LIZZO

by Judy Juanita

I am 100% behind you baby girl

Behind your superb black ass

Behind your exponential black ass

Behind all the big black women

We who are BeyBey

We who are BeyBey's kids

We who raised BeyBey

Who raised BeyBey's babies and babydaddies

We behind you Lizzo

Show that ass

Put that ass on the Lakers scoreboard

For the world to see

Your big fat cocoa ass

As important for the world to see as 

Emmett Till's bludgeoned face

"Let them see what they did to my boy

Let the world see what they did to my boy"

Let us worship Lizzo

That's right—Bow down

Before her big black ass 

Before her big black booty

Not injected into her backside by a Dominican doctor

Not leaking formaldehyde into her veins clotting her heart

Killing one more big fat implacable life

Fuck Brazilian butt lifts

Fuck the strip clubs that hire the women

Who pay with their very life for butts

That sit high on their hips

21st century Venus Hottentots

Fuck the only way these women will earn $2,000 a night $3,000 a night $4,000 a night

Instead of working at  Walmart

(Yeah yeah yeah do the math $15@ hr. times 30 hrs a week so they don't have to give them health benefits. That's $450 a week, $1800 a month, the living wage that Biden is fighting for? Get real. You'd hop on a plane to the Dominican Republic, leak silicone all over the seats armrests tray tables too for a big black ass a big black ass)

Lizzo's black ass is worth gold

Diamonds and Gucci

In the belly of the beast 

Same place where

Lizzo's Army yeah

A black only army for the descendants of Buffalo Soldiers and Tuskegee Airmen 

A big black beautiful army whose big black unbleached asshole emits the noxious gases called life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Same place where corner stores have filled those asses for decades with hostess twinkies butterfingers koolaid fruit loops sodas hogmaw and chitlins hot links potato salad macaroni and cheese sweet potato pie (BeyBey's son the athlete/personal trainer says with disgust, Ma, this is carbo overload, but eats at the christmas table because he too worships Lizzo once a year)

We love you Lizzo

Our anti-Lady Godiva

Our anti-Kardashian

Our anti-American

Miss America?

You're the missing America

The antidote to self-loathing

You had to be huge

In our face

All over the place

You are the dream deferred no more

You cannot be invisible

You will not live underground

Not one more day

Lizzo our Lizzo

Lizzo Lizzo Lizzo Lizzo Lizzo

You is You is You is

America the beautiful.

Judy Juanita's book of poetry Manhattan my ass, you're in Oakland won the 2021 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her short story collection The High Price of Freeways won the Tartt Fiction Award and will be published by the University of West Alabama's Livingston Press in 2022. Het debut novel Virgin Soul was published by Viking in 2014. 

OUR AMERICA

by Susana H. Case

I tried to explain the origins of blackface

to my bewildered Italian tutor,

who grew up in Perugia

and doesn’t read American

newspapers. I, too, had never seen blackface, 

growing up, but that was in New York City,

where burnt cork or grease 

would not have been thought funny, I hope.

Vaudeville, I think . . . I hesitated, 

or the earlier minstrel shows.

I was bewildered too. We shook our heads,

thinking of Italian companies 

that recently had to pull 

a Gucci balaclava sweater and Prada 

charms for purses,

blackface imagery on luxury.

Fat red lips on a black background

startled passersby on the East Side,

including me, who would never 

again enter their stores, both companies 

not having understood America, 

or having understood it too well.

Susana H. Case is the author of six books of poetry, most recently the erasure book, Erasure, Syria (Recto y Verso Editions, 2018). Her most recent book of traditional poetry, Drugstore Blue, was published in 2017. She is also the author of four chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press in Poland. Her work has appeared in Calyx, The Cortland Review, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, RHINO and many other journals.