a love poem, of sorts Melissa Hamilton

Melissa Hamilton a love poem, of sorts

“Beauty is beauty, even if it is irritating” – Gertrude Stein

Like a rose, you rise from bed, sleepily shaking off the night before when we sang like chirping birds at the crack of a new morning. I am flying over your body, soaring when the sound of a bell breaks me from you. I can not remember my dream, but you were in it assuring me that art, no matter how radical, must be enjoyed. You think that I am too serious for my own good, or yours, and that I tend to get caught up in my feelings over facts. In actuality though, they only pull me in closer toward your skin, even after you exit our bed. Your beauty burns through close eyelids, creeps over sleeping senses - your braids are interwoven in my dreams. The cat, whom we’ve labeled ‘Squeaker-Pants McGee’ for her inability to fully meow, climbs into your indentation and sprawls herself open. She works hard, but not in a traditional sense. She observes, takes it all in, and then recounts her days before us, as a stray kitten, searching through dumpsters and sleeping beneath parked cars. Even as I am writing this, she is watching the fluidity of letters appear, pawing at their arrival. If language begins with listening, then she not only opens her tiny ears, but speaks as well.

My family does not listen, only forces ears open. There is no mutuality, no sense of satisfaction. A call in the form of memory vibrates my jean pocket. You, my godmother, begin with an assumption, insisting why I choose to make things harder for myself. Two weeks ago, we visited my Grandmother. She is eighty-four years old and is the one person, besides my lover, who loves me most. While we were there, my grandmother showed my lover pictures of herself as a small child in potato sack dresses and thin-soled shoes. She was glad to have company; loneliness can be a terrible thing. Somewhere in the yellow-folds of my Grandmother’s Bible, though, is a comfort like no other. An acceptance that occurs over A&W root beer and muted episodes of Jeopardy. In these almost-translucent pages, more than just the relics of my Grandmother’s life are safely stored.

You have forgotten (my Godmother, my Mother’s Sister, my Grandmother’s Daughter) what it feels like to genuinely love. You are an executor of wills, an object claiming the few highly-priced antiques in my Grandmother’s shabby apartment. You have forgotten me: the nature walks, the horseback rides, the songs before bed on holidays. You had such a strong and gentle voice. You have forgotten the childlike pictures I drew, for you, in technicolor crayon beneath your kitchen table, while our family played, what seemed to me at the time, a never-ending game of trivial pursuit. You were searching for different colored pieces when you noticed my silence. Looking under, you realized that I had nearly ruined three-fourths of your brand-new linoleum floor. My mother scrubbed for hours, undoing my dirty deed; I was never one to stay within the limits of coloring book pages.

In seven days, my Mother will have been dead for five years.

There I was, loving phantoms before you, picking up past shards and forcing them into someone new. You were there though, suddenly, but waiting. Your body as landscape to be, at first, admired, then explored, and finally appreciated. This is what the other side of lonely feels like. You are a cool gust of wind across my hot face; a cartwheel over my thighs. Swimming down into you, I know that I will stay until the end; no one understands this though. I am either traitor or wanna-be. I suppose these things happen though when black and white women love one another. You see, our flesh can exist, separately, but when we collide - when we really collide - it is kisses that bind our hands and feet, that string us up to that familiar tree. I am sorry, but I can not jam my love into spaces where it will not fit. I will not deny this. As you undress, I see your black in the midnight blue and can barely speak. No, this does not matter to them. I do not choose to make things harder. I choose love, strong and unabridged. On the inside though, my family is the most strategic and delicate mania I have ever experienced. Usually, I wear chaos well but these are the people who are supposed to love me. It is not my smile or laughter which my family remembers. No, no one remembers my face without sour in their mouths.

vi. One hundred miles and one state away, my lover and I are lost and bickering on our way to a book reading. When I do eventually shut my big mouth and drive, we finally discover our destination and semi-comfort in tiny, wooden seats provided for listeners in the auditorium. Soon, two aging, Jewish women appear: one holding a large–lined notepad, the other talking loudly into her cell-phone. They make their way down the aisle and climb over seats to achieve their centered spot which is, of course, next to us. The notepad woman is wearing a large black hat that reminds me of the costume I wore in my neighborhood’s production of Anything Goes; the other is less abrasive, physically, but has a voice that could tear through miles of cinderblock. Not only is my bottom shoved into a space that proves much too small for it, but now, I am being bombarded by a slew of questions that I, frankly, don’t desire to answer. Are you two lovers? When’s the commitment ceremony? Are you attracted to the author as well? Despite the interrogation, it is here where I begin to make sense of the way that I’ve been feeling for years. It is here where I realize that familial dysfunction is, in all actuality, quite common and not always detrimental. No, normalcy doesn’t make it hurt any less, but what does is the mere fact that the bricolage of women surrounding me are going through the same thing. There is strength in numbers and as cliché as that may be, I swear by it. I want to take these women in, hear all of their stories, and cradle them. For now though, I will assume that they are painfully fingering similar memories and, hopefully, finding solace in their current company.

At the somewhat forced gathering celebrating my graduation from college, my eight year old Godchild (the Granddaughter of my own Godmother) walks into my apartment bedroom and picks up the mosaic tile frame resting on my nightstand. The picture is a close-up of my lover and I at the park. You know, the ones you take yourself by holding your arm out in front of you, as far as you can. In it, I am leaning over and kissing her smiling, sun-drenched cheek. As my Godchild fingers the rough edges of the frame, she asks, “Are you best friends?” I laugh and answer, “Yes,” to which she replies, “I have a best friend, too!”