Body of Life
By Elizabeth Alexander

1. 1990

One by one 'til
I'm the only one
left in the photo
we took in Gay Paree,
trill the final syl-
lable, thrill to
pretending we're
the Revue Negre,
funking so fiercely
our black clothes stained
our curvature, fab-
ulous flames let loose
in the city of lights.

One by one you leave
the picture, nix nix nix,
my moonpie face left
shining there. Au Revoir,
or like they say
in Sula, "Vwah!", bright
as a bottle, the beau-
tiful childen are
leaving me to trill
the final syllable,
this beautiful-
ugly world.

2. 1983

The other girls taught shy me to be a diva,
to preen, to plump my titties up like they did,
to work it. We danced. We wanted the body
of life and I lived for a year in that
body, the body of life, in D.C.,
in the African diaspora:
Chocolate City.

That was my slut year.
All the men I didn't sleep with, all I did,
all the lunch dates, all the dinners, all
the whistles on the streets of Chocolate
City, all the men who called me Baby,
called me Girl, like the one who made me tuna-
fish and tried to suck my breasts, then asked
me to type his resume. My buzzer
in the middle of the night, my phone, a man
who greased me head to toe with Lubriderm,
a Cape Verdean who appeared on busses
and trains as if by divination, sketched
me naked, never spent the night. I told
one man how much I loved Betty Carter
and he said, I hope you're not one of those
bulldaggers. A lonely Nigerian
who cooked fufu groped me on the sofa,
his across-the-ocean wife and daughter
watching from their picture frames.
Rum and dancing, too many things in my mouth,
genitals cobbled with passion or disease, bright
clitoris a phantom limb, remembering --

I moved away to Boston and would call
you for the update: Renee was a samba
star at Brasil Tropical, shimmied
on Brazilian TV. Denise graduated
school and made the foreign service, moved
to Jamaica, to bungalow, with
a man and a maid Pansy. "Who's sick?"
I'd ask and you'd tell me, and who died,
and one day you said, "And I'm living with AIDS."

There was Kemron in Kenya.
You were saving to get it.
You met with a support group
of other black men. You had
a Dominican boyfriend,
same as me. Mostly you felt
O.K., but you hated
your medicine. You were fat,
but you still took class.
No, Tyrone wasn't sick. But David was dead.

It was Njambi who called me to say,
you were back in shape. You performed
for the visiting Eminence of Senegal,
the next day went into the hospital,
the next day died. It made a romantic
story, but you're still gone. "I love when you call me
because you're alive," you said once,
one of your few friends still alive.
I'm writing this poem to say how we were,
that we danced and fucked and sweated, loved
ourselves and each other, lived fiercely,
knew joy. I'm writing to say,
I got lucky, you were my friend, you
knew me as a girl, I am a woman,
now, with my little piece of your story,
the year of the body of life.

From Body of Life, published by the Tia Chucha Press. Copyright © 1996 Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved. Used with permission of the author.

Copyright © 1997-2007 by Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

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