is up The Met’s stone steps,
so many that I have trouble collecting
my girthy tourist’s breaths
and my palms, all sweaty,
smeared with ink
from his crinkled face,
wrinkled in the brochure, and
to think I’m too underdressed
for a pocket square,
so up goes the tee’s hem
to blot my forehead dry
enough, when, of course,
there goes my furry gut’s apron
for everyone to see
it unfurling like the carpet
Claudia Schiffer stomped
toward that one Lagerfeld photoshoot:
her mean mien
of a pouty puss made up
to an almost-
black face, blond braided back
under a theoretical afro,
an aphrodisiac, you know,
what men want, a diasporic taste
in their ladies: hot
enough to boil a stew pot, thin
as ladle handles, good cooks
in the bedroom—yet
still Lagerfeld wanted
supremacy’s payload, to not see
that which was too colored
for his pleathered hands to hold
not but to plunder, and so here we are
staring up at his sketched waifs,
craning our necks
to take in the niched wall,
each gown an upturned urn
shelved in its own alcove,
dressed in nothing
but archive’s bleached light,
the mannequins’ clean faces
looking down on us—
crowded together
like the staggered heads
of snaggleteeth
in his stitched mouth.
Copyright © 2025 by Tommye Blount. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 15, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
