Kinky

In bed you grabbed a handful
of my hair, said it’s beautiful,
reminds me of the black girls
I used to date in high school.
It was raining that night,
120 percent humidity,
and while I answered sarcastically,
I’m glad I could provide you
with a moment of ethnic nostalgia,
who wouldn’t want a little of sixteen back?
The octane of palpable heartbeat
when “in-like” was a state
as real as New York, when just nearness
to the opposite sex was epileptic,
in darkened rec-rooms and
childhood bedrooms, parks
and parked cars. For me,
it’s Drakkar Noir, cologne of choice
boys bathed in before house parties,
left trailing in visible waves
down beige tile hallways.
I still have a magazine sample
of Calvin Klein’s Eternity
sandwiched in an old journal—
I peel it open and suddenly
I’m scrawling permanent bathroom graffiti,
driving barefoot in the summer, fitting in
to skintight jeans again and humming
like a strummed guitar to New Order’s
“Bizarre Love Triangle.”
If my hair—the mess that broke
school photographers’ combs,
the untamable mane that held
number 2 test pencils in its curls
and got me in more slut trouble
than my mother’s imagination
could conjure, even with her devout
leftover 70’s Semitic afro—
if my hair brings you back
to wherever there is, trembling
in the graceful brown arms of some girl,
sixteen, cocky and fragile,
and scented like an entire family
of Jersey Mafioso, then praise
the magnificent Jewfro, the unruly Hebro.
I’ve spent hours ironing out the kinks,
but maybe it’s time to roll au natural
and thank its tangled ways to youth,
the body’s new knotted desire, its slow
unraveling at the root in corkscrew tongues.
Amen.

Erika Meitner
Kinky first appeared in Snakebird: Thirty Years of Anhinga Poets (Anhinga Press, 2004).
Poem, copyright © 2004 by Erika Meitner
Appearing on From the Fishouse with permission
Audio file, copyright © 2005, From the Fishouse