Nikky Finney is the author of three books of poetry, On Wings Made of Gauze, Rice, which won a PEN America Open Book Award, and The World is Round. She also the author of Heartwood, a collection of short stories, and is working on a novel. She has been published in several anthologies and was the scriptwriter for the documentary "For Posterity's Sake," the story of Harlem photographers Morgan and Marvin Smith. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky.

The Greatest Show on Earth

For Saartjie Baartman, Joice Heth, Anarcha of Alabama,
Truginini, and us all.

Under glass and tent
floating in formaldehyde jelly
curled in a deadman's float
live the split spread
unanesthetized legs
of Black women
broken like the stirrups
of a wishbone,

somebody got their wish
and somebody didn't.

The lilac plumage
of our petaled genitalia
in all its royal mauve
and plum rose
with matching eggplant hips
that pull the ocean
across itself each night,
boats of peanut skin
folded and rolled
like the new fur
all proof of our pathology
all cut away
by pornographic hands
fascinated with difference
and the spectacle
of being a Black woman,

so the normal pay their fifty cents
to see what makes a freak a freak.

Go ahead,
walk around her
she won't bite,
she is the headless woman,
see her protruding mass,
steatopygia.

We don't have to be dead first
to be cut into manageable size,
one that fits their measuring rods
their medicine chests will not rest
until we are properly pried,
it has always been about
opening us up,
experimenting with Black women
but never dissecting their own desires.

The side show
was pitched on our backs,
the speculum hammered out
between our legs
modern medicine was founded
on the world of our hips;
we the standard patterned girth
of every bustle skirt ever made.

Black woman as spectacle,
wanting to but afraid to die.
Knowing death would never end
such sterling silver lust.
Bodies quake whole lifetimes
in a national geographic tremble
until the obituary arrives:

Please bury me behind the mountains
so they can never find me again.

But they do find us,
do dig us back up,
retrieve the last swatches
of soft skin,
the last twig of curved brown bone.

Our opened pirouetting vaginas,
our African music boxes
whittled down to perfect
change purse size,

for the normal
who will always pay
their fifty cents
to be sure and see
what makes a freak
a freak.