Donna James
By Tim Seibles
I remember that first time:
the empty auditorium, her voice,
the dark all around us,
her mouth reaching into mine.
She was Freddy’s foxy older sister,
and I didn’t know why
she wanted to kiss me. She
had already finished high school
and probably shouldn’t have
been walking the halls, but
she always called me her friend.
So one Monday after gym,
I found myself beside myself
in front of her house—with my
trench coat and lunch bag—
probably not looking much
like Shaft. Inside, the air held
warm milk and we talked a bit
about her baby and her Aunt
who paid the rent painting cars.
Maybe she liked me because
we were both black and mostly
alone in the suburbs, but I hadn’t
thought about that. It was her voice
that got me—banked fire, the color
of dusk—her voice, and my name
was smoke in her mouth.
I think about it more than I should now,
that January noon—an hour before
algebra—how most days I’d be
thinking football or replaying
the seventy-some kisses I’d gotten
over those lean years, but that day
Donna and me were on the couch
munching potato chips. Rrruffles
have rrridges, she kidded coming
from checking the baby who’d
slipped into a nap. I was kind of
disappointed that we hadn’t
done anything, but I needed time
to get back to school, so I started
to stand. She said wait,
look at this mess,
and with her left hand, she
brushed the crumbs from my lap
the way you’d whisk away lint—
then, swept over my pants again—
to be thorough, I guessed, but slower
and then some more, as if her hand
were getting drowsy. You know
how sometimes you see something
but just can’t believe it—like a squirrel
bobbling a biscuit on your kitchen counter
or a cricket creeping the red feathers
of your mother’s Sunday hat?
Her hand there, on my lap,
could easily have been a five-fingered
flying saucer from the fifth dimension.
For awhile, I just watched and
wondered if she knew where
her hand had landed but it was me
who didn’t know: me with my
six dozen kisses and the great Eden
of my virginity. How
do we not talk about it
every day: the ways
we were changed
by the gift
in someone’s touch—your body,
suddenly a bright instrument
played by an otherwise
silent divinity.
When I heard my zipper, I couldn’t
have said where my arms
were or what a clock was for:
I had
no idea I could be such a stranger
and still be myself. How could I
have known what a girl
might do to a boy
with her mouth if she felt
like doing what her mouth
could do? It was
a kind of miracle: the dreamed
impossible—my soul finally called
to my flesh. I didn’t know
what I didn’t know and then I knew.
Copyright Credit: Tim Seibles, "Donna James" from Fast Animal. Copyright © 2012 by Tim Seibles. Reprinted by permission of Etruscan Press.