The woman with the microphone sings to hurt you,
To see you shake your head.  The mic may as well
Be a leather belt.  You drive to the center of town
To be whipped by a woman’s voice.  You can’t tell
The difference between a leather belt and a lover’s
Tongue.  A lover’s tongue might call you bitch,
A term of endearment where you come from, a kind
Of compliment preceded by the word sing
In certain nightclubs.  A lush little tongue
You have:  you can yell, Sing bitch, and, I love you,
With a shot of Patrón at the end of each phrase
From the same barstool every Saturday night, but you can’t
Remember your father’s leather belt without shaking
Your head.  That’s what satisfies her, the woman
With the microphone.  She does not mean to entertain
You, and neither do I.  Speak to me in a lover’s tongue—
Call me your bitch, and I’ll sing the whole night long.

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston.    He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University.  The recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, he has served as poetry editor at Gulf Coast and assistant poetry editor at Callaloo.  His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, Oxford American, and several other journals and anthologies.  Brown teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego.  New Issues Poetry & Prose published his first book PLEASE.