Its Getting Hot in Here So Take Off

All Your Clothes

Thisssss book!

ThiSSSSSSS poem….

Parker owns her sexuality, unapologetically throughout the collection, claiming it as her own while grappling with how she personally experiences being hyper-sexualized as a black woman.  SSSSSS sounds resonating throughout: “flawS Spilling out my mouth like Sexy moon rockS. I cut out men’S tongueS & I Sharpen mySelf & im Scary & im boSSy,” sliding out of the mouth with a hissing sound, moving the poem forward and shaping it as a spell from this magical, crystal toting melting witch being.  Beginning with a rhyming quip about

“men shouting like lizards..for salty flies.

The sky’s the boss of us: I can’t spit when I try” she later turns to say that while men shout, sending “flaws on my crystal” and she can feel their tongues literally, she fights to owns her sexuality with all her magic, and all her rage.  Again another theme in the collection, references of being a witch and the weaving of magic are found throughout. “Magical powers are everywhere/Fingernails, post offices/indoor cactus spines” (81) which I read as the idea that noticing what is beautiful in the world is understanding the magic, is being part of its making and sorcery as in the title poem which goes on to list things that are more beautiful than Beyonce: “self-awareness,/Leftover mascara in clumps, recognizing a pattern/...Lavender, education, becoming other people,/The fucking sky” (76).  Understanding that magic, noticing beauty is also a process of decolonizing our minds from what we are fed as beauty, how we are conditioned to see the world and to see things as flat, one dimensional and stereotyped like the tropes of images of black women laid out in the poem 13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl (29).

In the poem there is a repetition of volcano throughout the poem, a hot, firy, magic witch “erupt(ing) with a mouth like a bossy eagle.”  She begins by saying that “in the heat, less is everything: respect, power, mouths, sex./All of it is taken from me” but later there seems to be a transformation, a reclamation of power and the volcano is a source of power: “I’m the chick who raises snakes like a volcano..Volcanic in the streets & volcanic in the bed.”

“I made my bed so I have sex in it” makes me think of the saying “you made your bed now lie in it” but the person in this poem has no guilt, no regrets, she is “bossy,” she won’t be made to feel demoralized, less then, sexualized like the black bodies in Nelly’s Video (Its Getting Hot in Here) grinding in rhythm for the male gaze.  Over layed to these pop-cultural images of black femininity is the reference throughout the poem to the song Flawless which in its video Beyonce directs a defiant face forward stare at the camera, digging deep into what the image of a female black bodies, referenced in the poem through out. This song itself is multi-textual, with the autobiographical framing of Beyonce’s experience on star search show as a young performer in the group “Girls time” which introduces the song and ends it with the results of the contest in which the all white boy band wins on this national show, sharing the long story of her career and the work that she has put in to show up with the vibrato refrain, “Bow down Bitches.” Beyonce reminds us that “this is my shit,” that she is charge of herself and not a puppet to Jayz, and, that she is self made all the way back to star search.  The song also includes a layer by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talking about feminism and the role of women in relation to expressing their sexuality and to marriage, a theme that is found throughout Parker’s work in this collection.  

“my mind sticks to you like a bad feminist…

You’ll marry me but I’ll be goddamned

Without you my mouth becomes my face.” ( 63)

And again later in the poem: 99 problems Parker places number 55. The Marriage industrial Complex after the Prison Industrial Complex and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex showing her disdain for the institution of marriage and the cultural tendency to place female sexuality in relation to men rather than an expression of self. Parker ends the book with a message about her own power, cultivating self love rather than love of another, waking in the morning in love with herself:

“This is where I hang my hat

And kiss myself hello.” (81)