Kathy Z. Price
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: The opening of this prose poem dazzles with description of scene, a super Mercado on Saturday night; I think of Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”: “Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!” Kathy Z. Price’s poem moves with the same energy, thought after cascading thought separated only by commas. And then there’s Barbie Negra, wrapped in cellophane, pulling the speaker from present moment to past experience and back again. Time warps as she confronts what isn’t so much a microaggression as a blatant enactment of racism’s effects on the body of a woman of color. The poem’s speaker demands that we see what she sees.
To hear Kathy read the poem, click below:
Mercado de Sabado por la Noche;
Con Barbie Negra como Plato de Entrada
(Saturday Night Market with a Side Dish of Black Barbie)
The super Mercado, that nucleus of Saturday night, where single girls and mamas alike congregate, young men posed on motorbikes fire the engines, motors gunning allegory to their erections, and local gringos are the designated gancha vendors, clichéd as you could imagine, aging surfer dude passing for neon, inside bulbs parse dull orange light, gray aisles stream with expatriates along with the Guatemaltecos, the tomato paste punched with monosodium glutamate, black beans in giant plastic bags, large enough to smother a fully grown cochino, I drop them in the shop cart, packaged boxed goods, afraid to buy fresh vegetables, buy purifying tablets, I stop at the plastics ware to buy disposable utensils, paper dinner plates, anxious about tap water, prepare to purchase store-brand bottled, and there is a kiosk, not with plastic forks, but plastic
barbies wrapped loosely in cellophane, the store chain does not discriminate, there are blonde pink-cheeked barbies and brown smoky-haired brunette barbies. I turn the revolving metal spine and more brown barbies emerge. the blonde barbies are dressed in a checkered sporty minidress, up to where the vaginas, and I remember a cluster of black girls singing along with a music track on the Number 2 subway train, vaginas at the top of their lungs, their voices smoked the windows, giggling and rejoicing as if they just made up the word themselves. The cellophane does not cover the features of the dolls, and all the black barbies, every single one is top
less. I sneak pictures of them and the manager alerts a squat man in a security uniform—who tells me in emphatic Spanish to stop. I nudge a female clerk, Black Barbie is naked I said. Black Barbie está desnuda. Barbie Negra ella está desnuda. ¿Por qué la Barbie Blanca tiene ropa? Ella es ru-bi-a. She’s blo-onde. Pero, Black Barbie no tiene ropa. She shrugs. No es mi culpa, no es mi culpa, tengo el espíritu de todas las barbies negras del mundo. Not my fault, not my fault, I am aligned with the spirit of all black barbies of the world,
and when no one is looking I try to cover Black Barbie with her skirt, through the cellophane. Through the cellophane her breasts are enviable, her eyes are wide open, in the cellophane, she looks as if she is drowning, standing up, how many of us black girls break open the cellophane, our breasts are our business, though enviable, our skin cannot be compared to inane menus in a confectioner’s shop, we earned our right to flaunt, or to remain silent, and when we tell you we are sick of your pedantic juju, step back, or you might just find a fly grrl’s boomerang, the jawbone of an ass, perform the cross, wavering cellophane across your face, all your clothes removed, when we dare you to see what we see.
Kathy Z. Price is author of a forthcoming poetic picture book with Atheneum Books for Young Readers (Simon & Schuster, 2020) and of The Bourbon Street Musicians (Houghton Mifflin, 2002). Her poetry is included in TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, Chronogram, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, African Voices, and other publications.
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