To Ethel (draft 1)

Finally, it is storming like Seattle should, and I can move again. As if the raindrops and I are playing freeze tag, and just to be a tease, the storm clouds waited and tapped a toe, giggling as I sat crouched with a pen over a page, waiting for my heart's ink to come out. Here we go. This poem is a response to my beautiful and talented friend Sidony's piece "To Lucille," about her friendships with women.

To Ethel.
I stink. I know I stink because I just smoked a cigarette or five, neither of us have showered in days, we ate burritos at 3am, I'm wearing amber oil on all my pulse points, and I am thinking of that time we fried kimchi in my kitchen when there was nothing else to eat. The odor of my memory is pungent and wafts through my room, all up and down the weathered staircase that looks like it's made of driftwood, following us out the front door as we bundle up (probably much more than we need to) to go get coffee in the flat, grey sunlight. We walk down the street in hats and scarves and legwarmers and tights with geometric designs and sweaters that would make Cosby blush, looking over our shoulders to make sure the white men are looking as we rail against white male privilege. We needn't have worries; of course they are. We are a walking, snarling piece of free form jazz. And in this American northwestern city no-one even thinks twice about looking at the two black girls on the street that look like a moving Picasso.

I wish they all could be California girls.
Ethel, do you remember the day we learned together, in the house that you were raised in, what eyeliner is for (not for making the eyes look larger, but for drawing designs on our faces)? How about that time you cut my god-awful perm off, disembodied strands of hair that looked and felt like they came from a wig on your pink tile floor, leaving only tight, soft ringlets resting lazily on my scalp, and the first step on my path to getting free. The up-all-night reckonings with our brilliance, and how they didn't even realize what we had memorized and learned with our bodies when we were ten years old and younger. How could they possibly be so behind, and we were the ones that needed catch up? We made up languages that simplified even the most abstract concepts into one or two words and knowing glances, and taught one another how to read tarot cards. Remember that one time, when that one white girl said "Bob Dylan is the voice of the revolution," and we both cackled in her face and told her what was up: "Hell no girl, Chuck D is the voice of the fucking revolution" I'm realizing now that we even got that one wrong. Our brown mouths, crinkled into smiles with the faintest of unapologetic hair on the upper lip and glimmering teeth, these hold the voice of any revolution. Because all we have to do is say "I'm alive and I'm taking what's mine" and they'll be quaking in their britches.

God only knows what I'd be without you.
The truth is, you were always the brilliant one of the two of us. By the time I'd met you at eighteen, you already had an intimate knowledge of how to take care of yourself using what you found on the ground in an alley and to fight like a dog for the things that you loved and believed in. You told me about books I had never heard of, moved with me to syncopated rhythms, spat rhymes in my face and encouraged me to spit them right back out. We played dress up in your grandmother's scarves and held photo shoots and philosophical summits in your uncle's living room. Our experienced fingertips moving through record after record and brown-leaved books with dog-eared pages, always hungry for the next thing that we could add to the pastiche we created for our personal viewing pleasure.

We'll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the t-bird away.
Eventually it came time for you to pack up and move back home, because you ran out of money and we both ran out of ideas. A slow-motion punch to the jaw, and suddenly you're gone. Now it's all wilted songs sung from a balcony choked with creeping ivy. For California in December, for another Sagittarius, for knowing it's you from behind by the drawings on your sneakers. We reconvene occasionally now, and it's like it always was: you show me the miracles of putting raw honey in our kinky ass hair, give me a Moleskine notebook; I feed you brown rice and kale cooked in ume plum vinegar, and paint your toenails a color named "Lickity-Split Lime." But there is no more turning around and knowing exactly where you were by the smell of sandalwood and dirt; I, like a lame bloodhound, can't pick up the scent anymore.