For Sugar

For Sugar Joanne Braxton (bio) when she called me her shy colt i did not know that little girl whose family belonged to the joe louis beach club in ontario “where all the black people were” and where she kept a pony that ate sugar from her hand i could not have known that on sundays her mother made fried chicken sandwiches on buttered bread and wrapped them in wax paper kept warm in a neat picnic basket while her daddy (who loved her and hated her) drove the no doubt too big buick across the boundaries of race and nations when she told me not to bolt i could not see the proper young lady astride her mount the one she had tamed all by herself when she rode me all spurs and sweat silencing me with her “be quiet” i did not know the younger rider trained from infancy to command me in bed and when i came to her hand because she had called me called me out of myself i thought it was for my own pleasure i did not know that this bed was my red and clovered pasture that i had come, like her pony for sugar Joanne Braxton Joanne Braxton is author of Sometimes I Think of Maryland (poems) and Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition; and editor of The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Copyright © 1996 Charles H. Rowell

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