Wisdom Teeth

Derrick Weston Brown

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781604864175
• eBook ISBN: 9781604865608
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

To consider Wisdom Teeth is to acknowledge inevitable movement, shift, and sometimes pain. There's change hidden just below the surface and, like it or not, once it breaks, everything has to make room. So goes the aptly titled debut poetry collection from poet and educator Derrick Weston Brown. Wisdom Teeth reveals the ongoing internal and external reconstruction of a poet's life and world, as told through a litany of forms and myriad of voices, some the poet's own.

Wisdom Teeth is a questioning work, a redefining of personal relationships, masculinity, race, and history. It's a readjustment of bite, humor, and perspective as Brown channels hip-hop, Toni Morrison, and Snagglepuss to make way for the shudder and eruption of wisdom.

Wisdom Teeth

Legacy

My father’s vocabulary

is extensive but

he still can’t find the words

for I love you.

Nor the synonyms

acronyms

or abbreviations.

I guess this is why I am

a poet.

I inherited the words

lost to his dictionary.

I am the new volume.

Updated.

New testament.

Forgiveness Poem

After Randall Horton

Alicia Turnbull

didn’t do anything

but breathe and be a girl.

It was her skin we didn’t like.

This was back then when to

be dark was to be a punch line

-Hey Licia! you so black

when they called your

name at night school and

you said here they still marked

you absent!

-Hey Licia! You so black

you leave finger prints

on charcoal.

Alicia Turnbull didn’t do

nothing but be. Be a

girl, be a sister, be the

darkest child in her family,

in her class, in after-school.

We tore her down daily.

What a smile.

We smashed it.

What a laugh.

We choked it.

She cried every day.

Fought the older girls

who called her names

smacked her upside

the head and claimed

they still couldn’t

knock the Black off.

I was the nice one

but I pitched in too

the day she tried to sit

next to me at the swimming pool.

My friends started hollering

and I turned to her and said

Don’t nobody want to sit

by your ol’ ugly black self.

Alicia Turnbull

didn’t do anything but

breathe, be a girl, a sister,

a daughter.

We made her a shadow.

Stole her light till she

disappeared.

Forgive me Alicia

for not seeing

your beauty

and believing

the perm kit,

TV, fading cream

whispers that

said our brown,

cocoa, red tinged,

black berry hues were

injury to insult.

Forgive me for believing

that night held no glory to day.

Forgive me for holding

white washed fairy tales

as truth.

Forgive my ugliness

and my dark heart.

Where ever you are

forgive me.

Gust

1989 Charlotte, North Carolina, Hurricane Hugo

The sky snarled.

We heard God swallow cumulus,

stratus, and anvil headed nimbus

before the hush.

We ventured outside

peered up into the calm.

The sky a frosted snow globe

swirl of stars.

The moon

a glossy clear polished

fingernail sliver

winked.

Odd

The wind so strong

I could lean into it

arms out and not fall.

I was Pisa.

What did I know

of nature’s way

of teaching lessons?

That there is

an eye of the storm.

Watch me smile.

My back to the rifle

sight of lassoed menace

clueless to the coming stretch

and yawn of ruin.

Till’s Skin

Lesson #1

I.

Second to last summer

before high school

me and Brooke Petty were

a neighborhood item.

Sugar water lovers.

Ten speed bike sunset rendezvous

at a creek bed.

Here we would trade spearmint kisses

and work the squeeze play

between first and second base.

Goofy love. Twitterpation.

Awkward overbite love, braces

knobby knee headgear romance.

The best two weeks ever.

I would put mad miles on my

Huffy to sit with my first freckle

faced white girl who lived at

hop-skip jump address.

II.

Mom was cool and let it ride.

Our talk on interracial dating

would come later after the

inevitable ending.

But for now

there’s Brooke’s birthday party.

Me, the only boy invited

and five other

girls.

My ego does

the running man.

III.

T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword My Words Of Wisdom
• Hourglass Flow
• The Sweet Home Men Series
• The Unscene
• Wisdom Teeth
• Ajar
• Notes
• About the Author