Li’l crunk girl in a blue prom dress, tiny, not like me, hair up but long, laid, cute, krumping in a contest with a gigantic date, black, like me, but big and a boy.  Li’l crunk girl gets down, hard, not like my hard, hers, a lazer sass, aimed to win.  In the battle, round one, Li’l crunk girl does not drop it.  She beats her arms out and her chest thumps. The gigantic date, already losing, does his thing, but it’s a prom and he’s limited by size, tuxedo, and dress shoe.  Li’l crunk girl in round two repeats, goes harder, leaps and lands all brute.  And since the gigantic date can’t  krump, and would never leap or take his shoes off  (if he did either, he’d have a chance), he falls to his back on the floor, submits.  Li’l crunk girl rises into a sea of hugs.

When I was a kid, I was a horrible dancer. They used to tell me I “dance like a white girl.” “Oh, Hemmy (that’s what my grandmother used to call me), if only you could keep a beat. You’ve got no business here with all that irrelevant hopping about.” (She loved the word, “irrelevant,” especially as it pertained to the body’s movements or growths. She’d also say that a protruding strand of hair unnecessarily kinked was “irrelevant.”) My parents took action and sat me down in front of the video screen to watch Adrian Piper’s “Funk Lesson,” in which she, indeed, claims that “WHITE PEOPLE CAN DANCE” and I began to think there’s hope for me yet. It is from Piper, for example, that I learned that dancing is a practice and must be done every day. So, every day, I went to my mirror and turned on some “black music”–hip hop, r&b, soul, Michael Jackson–and tried to “get down.” But, more importantly, I learned “sass” and “letting go” or “abandon,” now all part of my poetic practice, making it, in my estimation, one of the blackest things I’ve ever done.