Fanny Says Read online

  FANNY SAYS

  Copyright © 2015 by Nickole Brown

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  15 16 17 18 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For information about permission to reuse any material from this book please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [email protected].

  Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the County of Monroe, NY; the Lannan Foundation for support of the Lannan Translations Selection Series; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester; the Steeple-Jack Fund; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 148 for special individual acknowledgments.

  Cover Design: Sandy Knight

  Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

  Manufacturing: Versa Press, Inc.

  BOA Logo: Mirko

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brown, Nickole.

  [Poems. Selections]

  Fanny says : poems / by Nickole Brown. — First edition.

  pages cm. — (American poets continuum series ; No. 147)

  ISBN 978-1-938160-57-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-938160-58-5 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3602.R72243A6 2015

  811'.6—dc23

  2014039935

  BOA Editions, Ltd.

  250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

  Rochester, NY 14607

  www.boaeditions.org

  A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

  Note

  This book is a biography of sorts, piecing together fragments left behind from Frances Lee Cox, my maternal grandmother from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Some names and details have been altered to protect the identity of those involved. All poems whose titles begin with “Fanny Says” and most lines in italics, unless otherwise noted, are not words I wrote but words I wrote down, transcribing best I could as my grandmother spoke to me.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  For Our Grandmothers

  I

  Fuck

  Your Monthly

  Fanny Says She and Her Husband Had Their First Fight

  Fanny Linguistics: Malapropisms

  Fanny Says She Spent It

  Pepsi

  Fanny Says Sometimes It’s Worth the Whupping

  Go Put on Your Face

  For My Grandmother’s Teeth, Pulled When She Was Thirty-six

  Fanny Says She Got Saved

  Fanny Linguistics: Nickole

  Fanny Says How to Make Potato Salad

  Fanny Linguistics: Superstition

  The Dead

  Fanny Linguistics: Birdsong

  Fanny Says She Learned to Throw the First Stone

  Hettie

  Fanny Says How to Be a Lady

  II

  Clorox

  Fanny Says She Didn’t Use to Be Afraid

  Fanny Linguistics: Publix Hieroglyphics

  Fanny Linguistics: Origins

  Crisco

  For My Grandmother’s Feet, Swollen Again

  Fanny Says How to Tend Babies

  Fanny Says She Wanted to See Elvis

  EPO

  Fanny Says at Twenty-three She Learned to Drive

  Dixie Highway

  Fanny Linguistics: How to Say What You Mean

  Pheno

  Fanny Says She Made Him Feel Better

  How to Dress like Fanny

  Fanny Says I Need to Keep Warm

  III

  A Genealogy of the Word

  IV

  Fanny Says She Knows How Little Time Is Left

  For My Grandmother’s Gallstones, Reconsidered

  Sweet Silver

  Fanny Says She Met a Stripper Girl in the ER

  Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit

  Fanny Says Again the Same Dream on Morphine

  Flitter

  Fanny Asks Me a Question Before I’d Even Ask Myself

  My Book, in Birds

  A Translation for the Spiritual Mediator Who May Speak for Me to Frances Lee Cox, Wherever She May Be

  To My Grandmother’s Ghost, Flying with Me on a Plane

  Fanny Linguistics: Thaumatology

  The Family Celebrates Independence

  An Invitation for My Grandmother

  A Prayer for the Self-Made Man

  For My Grandmother’s Perfume, Norell

  Fanny Says Goodbye

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Colophon

  For Frances Lee Cox, because she said so

  For Our Grandmothers

  All of them, who clutched their pocketbooks, who hid the money

  for the light bill in the Bible, who counted, counted, and recounted

  stacks of towels. For our grandmothers who stored the white wax

  of bacon grease in a coffee can, who tossed table salt over their shoulders,

  who had rules about stepping under ladders, eating supper’s last

  biscuit, and the acceptable distance hemmed up from a girl’s knee.

  For our grandmothers who would not let us call her grandmother, who wanted

  to be called anything but grandma, for they were too young to be a mother

  when they became mothers, and then? You.

  For our grandmothers who made us pick our own switch, who cooled

  hot coffee on a saucer, then sipped from its chipped edge.

  For our grandmothers who would not call a cicada a cicada but a locust,

  a thirteen-year plague of them, making an apocalypse of June, for grandmothers who

  considered a tabby not a cat but a tail-switch hex that would slip under your bedroom door,

  take your breath from you, then smother the baby in its sleep.

  For our grandmothers who taught there’s a right way and a wrong way—

  right is right, wrong’s wrong—ain’t no sense in between. For grandmothers

  who emptied their husband’s fish-gut buckets and bore enough children to run

  out of names. For my grandmother, who snatched me from the nurse and wrapped me

  in her tea-length mink coat. It was cold, almost spring, and though I was bruise yellow

  with jaundice, she took us out of that hospital, settling her youngest daughter,

  a teenage mother, careful in the back. With no shoulder belts or infant seats or air bags,

  it was simple: she held me up front for my first ride, she turned the key.

  We were on our way, she took us

  on home.

  I

  You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.

  —Flannery O’Connor

  Fuck

  is what she said, but what mattered was the tone—

  not a drive-by spondee and never the fricative

  connotation as verb, but from her mouth

  voweled, often preceded by well, with the “u” low

  as if dipping up homemade ice cream, waiting to be served

  last so she’d scoop the fruit from the bottom, where

  all the good stuff had settled down.

  Imagine: not a word cold-cocked or screwed to the wall

  but something almost resigned—a sigh, an oh, well,

>   the f-word made so fat and slow it was basset hound,

  chunky with an extra syllable, just enough weight

  to make a jab to the ribs more of a shoulder shrug.

  Think of what’s done to “shit” in the South; this is

  sheeee-aaatt but flicked with a whip, made a little more

  tart. Well, fuck, Betty Sue, I never did see that coming.

  Can you believe?

  Or my favorite, not as expletive but noun—fucker,

  she said, but what she meant was darlin, sugar pie, sweet beets,

  a curse word made into a term of endearment, as in

  Come here, you little fucker, and give your grandma a kiss.

  If the child was young enough for diapers, he’d still be a shitass,

  but big enough to lift his arms and touch his hands together

  over his toddling tow head, he was so big, all grown, a cute little

  fucker, watch him go.

  Fuck is what she said, but what she needed

  was a drum, a percussion to beat story into song, a chisel

  to tap honey from the meanest rock,

  not just fuck if I know or fuck me running or fuck me

  sideways or beats the fuck out of me but said tender,

  knowing there was only one thing in this whole world

  you needed to hear most: You fucker you, don’t you know

  there wasn’t a day when you weren’t loved?

  If you still don’t understand, try this: a woman

  up from poor soil, bad dirt, pure clay. A woman as

  succulent, something used to precious little

  water, hard sun. Rock crop maybe, threading roots

  to suck nutrients from the nothing

  of gravel, the nothing of stone, a thriving thing

  sturdy, thorned, green out of mere

  spite and, because you least expect it,

  laughing, cussing up a storm—my grandmother

  who didn’t ask for power but took it

  in bright, full, fuck-it-all bloom.

  Your Monthly

  is what her mama called it. But what I want is a word for the year she bled

  freely, a wad of old washrags, each end pinned to a belt around her waist,

  a word for twelve happy deaths, each unfertilized cell that washed out

  saying, Not yet, Fanny, you still just a child yourself, because this world knows

  a girl of fourteen’s too old to be playing Cowboys and Indians but also knows

  how young she was when, stiff red feather in her hair, she scrambled inside hollering,

  Mama, come quick, I’m bout to bleed to death. A word for the year she learned to walk

  in red shoes pulled from some rich lady’s trash, the sound of those heels down the hall

  two guns cocking with quick clicks, a sound to hide from her daddy in the morning

  eating his breakfast of milk and cornpone with a spoon. A word for the time before

  a man swaggered in, bought her a dime-store Coke, bought her very first bra, then took her

  to the picture show to see a cartoon with dwarves impossibly happy to be working the mines.

  A year later, she was expecting—though what exactly I was expecting, she told me,

  I couldn’t have said. A word, please, somebody give me, for that season with her uterus

  small and tight as an inedible green pear, her body keening and cramped in its stall.

  A word for all things not yet stretched to bits, a word for all things not yet broken,

  a word for all things left unbroken, a word for breakable yet unbroken things,

  a word for unbroken, expectant things. Tell me, what is that word?

  Fanny Says She and Her Husband Had Their First Fight

  Well, I was throwing fried potato sandwiches and he was throwing fried potato sandwiches, and little Barry, my firstborn, he was a year old and having a good time, throwing some potato too. But mind your grandfather only threw but one, and it smacked me square in the face, but only oncet.

  See, I was angry because for months and months Monroe had been promising me ten dollars for a dress, and so I asked him, Can I have my ten dollars now? And he said, No. And I asked him why, and he said he was going to buy a saw. Well, that’s when I called him a lying son of a bitch and threw my sandwich.

  But he said, That dress, that dress ain’t gonna get us nowhere. But these hands, these hands and that saw’s gonna get you a dress and then another dress and then a dress after that. And he always did promise he’d do good by me, and he did, eventually. But I wanted my dress. But he bought the saw, and that’s the way it was, always choosing the saw over me.

  Fanny Linguistics: Malapropisms

  A language is a dialect with an army and navy.

  —Max Weinreich

  Unpack chester drawers to find

  chest of drawers,

  Tandalon to Tylenol,

  furrl to foil,

  gazebo pills to placebo,

  salmonella candles to citronella,

  and when the cousin who shoots frogs out of trees with a pellet gun

  graduates first in class,

  congratulate him not for being Valedictorian

  but for being Crowned Victoria.

  Never drop the friendly s in anyways,

  and when Monroe belts out

  “In the Pines” at full vibrato

  from the roof, he’ll stop his hammering

  long enough to yell down

  for rim-rams and tim-tams. Best always do what your grandfather says,

  don’t come back

  from the hardware store without them

  even if not one soul—not clerk or handyman or contractor—

  knows what the hell he’s sent you to buy.

  Not a family for quiet things, the silent

  consonants were

  varmint traps, bad mayo barfed up

  with the toe-main poisoning,

  running hot and cold with a full-on case of

  the walking new monayah you’ll bout never recover from.

  It’s like that snotty b in subtlety—

  that sorority chick—her tennis skirt, the white snake

  of her ponytail hissing back and forth

  to remind you:

  you’ll always lose the game, and despite all it,

  your daddy’s money never was good enough—

  he never could get us in the club.

  So rarely one for airs, we swung

  the racket like a bat, aimed the ball

  for the familiar hills to answer her plain:

  Then fuck suttle.

  Fanny Says She Spent It

  Betty Sue, now—yes, my sister Betty and me—we were tight. She came over my house nearly every day, and I was the one taught her how to steal checks, you see. So we’d wait till the men went off to the track, and we’d go shopping—$1,000 a piece—but we didn’t care. I mean, what made the men think we should sit around all day while they were out, just a gambling away? Shit. They’d catch us on Monday, but it was too late. Wurn’t a thing they could do about it.

  Yes, he made it, and I spent it. He fixed one house, then another, then another, and then he built one house, then another, then built another. All them churches and condos and more houses to boot. Yes, all those homes with people living in them and no one even knows now that Monroe poured their foundation. But half of Louisville’s got his name on it. He made all that money, more than we ever could have wanted, and we spent it, every last dime.

  Ain’t no sense in holding on to it; you know and I know you can’t take it with you when you go.

  Pepsi

  1.

  Because she thought even fish said something about class.

  Catfish, for example—mud-blooded, fried up only by men who

  mow lawns and scrape shingles and make their living shoveling

  dirt under their nails—

  but bass? Bass were wild, wide-mouthed, pink
throats hooked

  by men with enough money for a boat, flashy catch with heads to be taken

  by the working man who works the other men.

  And trout? We heard about men who ate a fish called rainbow,

  but they were freezing their nuts off up north, hip-deep in icy water,

  reciting poetry, casting houseflies across a stream.

  So why should soda be any different?

  RC, that’s for overall-wearing kids with runny eyes,

  a once-a-month Moon-Pie treat after borrowing the family’s

  one pair of shoes and huffing five miles to the general store.

  And Coke? Chugged by the common freckle-face gal across the river

  in Indiana—a Hoosier who hived her hair and squeezed

  all she could please into polyester skirts—

  Lord, look at her in her Sunday best; she actually thinks she looks good.

  Pepsi though? Well, Pepsi was enough for Joan Crawford,