Queen Mrs Carter

Intuition

I tried to make a home outta you. But doors lead to trapdoors. A stairway leads to nothing. Unknown women wander the hallways at night. Where do you go when you go quiet? You remind me of my father, a magician. Able to exist in two places at once. In the tradition of men in my blood you come home at 3AM and lie to me. What are you hiding? The past, and the future merge to meet us here. What luck. What a fucking curse.

Denial

I tried to change. Closed my mouth more. Tried to be soft, prettier. Less…awake.

Fasted for 60 days. Wore white. Abstained from mirrors. Abstained from sex. Slowly did not speak another word.

In that time my hair grew past my ankles. I slept on a mat on the floor. I swallowed a sword. I levitated… into the basement, I confessed my sins and was baptized in a river. Got on my knees and said, “Amen.” And said I mean. I whipped my own back and asked for dominion at your feet. I threw myself into a volcano. I drank the blood and drank the wine. I sat alone and begged and bent at the waist for God. I crossed myself and thought… I saw the devil. I grew thickened skin on my feet. I bathed…in bleach and plugged my menses with pages from the Holy Book. But still inside me coiled deep was the need to know. Are you cheating? Are you cheating on me?

Anger

If this what you truly want. I can wear her skin…over mine. Her hair, over mine. Her hands as gloves. Her teeth as confetti. Her scalp, a cap. Her sternum, my bedazzled cane. We can pose for a photograph. All three of us, immortalized. You and your perfect girl.

I don’t know when love became elusive. What I know is no one I know has it. My father’s arms around my mother’s neck. Fruit too ripe to eat.

I think of lovers as trees… …growing to and from one another. Searching for the same light. Why can’t you see me? Why can’t you see me? (Why can’t you) Why can’t you see me? Everyone else can.

Apathy

So what are you gonna say at my funeral now that you’ve killed me? Here lies the body of the love of my life, whose heart I broke without a gun to my head. Here lies the mother of my children both living and dead. Rest in peace, my true love, who I took for granted, most bomb pussy, who because of me, sleep evaded. Her shroud is loneliness. Her God was listening. Her heaven would be a love without betrayal. Ashes to ashes…dust to side chicks.

Emptiness

She sleeps all day…dreams of you in both worlds.

Tills the blood in and out of uterus. Wakes up smelling of zinc. Grief, sedated by orgasm. Orgasm heightened by grief. God was in the room when the man said to the woman, “I love you so much. Wrap your legs around me and pull me in, pull me in, pull me in.” Sometimes when he’d have her nipple in his mouth, she’d whisper, “Oh my God.” That, too, is a form of worship. Her hips grind pestle and mortar, cinnamon and cloves, whenever he pulls out.

Loss. Dear moon, we blame you for floods…for the flush of blood…for men who are also wolves. We blame you for the night, for the dark, for the ghosts.

Every fear… Every nightmare…anyone has ever had.

Accountability

You find the black tube inside her beauty case. Where she keeps your father’s old prison letters. You desperately want to look like her. You look nothing like your mother. You look everything like your mother. Film star, beauty. How to wear your mother’s lipstick. You go to the bathroom to apply the lipstick. Somewhere no one can find you. You must wear it like she wears disappointment on her face. Your mother is a woman. And women like her can not be contained.

Mother dearest, let me inherit the Earth. Teach me how to make him beg. Let me make up for the years he made you wait. Did he bend your reflection? Did he make you forget your own name? Did he convince you he was a God? Did you get on your knees daily? Do his eyes close like doors? Are you a slave to the back of his head? Am I talking about your husband or your father?

Reformation

He bathes me… …until I forget their names…and faces. I ask him to look me in the eye when I come…home. Why do you deny yourself heaven? Why do you consider yourself undeserving? Why are you afraid of love? You think it’s not possible for someone like you. But you are the love of my life…love of my life…the love of my life…the love of my life.

Forgiveness

Baptize me… …now that reconciliation is possible. If we’re gonna heal, let it be glorious. One thousand girls raise their arms.

Do you remember being born?

Are you thankful? Are the hips that cracked… …the deep velvet of your mother… …and her mother… …and her mother? There is a curse that will be broken.

Resurrection

You are terrifying… …and strange… …and beautiful.

Hope

The nail technician pushes my cuticles back… …turns my hand over, stretches the skin on my palm and says: “I see your daughters, and their daughters.” That night in a dream the first girl emerges from a slit in my stomach. The scar heals into a smile. The man I love pulls the stitches out with his fingernails. We leave black sutures curling on the side of the bath. I wake as the second girl crawls headfirst up my throat. A flower blossoming out of the hole in my face.

Redemption

Take one pint of water, add a half pound of sugar, the juice of eight lemons… …the zest of half lemon. Pour the water from one jug, then into the other, several times. Strain through a clean napkin.

Grandmother, the alchemist. You spun gold out of this hard life. Conjured beauty from the things left behind. Found healing where it did not live. Discovered the antidote in your own kitchen. Broke the curse with your own two hands. You passed these instructions down to your daughter. Who then passed it down to her daughter.

My grandma said, nothing real can be threatened. True love brought salvation back into me. With every tear came redemption. And my torturer became my remedy.

So we’re gonna heal, we’re gonna start again. You’ve brought the orchestra. Synchronized swimmers, you are the magician. Pull me back together again the way you cut me in half. Make the woman in doubt disappear. Pull the sorrow from between my legs like silk, knot after knot after knot. The audience applauds… …but we can’t hear them.

I absolutely understand why you didn’t get the Beyoncé album, *newsflash honey*…it wasn’t made for you…and i’m going to need you to be cool with that.

Now, I found quite a few of your comments in your piece to be highly “inflammatory & agitating”. As a black woman, i am deeply offended by your lack of due care when writing this article, but i would like to take this opportunity to help you out, and assist you in making the whole “Lemonade thing” a little less bitter for you.You are a middle aged British white man, you have no idea, i repeat, NO. IDEA. What it is like to be a Black Woman. And furthermore, the sacrificial, struggle-filled, tounge-biting, mask-wearing fight it is to become a successful one.Let me break this down for you;Beyoncé’s album is not an attack on anyone, it is a celebration of strength, endurance and potential within black woman-hood. The fact that you are mad/uncomfortable/agitated about it, is evidence enough of how blind you are to the realities of being one.Beyonce isn’t the only one being unapologetically loud & proud of her blackness, there are many of us (go and type #BlackGirlMagic into instagram/twitter/google), but you didn’t see us or notice the wave. That is why Beyoncé had to do this. On social media, we are celebrating ourselves, in all our glorious forms. We are sporting our – what did you call it? – “Panther-style Afros” (Babe, we’ve had these afro’s growing out of our heads since the beginning of time)  not as political statements, but as celebratory beacons for ourselves, and forthcoming generations.Beyoncé is a mother now, she wasn’t one when you had your little tea party 5 years ago, becoming a mother of a black child changes things. You can be privileged, but along with your own,  you begin to become concerned for all the other little black children too. Then you start to think, ‘i don’t like what i have had to go through, and i don’t want my child to face the struggles i have, i want to change things’. Seldom are black women in a position to make statements that reverberate around the world and penetrate the peripheral vision of your Piers Morgan’s. Beyoncé did that. You wrote about it. Now you’re trending, and celebrating that fact – LOL.Whether or not you feel the involvement of the grieving mothers to be in poor taste, is irrelevant. The brutality & racism being faced by black people daily is what IS relevant…and Beyoncé has you talking about it, i’d say it’s a job well done.Maybe it’s because i’m a black woman.A Black woman who cried tears when i read about Trayvon Martin or when i saw those awful videos of Eric Garner & Sandra Bland, and then again each time their murderer’s got away without so much as a slap on the wrist. I get how a privileged middle aged white man from Surrey doesn’t feel that pain, but when I saw Trayvon Martin’s picture I saw my nephew, When I saw Eric Garner, I saw my uncle. When i saw Sandra Bland, I saw my auntie. I get, why you don’t get it.“The New Beyoncé wants to be seen as a black woman”This line made me laugh out loud! Beyoncé has always been black, she just did what millions of black people feel the need to do to gain success, she made herblack palatable to you, which is why you’re such a big fan! Same thing Oprah did, and the Obama’s. This is what black people do, along with working twice as hard to get half as much, we dilute ourselves and our culture, so you accept us. I guess some of us have had enough. Being black is not an affliction. No race should be seen as such. Celebrating our heritage should not be seen as a threat. We just want what you have, fairness and equal potential, and if you don’t give it to us…we’ll fight to get it for our children.Oh, and on the subject of “The Race Card”, there would be no possibility of it being played if we didn’t have it in our hand.I dont blame you Piers, not at all. I’m sure it’s lovely being you.But the lemons we have been handed, are those of the Black female, and we refuse to see them as less than, we will use them to make the most wonderful, Lemonade.

#LEMONADE 4.23