Cause you were the bad bitch’s first catalyst, the 90s hottie,skin oiled & tossed in the heat of a Harlem’s summer sun.You made the girls into gods who ruled over the tore up sidewalks,the ambidextrous stoops, the men panting like dehydrated dogs.You painted your waters onto skin & became it—light,indigo, acid, mid, stone, rinse, black, vintage, wash(ed)the streets clean of the sin of summer time wars& the 69 Boyz bellowed, I want you to lookat them girls with the daisy dukes on! & howcould anyone with eyes not look, see round-ass-spread into you.& they called it peach, applebum, bubble butt, Bonita Bonita Bonita,& Tanya got a big ole butt (oh yeah) & an ass calledby any fruit name, any thing with juice—an ass incanted like a psalmis indeed an ass—certified booty, especiallyif it can be seen spheric, spread out like a legion,& rivering amongst a strut in tight jeans.My god, you kept the hood together—uniformed usin your armor-reminiscent heavies, made oceanic mosaicsof our people, made black to double as the color of water& the irony was not lost on us, for our bodies becamethe blood-wet cemetery of our once forced dead& denim, more Black people get held in youthan they do in a church house & I mean that with God& with love & I mean thatchecking my reflection & telling my best friend, girl, I think my butt getting big.
Denim Ode
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Copyright © 2023 by Shaina Phenix.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Shaina Phenix is a Black, queer poet, essayist, and educator from Harlem, NY. She is the author of To Be Named Something Else, the winner of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize (University of Arkansas Press.) She is an assistant professor of English at Elon University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in West Branch, The Pinch Journal, Puerto del Sol, Frontier Poetry, The Offing, CRAFT Magazine, and Haymarket Books.
Summer 2023
Atlanta, Georgia
University of Georgia
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