Fanny Says
FANNY SAYS
Copyright © 2015 by Nickole Brown
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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.
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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,