Earnestly, I think, he asks me a question
couched in the phrase I don’t want to be an asshole but,
a sentiment actually quite common
to assholes, as it turns out, but I oblige
listening
as he recounts the story of a woman
who–being on a date with a man she does not like–
consented to a peck on the cheek, after
having been badgered (my word, not his)
by said man in public, and my friend
wants to know why
she leaned in.
And so I tell him
with every incidental teaching experience,
with every coincidental dating experience,
with every trigger having been pulled,
about the algebra of her decision: how
to solve for x when public times x is added
to man who keeps pushing, where x
is calculated by the restaurant’s lighting,
whether she knows anyone there, who
is behind the bar, how far away is her ride
share, how ursine that man’s chest,
how selachoid his smile, and how crotaline
he makes the words on his tongue. She is a duck
I say, loosening my cadence, lightening
my pitch, the bespoke melody a lure
toward common sense. But you know
what they say about sense: Ain’t common.
Here come his counterarguments; my shrug
a furious kicking of feet away from this
constant shore. Ripple after ripple
an elegant isosceles triangle in my wake.
What I Saw When Will Smith Smacked the Shit Out of Chris Rock, Academy Awards 2022
and, right hand to the Lord, I only could watch it
once. I recognized that cocksure stride
from his seat to the stage, the distance
between where Lupita’s eyes landed first
and second and third and fourth. She
like the rest of us, spoke with blinks
and shuffling irises. It was that stalking
gait, more than the upturned hand & poise,
more than Chris’s cartoonish head and chin
struck back, face blown to stage left. That
walk. It spoke of electricity, the kind of man
who believes the taste needs to leave a mouth
fore it comes back the right way. And it was
the casual amble off the stage, descending the steps
like he was going to retrieve his keys
from the foyer. A surety in that bow-legged bop
back to his seat. And while the whole place
scrambled–camera folks, producers, stars
studded with alarm–he shouts out his just
-ification, his limbs recoiled, the GQ cover
pose evident in his lean back: that balance
the photographer strikes
between glamour and menace, between
paper and cut.
Therí Pickens is the Charles A. Dana Professor of English & Africana at Bates College. She has published two academic monographs—New Body Politics (Routledge 2014) and Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke UP 2019)—and three edited projects—a special issue of African American Review on Blackness and Disability (2017), Arab American Aesthetics (Routledge 2018), and a special issue of College Language Association Journal (2021). Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Langston Hughes Review, Prairie Schooner, The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet, diode, The Journal, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Save the Date, and Disability Studies Quarterly. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection is entitled What Had Happened Was (Duke 2025).