Delta Delta Delta

I don’t know why I joined the white sorority.

We whispered Latin passwords to each other.

They wore white robes and sang to us.

 

 

I don’t know where I belong.

And the parties, like “Pimps and Hoes”

inside a rented Laundromat with fake hickies

 

and scars on our skin and pimp juice

in pimp cups. Look at me: the only black girl

backing it up to Nelly repeating, It’s getting hot

 

 

in here (so hot), so take off all your clothes.

Grinding on washers and dryers. Washers

and dryers with my mom at the Laundromat

 

 

growing up—my fingertips collecting coins

from in between the slits in the couch. Good

treasure. The performance of being poor.

 

 

The performance of playing the other

while being the other. Said Memphis. Said

sloppy weather. Didn’t Jeff Buckley?

 

 

Didn’t he die here? Drowned in some slack

channel off the Mississippi River…swimming

with all his clothes on? Said stay. They said

 

 

stay off the streets with the names of presidents.

They said that’s where all the niggers live.

Another said, Memphrafrica. They laughed.

 

 

Not me. What hurts now? That I enjoyed

the pretending. I still don’t know who drew

a thick dick on my face with a sharpie.

 

Didn’t wash off for days: faint phallic outline,

faint papyrus, another weak ghost. That I

were white. That hardware of whiteness.

 

That equipment. That apparatus.

That privileged machinery

                                                            felt good.