"I like my black boys broke, or broken."
"When I finally wrote this poem, I had been thinking about the words “black” and “blue” for months. I’d say them over and over again to myself, repeating and re-arranging them to see how they sounded. The pairing of these two particular colors is, of course, loaded with meanings. It applies violence and the aftermath, the bruising. And I was interested in the idea of bruises being physical memories.
So, I had all of these ideas swarming in my brain but no poem to show for it until I heard Mark Doty read a poem about bootblacks. The moment I heard him say “bootblack” which sounds an like echo of “blue-black,” I bolted up in my seat. That night, I sat down at my desk, saying the names of cities that start with a “B.” When I got to Birmingham, it all came together. That’s how most of these poems happen. I obsess over words or sounds or images until there’s a breakthrough that brings all of them together. Birmingham, AL is such a potent symbol of the troubled history of race in America, setting a poem about bootblacks and blue-black bodies there just seemed like the culmination of everything I was trying to do. I wrote the poem very quickly while saying it out loud, line by line. I was afraid that if I thought about it for too long, it would fall apart in my hands.
As for the scene described in the poem itself, well... The poem isn't autobiographical, thankfully, but the first time a man said "nigger" to my face, it was in the middle of having sex."