried
big, unreasonable toddler
tears for plain vanilla
ice cream. We gave her
chocolate—what we had
on hand—knowing she’d barely
have enough time to eat
what she did not ask for
before she’d have to
go.

At the time, I wanted
to be that family
reciting poems
to beckon
angels to drop blazing
beams of light
by her bed. I wanted
to pipe-in the pluck
of harmonious song,
wanted us to
genuflect, to cross
an X or two into the air
to scissor a passage
for her into the sky.
But no.
Hell, no.

Instead, we gave her
the wrong
flavor, told her she
couldn’t kick the bucket,
not now, because her
maid wouldn’t have a job
no more, because everybody
knows that woman’s too
lazy to make a dime on her own.
Bernie May said, You got that right,
told her, Scoot your big
ass over in that bed.

You motherfuckers,
my grandmother said,
wiping her eyes.
She took the melting
supermarket chocolate
to her dry mouth,
unable to swallow right
from laughing.

Author of the article

Nickole Brown’s poem included here is from her upcoming poetry collection Fanny Says, a biography of her grandmother to be published by BOA Editions in May 2015. Her books include her debut, Sister, a novel-in-poems, and an anthology, Air Fare, co-edited with Judith Taylor. She studied at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar, received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and was an editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She worked at the independent literary press, Sarabande Books, for ten years and was a National Publicity Consultant for Arktoi Books. Currently, she teaches at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Series in Prose Poetry. Nickole lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs.