Patricia Smith > Quotes

“I write you a letter that begins
With I love you and ends with I love you and
Somewhere in the middle is one goodbye for
Every hurt”
― Patricia Smith

“Stop thirsting for things that are bitter,
Go crazy here, here in these arms that are still
Wrapped around the absent shape of you,
Go crazy with me, thrash about in our bed
And weep and wail and call me by her name,
At least have the courage to let our hearts break together.”
― Patricia Smith Breakdown

“A whole people's tumble into raw, untested century began
with one man, penning his serpentine sojourn up from slavery--
I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth,
but ... I must have been born somewhere and at some time.
He began as another baby shoved directly into the wrong air.”
― Patricia Smith, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,
decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.”
― Patricia Smith

“Murder helps you sleep at night. Murder keeps me up at night, thinking of you asleep at night.”
― Patricia Smith

“What You Pray Toward

“The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.”
—Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966

I.

Hubbie 1 used to get wholly pissed when I made
myself come. I’m right here!, he’d sputter, blood
popping to the surface of his fuzzed cheeks,
goddamn it, I’m right here! By that time, I was
in no mood to discuss the myriad merits of my
pointer, or to jam the brakes on the express train
slicing through my blood, It was easier to suffer
the practiced professorial huff, the hissed invectives
and the cold old shoulder, liver-dotted, quaking
with rage. Shall we pause to bless professors and
codgers and their bellowed, unquestioned ownership
of things? I was sneaking time with my own body.
I know I signed something over, but it wasn’t that.


II.

No matter how I angle this history, it’s weird,
so let’s just say Bringing Up Baby was on the telly
and suddenly my lips pressing against
the couch cushions felt spectacular and I thought
wow this is strange, what the hell, I’m 30 years old,
am I dying down there is this the feel, does the cunt
go to heaven first, ooh, snapped river, ooh shimmy
I had never had it never knew, oh i clamored and
lurched beneath my little succession of boys I cried
writhed hissed, ooh wee, suffered their flat lapping
and machine-gun diddling their insistent c’mon girl
c’mon until I memorized the blueprint for drawing
blood from their shoulders, until there was nothing
left but the self-satisfied liquidy snore of he who has
rocked she, he who has made she weep with script.
But this, oh Cary, gee Katherine, hallelujah Baby,
the fur do fly, all gush and kaboom on the wind.


III.

Don’t hate me because I am multiple, hurtling.
As long as there is still skin on the pad of my finger,
as long as I’m awake, as long as my (new) husband’s
mouth holds out, I am the spinner, the unbridled,
the bellowing freak. When I have emptied him,
he leans back, coos, edges me along, keeps wondering
count. He falls to his knees in front of it, marvels
at my yelps and carousing spine, stares unflinching
as I bleed spittle unto the pillows.
He has married a witness.
My body bucks, slave to its selfish engine,
and love is the dim miracle of these little deaths,
fracturing, speeding for the surface.


IV.

We know the record. As it taunts us, we have giggled,
considered stopwatches, little laboratories. Somewhere
beneath the suffering clean, swathed in eyes and silver,
she came 134 times in one hour. I imagine wires holding
her tight, her throat a rattling window. Searching scrubbed
places for her name, I find only reams of numbers. I ask
the quietest of them:


V.

Are we God?”
― Patricia Smith, Teahouse of the Almighty

“Between the tenets of those two men [W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington], a race strived to untangle
its convoluted root, urged its whole self forward, and hurtled
toward the door America had fought so hard to keep closed.”
― Patricia Smith, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“But you have poetry, you say.
And if you can tell me what poetry is,
where the line is drawn
between the beauty and the breathing
of breath into something to make it beautiful,
I will claim poetry as my own."-Patricia Smith”
― Patricia Smith

“I was both fed up with explaining and desperately craving an explanation.”
― Patricia Smith, The BreakBeat Poets, Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic

“Crying 'bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off
what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips.”
― Patricia Smith

“What do we do with these huge gifts of the throat and tongue? How do we manage?
— Related to the Buttercup, Blooms in Spring”
― Patricia Smith