Confession
for Nina Simone
In their tiled-coffee-smelling world
of yellow kitchen
Mama and her girlfriends
go on and on about grown men
and women things, clicking their tongues
with the shame of
Did you hear/ Girl, I know/ Now,
ain’t got a pot to piss in/ Can’t tell
some women anything /Oh hell,
I can’t hear myself think/ That girl’s
gonna go deaf /Fourteen
What she know about heartbreak?
There are things I can’t ask her,
so I ask Nina, on my back
with the cracking sleeve of her face
resting on my stomach,
mouthing questions to my living room ceiling.
My palm is on the speaker’s pulse.
Mama’s coming heavy-footed down the hall,
hollering into the room
If you don’t turn that down / If you just
have to play those records now
play Chaka, Whitney, or Janet/It’s too early
for all that gloomy shit/ It’s wearing
on my nerves.
But I want the crow-
faced woman whose mouth could
swallow a blackbird whole.
Whose sound could blow down
dollhouses, sweep away plastic people
and give me a voice that names the vacant
lots in my chest after loves I haven’t met yet
but wish they’d hurry up and make me
sound like this.
My first will sound like shatter
when I’m seventeen,
and he’s showing off,
throwing a rock through a factory window,
making a broken face
of glass for me to admire,
the night he makes me feel
what I’m doing to him down there
in his parked Volvo.
My second will carry plaster
in the scabs of his knuckles.
Will know where to break me
against the edges of moonlight,
the rigid arms of doorframes.
Will teach me the sound
of a kitchen floor’s hard,
linoleum apology.
Because there are things I can’t tell Mama
so I tell Nina, on my back
cause I'm ashamed,
and I know she will tell me how
she’s done it all. How she knows
that grainy mourning
stuck in my teeth.
With my palm on the speaker’s
pulse. I let the needle drop
on any song
and wait.
by Krysten Hill
In their tiled-coffee-smelling world
of yellow kitchen
Mama and her girlfriends
go on and on about grown men
and women things, clicking their tongues
with the shame of
Did you hear/ Girl, I know/ Now,
ain’t got a pot to piss in/ Can’t tell
some women anything /Oh hell,
I can’t hear myself think/ That girl’s
gonna go deaf /Fourteen
What she know about heartbreak?
There are things I can’t ask her,
so I ask Nina, on my back
with the cracking sleeve of her face
resting on my stomach,
mouthing questions to my living room ceiling.
My palm is on the speaker’s pulse.
Mama’s coming heavy-footed down the hall,
hollering into the room
If you don’t turn that down / If you just
have to play those records now
play Chaka, Whitney, or Janet/It’s too early
for all that gloomy shit/ It’s wearing
on my nerves.
But I want the crow-
faced woman whose mouth could
swallow a blackbird whole.
Whose sound could blow down
dollhouses, sweep away plastic people
and give me a voice that names the vacant
lots in my chest after loves I haven’t met yet
but wish they’d hurry up and make me
sound like this.
My first will sound like shatter
when I’m seventeen,
and he’s showing off,
throwing a rock through a factory window,
making a broken face
of glass for me to admire,
the night he makes me feel
what I’m doing to him down there
in his parked Volvo.
My second will carry plaster
in the scabs of his knuckles.
Will know where to break me
against the edges of moonlight,
the rigid arms of doorframes.
Will teach me the sound
of a kitchen floor’s hard,
linoleum apology.
Because there are things I can’t tell Mama
so I tell Nina, on my back
cause I'm ashamed,
and I know she will tell me how
she’s done it all. How she knows
that grainy mourning
stuck in my teeth.
With my palm on the speaker’s
pulse. I let the needle drop
on any song
and wait.
by Krysten Hill
Krysten Hill is originally from Kansas City, MO, and currently lives and teaches in Boston, MA. She received her MFA from UMass Boston. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, apt, Amethyst Arsenic, ROAR, and Write on the DOT.