Can we make love to the rhythms of a “little early Miles” when he may have spent the morning of the day he recorded the music slapping one of our sisters in the mouth?
–Mad at Miles, Pearl Cleage
mama gave me mad at miles when i was thirteen,
like angry was a book
every woman should have in her library.
i didn’t hear him play until three years later,
hadn’t known a trumpet
from a treaty; had only tasted jazz from hot
churchfuls of women who’d lost sons to thighs peeking
through slits in smoke-filled
powder rooms that crooned someone’s half drunk gospel-and
i wasn’t sure if i could listen to those notes
after what he’d done to
cicely—with an empty blue bottle and thumbs
used to making music when they pressed down—wasn’t
sure that i could unwind
to what he’d played, notes he may have written to her,
midnight notes someone may have hummed to me too. i
can’t know if most women
spend evenings with indigo sealing up their lips
in the bottom of their own basements, police with
their blue-knuckled boyfriends,
chuckling over their screams, but that afternoon, i
played his kind of blue over and over, until
from the trumpets, all i
could hear in the high notes was her, singing the blues.
