Written for Women in Creativity Month performance at Tricklock Theater Company’s Reptilian Lounge in March 2013

Crea+ivi+y … for Mae Jamison

Quote

“For some reasons of reason, it is overwhelmingly apparent that the female brain does not rival a man’s brain when it comes to math and science.”

so she grabbed a telescope

to see

what kind of god

would not make space

for her

what kind of idiot

savant

would phrenologize uterus

with iQ

in a respectable scholarly journal

and call his self

scientist

an alchemist

is much more

than a palmful

of snake oil

more than scales

and skin sales

more than the atheism

we cook

and crack

in the crosshairs of that scope

she saw pimps

standing on the corner

of crea+ion and nativi+y

selling acrylic

on canvas, no prints,

of Mary

and manger

sky

blacker than universe

than womb

in it

stars look like asterisks

like X, X

on top of each other

one tick-tocked clockwise

90 degrees

“Like you don’t know what time it is!”

she says

under lapcoat collar

like impo’tent men

will put their dick in

test tubes to

try and reproduce

the laboratory inside of her

futile

those same men,

however important,

will fit firearms into mouths

of mothers

on a crusade

to barren nations

frustrated

that their black magic

will never match

her birthright…

they will say

“God made Adam first.”

She will thank’em kindly

for the compliment

and call herself

evolution

smile

and tell them to adopt

while she adapts

“We are in clinical trials,

trying to reproduce a miracle.”

she belches

“The future of this species rests in an aberration.

Inconclusive, yet well-documented, evidence that one

Of their gender was able to regenerate without the other…”

she is between homo habilis

and australopithicus

she is time travel

nine months of present

and future

at the same time

she is pregnancy without penis

he is penis without progress

he is original man

primitive

she is Es-class

opposable thumb

she has made man

without man

he has tried

to clone her miracle

jealous

of how she plays god with herself

one day,

he will worship her

for the nucleus she is

instead of the warfare

he wet dreams her

to be

til then,

he will dismiss this report

file it away in the annals

of science

and tell her

this sort of study

this sort of research

is heresy

he will unbend

his lips and innuendo

his brow

as he lets her know

what is at stake

shrug it off

by trying to diffuse

a lawsuit

with a joke about sausage

and how she is

missing link

he is not

cute

or scientifically correct

he is cocky

not cunning

he is over the line

and over confident

she is over head

and over

it

he will discharge

one last shot

at her sisterhood

laughingly, ask her

if she thinks

she can fly

and she will

look him in the eye

and say

“Yes”

“Now,

ask me…

which broomstick

to prove it with.”

© Hakim Bellamy March 21, 2013

Hear the audio of me reading

“From Mohandis K. Gandhi to Michael Luther King Jr.”