I have loved so many women v.1

God damn, I love the sounds of strings and slow tongue singers with wraspy voices like dry wine, women like the ones I loved so long ago and still can't say the stories of.

Say the stories of.

Toi Derricotte told our class that we had to write the roots. "These are stories that need to be told." She said it with such sincerity, somewhere between devotion and desperation, this master of words- she was at the feet of our adolescent poems, washing them with her hair (holy, laurels of laughter and lavishing praise) and every one in that class left with a new respect for their own voices. What do you call a voice doctor? What do you call a modern medicine woman?

Somewhere I read of a teacher (maybe it was Toi?) who asked her class to draw a tree. Some drew trees they had seen in books, having never really had an intimacy with a real, living tree. Others, usually the black students and the poor white students, drew trees from memory- a vivid, living memory of a beautiful tree they knew from a grandmother's garden, a father's forest, a secret hillside. If I were there, the first tree that would have entered my mind would have been the weeping cherry behind my Nunni's house. The tree which bloomed like fairy tale fireworks in pinks and slow swaying reds on the hill. The tree we buried our dogs under. The tree I went to to lose my mind under in high school, like Buddha's Bodhi, but this enlightenment was painful and crazy and didn't go away for years. When my grandmother died, I made myself believe that her spirit stayed somewhere in the array of leaves and delicate petals and I promised myself that, everafter, weeping willows would represent grandmother spirits and I could go to any and all of them to cry.

Your tree, your history, your roots. It doesn't have to be genealogy. It could just be a web of women you loved hard and went through hell with. Women you knew when they were girls and you were together in a trailer somewhere sneaking cigarettes and whiskey when the parents were away, working out together the pain of molestation, abuse, becoming in a body under siege in a culture of impossible images. These stories need to be told.

A few nights ago I watched Stand By Me. I was just as carried away with it as I ever was, but I am old enough now to know what's missing, to be able to articulate that pain and hunger I feel in my heart chakra where the girls I loved and lost are still stealing cheap jewelry with me at Claire's of long ago, still fucking for nothing in the backseats of cars, still selling the stolen shit on the side of the road so we could get a drink because we were going nowhere. Those girls are not in the Stand By Me story. Their stories still need to be told.

A mass of bodies breaking noses and pulling pink and purple weaves out like leaves into the crowd of kids watching, running up and down the isles of the lunchroom laughing, yelling, fight, fight, fight for the escalation of it, for the boredom of looking away. Somewhere in that writhing, violent tree is my sister's body, my girl's blood, my best friend's pregnant belly- and I can't get to the center of it. I can't cut it down to count the rings. I can't push myself through the branches of limbs locked in licking lips and biting teeth, I can't be there.

Later on in the principal's office, the Man looked us up and down like dead bodies standing and he said, "You're disgusting. Look at you." We looked around, a room full of twelve or so angry girls, black and white, ready to fight until he tells us collectively we aren't what he thinks we should be. We are disgusting. We are niggers and white-trash. We are going nowhere. We are nowhere. He looks at me. "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree." He says it with a sick smile. The girls, three seconds ago my enemies, are now on my side, spitting in his face, telling him he don't know shit. We all got suspended. Some got away and some stayed there, going nowhere, with so many stories to never tell.

Say the stories of.

In this one dream, the trees are split at their trunks, spraying living water like geysers out from the earth and into the air and my old friends are falling from them like fruit. The living tree, the tree of your memory. The blood, the bars of our fathers on mainstreet, the braids. My Brandi, my bullgirl with a shaved head and blue crosses tattooed on her knuckles, now dead. The quad rides, the Terence, Joel, and Jamal, lightskinned and beautiful hazel eyes, good talkers, banging on the tables making music with spoons. The brown eyeliner outlining our lips, the cornrows, not for the tender headed. The bad girls. The bad girls. Their stories must be told. They have to know what they meant to me.