bone Read online

  praise for bone

  “yrsa daley-ward’s bone is a symphony of breaking and mending. this whole book is an ache. and a balm. daley-ward effortlessly mines the bone. the diamond from the difficult. the things that are too bright and taboo. she lays her hands on the pulse of the thing. and gives wide air to the epic realities of women. the unfamiliar. the familiar. sexuality. poverty. sex work. sadness. joy. damage. and restoration. assigning them all the grace. all the nurturing. and all the love they deserve. an expert storyteller. of the rarest. and purest kind—daley-ward is uncannily attentive and in tune to the things beneath life. beneath the skin. beneath the weather of the everyday. her poetry and prose are intimate and distant. sonorous and staunch. delicate and metal. unwilling to yield and wondrously supple. daley-ward’s extraordinary talent. ability. to both see and write the veins of the true life. the true lives. is a gift. a breath.”

  —nayyirah waheed, author of salt. and nejma

  “[Yrsa Daley-Ward] is at the realm of a new wave of contemporary poets who inspire an unprecedented level of empathy and accessibility through their honest and raw approach. . . . [A] powerful collection of a woman facing tumultuous inner and external battles head-on, delivered with a hard-hitting directness, yet with inflections of optimism throughout that are bound to touch readers to their core.”

  —i-D Magazine

  “The actor, author, model, and poet draws from her own experiences as well as issues affecting today’s society throughout her work and is truly a storyteller (‘some tall, some dark’) of the soul.”

  —POPSUGAR

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  bone

  Photo: Kirill Kozlov

  Yrsa Daley-Ward is a writer and poet of mixed West Indian and West African heritage. Born to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, Yrsa was raised by her devout Seventh-Day Adventist grandparents in the small town of Chorley in the North of England. She splits her time between London and Los Angeles.

  Kiese Laymon is the author of a critically acclaimed novel, Long Division, and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He has two books forthcoming: Heavy, a memoir, and And So On, a novel.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Original edition published by the author 2013

  This edition with additional poems and a foreword by Kiese Laymon published in Penguin Books 2017

  Copyright © 2014, 2017 by Yrsa Daley-Ward

  Foreword copyright © 2017 by Kiese Laymon

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  “it is what it is” and “some kind of man” first appeared in On Snakes and Other Stories, published in 2013 by 3:AM Press.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Daley-Ward, Yrsa.

  Title: Bone / Yrsa Daley-Ward.

  Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017031004 (print) | LCCN 2017031016 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525504528 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143132615 (paperback)

  Classification: LCC PR6104.A456 (ebook) | LCC PR6104.A456 A6 2017 (print) | DDC 821/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031004

  Cover design by M. Phoenixx

  Cover art by Lynn Buckley

  Version_1

  because writing is a soft and a hard place,

  all at once.

  contents

  praise for bone

  about the author

  title page

  copyright

  dedication

  foreword

  intro

  emergency warning

  liking things

  a fine art

  bone

  this was the story

  battle

  when it is but it ain’t

  skill

  you don’t know the half of it

  secret

  community

  the not quite love

  lesson

  artichokes

  heat

  relief

  the good work

  a test—things our bodies have been

  girls

  sthandwa sami (my beloved, isiZulu)

  she puts cinnamon on tomatoes

  I’ll admit it, I’m drawn to the wolves

  there will always be your heart

  legacy

  it is what it is

  panacea

  mental health

  nose

  issue

  what is now will soon be past

  why you love her and what to do

  q

  another tuesday

  success

  the biggest tortoise in the world

  now that it’s all over

  what love isn’t

  body

  things it can take twenty years and a bad liver to work out

  lipsing

  revelation

  sabbath

  not the end of the world, but almost

  waiting for the check to clear

  a

  some kind of man

  true story

  breathe

  karma

  14

  prayer

  impending dialogue

  the stupid thing about it

  new

  quirk

  up home

  mum

  kid

  inconvenience

  coordinates

  who was doing what and where

  on hearing he hit his girlfriend

  when they ask

  to the elders

  history

  untitled 1

  poetry

  wine

  another thing that happened

  untitled 2

  dankyes (Mwaghavul)

  acknowledgments

  foreword

  but that

  When I was eleven years old, I was sent to stay with Grandmama in Forest, Mississippi, for the third time because Mama didn’t know what to do with me. After church, Grandmama told me to write a response, no doubt Jesus-fearing, to what she called the “Book of Poetry” in the Bible. The “Book of Poetry” was really the Book of Psalms, specifically Psalms 23:5.

  You prepare a table before me

  in the presence of my enemies.

  You anoint my head with oil;

  my cup overflows.

  “Dear Grandmama,” I wrote, “I do not know who ‘you’ is in this poem or why they would prepare a table for me if my enemies were watching when they know good and well that enemies will eat all the food off your table. I do not know why they want my head to be greasy or my cup to overflow on your carpet either unless they want me to get a whupping. But that last line does sound good compared to the whole poem.”

  Grandmama told me that my breakdown of the “Book of Poetry” was shameful, but she encouraged me that day to write my own poems. I filled long yellow legal pads with boastful verses about my how my adolescent fatness was the new fineness and girls who didn’t re
cognize the new “fineness” must have been an old kind of “mindless.” I started trying to write my own version of love poetry to the same imaginary mindless young woman.

  But three years later, I found and obsessed over the brilliance of subject-verb disagreements in the fortunes of fortune cookies. Four years later, I found and obsessed over the “wait a minute” truths of horoscopes. Six years later, I found and obsessed over the sustained jerky exploration of the essay. Eight years later, I found and obsessed over the importance of dramatic irony in unreliably narrated short stories. Ten years later, I found and obsessed over the magic of multiple narrative threads in the novel.

  Thirty years later, I was given bone.

  But that.

  bone works forward and backward, alerting me of yesterday and reminding me of tomorrow. bone is the fortune, horoscope, essay, short story, and novel we all want to write, and all hope to have written to us. At the end of the piece “Poetry,” Yrsa Daley-Ward writes,

  The bruising will shatter.

  The bruising will shatter into

  black diamond.

  No one will sit beside you in class.

  Maybe your life will work.

  Most likely it won’t at first

  but that

  will give you poetry.

  By the time bone was given to me, I’d written ten thousand sentences, hundreds of thousands of words, two books, three unpublished manuscripts, but somehow, some way, I’d forgotten that all along I’d been given poetry thirty years earlier.

  I’d been given poetry at twelve when Grandmama read my poem about my experiences with sexual abuse. When I got off my knees praying with her that night, I watched the back of Grandmama’s sixty-one-year-old body heave in, pause, and heave out. When I finally placed my thumb lightly on the small of Grandmama’s back, and she jerked forward and clenched the covers tighter around her body, she gave me poetry.

  But that.

  I’d been given poetry at sixteen when all I could think to do was steal all the wheat bread, white bread, cinnamon rolls, pitas, and hot dog buns from the bread truck after the Rodney King verdict.

  But that.

  I’d been given poetry at seventeen when I heard Mama tell someone on the other end of the phone that being alive was harder than she thought.

  But that.

  I was given poetry when I’d starved and run myself from a 319-pound heavy black boy to a 161-pound skinny black man. But that heart, and those bones, were the same. Poetry was lodged in the memory, and the memory was lodged in the bone.

  Yrsa Daley-Ward makes all of us, and all of our different sensibilities, know that bruises give you poetry, and we give you poetry, and you give we poetry, and loveliness gives you poetry, and first days give you poetry, and warnings give you poetry, and emergencies give you poetry, and bones, bones have no choice but to give us poetry.

  The trick is to accept what’s offered.

  Kiese Laymon

  June 2017

  intro

  I am the tall dark stranger

  those warnings prepared you for.

  emergency warning

  You are one of those people, it is

  clear, who needs help. I think you

  should stop speaking in a low attractive

  voice whenever you call. Stop

  making me think of velvet and

  fragrant tobacco and that first sip

  of bourbon. Stop inciting

  stirrings, movements between us,

  little rebellions, causing chaos in all

  of my darker places. The top half of

  my body is at gross political warfare

  with the lower. One part of me is

  roaring and the other wholly

  disapproves. You are a beautiful

  danger. Do not force me to

  open up. Some books are bound

  tightly for years for reasons. Some

  books are burned for their own

  good, Love. Stop wearing clothes the

  way that you do. Don’t allow them to

  cling to your body like that. Do not

  follow these effortless fashions where

  everything looks just so, because,

  really . . . who could resist

  such a thing? The Lord knows you

  are beautiful and unfair. I think perhaps

  you should spare a thought, dear,for those

  who are sick over you, burning up with

  you, damp with you. You know what you

  do. You’re a slow fever. Don’t be so very

  engaging, amusing or witty or bright.

  You are causing confusion and jams in

  tight spaces. You are an accident in

  waiting. The type of accident with

  casualties spanning from me to you and

  here to there, a potential tragedy, a

  stunning unborn disaster. Should I touch

  you, I will suffer and you will suffer and

  she will suffer. You are a danger zone.

  I must not enter. I should not enter.

  But I might.

  liking things

  Women who were brought up devout

  and fearful

  get stirred, like anyone else.

  Want men. Want

  other women. Stink under the arms at the end of

  the day.

  Get that all too familiar mix of fear and discontent

  in the night. Want to do the things

  that they Must Not Do.

  Those dirty, bloody attractive things.

  a fine art

  You may have learned from your

  mother or any other hunted woman.

  Smiling at devils is a useful,

  learned thing.

  Swallowing discomfort down in

  spades

  holding it tight in your belly.

  Aging on the inside only.

  Keeping it forever sexy.

  bone

  From One

  who says, “Don’t cry.

  You’ll like it after a while.”

  And Two who tells you thank you

  after the fact and can’t look at your face.

  To Three who pays for your breakfast

  and a cab home

  and your mother’s rent.

  To Four

  who says,

  “But you felt so good

  I didn’t know how to stop.”

  To Five who says giving your body

  is tough

  but something you do very well.

  To Six

  Who smells of tobacco

  and says, “Come on, I can feel that

  you love this.”

  To those who feel bad in the morning

  yes,

  some feel bad in the morning

  and sometimes they tell you

  you want it

  and sometimes you think that you do.

  Thank heavens you’re resetting

  ever

  setting and

  resetting.

  How else do you sew up the tears?

  How else can the body survive?

  this was the story

  This was the story according to her, but then she

  could never be trusted. It was safe to say that we

  had established this by now.

  We had established this on a very regular basis.

  On this particular morning, her story and its

  various possibilities did corroborate with stories

  she had told before, but everything else was out of

  sorts.

  We were dr
inking whisky on two stools by the

  window.

  It was freezing cold and the moon was a tiny slip

  of a thing in the sky.

  She had woken me up for school far too early or

  far too late again. Also, we were trying to avoid the

  view.

  She was house-proud but not at all garden-proud

  and the garden was an embarrassment, even at the

  wrong, pitch-black time of day.

  Now she was saying that she met my father

  somewhere on a large boat. She was working on

  the Gold Leaf Cruise liner in nineteen eighty-four.

  The way she put it, I could be the child of one of

  four, possibly five, but the fifth was not likely due

  to timing and the fact that they were interrupted

  before the Point of No Return.

  However, as she put it

  (and never tactfully enough)

  accidents do happen.

  So here were the four, plus the very slim

  possibility.

  The Captain’s mate

  The dark-skinned man behind the

  bar, or

  his friend, or

  his other friend . . . owing to the

  fact that it had been a crazy night

  in the middle of a set of six lost,

  crazy months and she was a) going through a great deal.

  Heartbreak, namely

  b) drinking far too much far too often.

  Furthermore, she did not

  subscribe to the theory of

  regretting anything. If she did,

  she might regret not having more

  control over the situation. Also,

  most cases like this won’t stand

  up in court.

  (Least likely) The One she loved.

  I felt that I should get up (although you couldn’t

  stand up to your full height in our house—do I

  call it a house?)

  and make a point about going to school, because

  she was likely to forget.

  “Anyway,” she went on. “This fettered concept

  of motherhood is outdated. You can go and come