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By the time he was infamous enough to sell out bullfighting arenas, the Caruso C was a sort of burlesque number.  He would inch to it from the frequencies below, nearly embrace the note, and then flat a bit before trumpeting, C! with full tenor fury. Toscanini chided him for grandstanding, but this in-and-out tease worked well with German and Latin American houses, which particularly enjoyed the punishment of a loud flirtation.

When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in.

The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking

brushes the air between us like a wet mark

stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead

twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.

Robyne, who, when someone hurls 

toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.

My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins

I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.

Fear the opera expert, he who knows everything, who puts your humble tastes to shame, who will criticize your recording of Turandot or even your affection for that vulgar opera, the opera queen who only like Monteverdi, the opera queen who doesn’t go to the Met anymore, the opera queen who can’t stand Sutherland, the opera queen who gave me his 1953 Callas Cetra Traviata because he said her voice was fingernails against a chalkboard, the opera queen who disagrees with the maestro’s tempi, the opera queen who hates Wagner or loves only Wagner, the opera queen who doesn’t recognize himself in this description, the opera queen who thinks homosexuality has nothing to do with opera, the opera queen who never has body odor but then, suddenly, unexpectedly, stinks, the opera queen who doesn’t come out to his mother because he says it will hurt her, the opera queen who loves the local production of Barbiere and the opera queen who makes fun of it, the opera queen who isn’t gay but seems gay because he has learned from opera queens how to be a connoisseur: the opera queen whose intense, phobic knowledge is a bludgeon.

            Jilly took her head out of the oven mainly because it was hot and the gas did not work independently of the pilot light. Stupid new technology. And preferring her head whole and her new auburn sew-in weave unsinged, and having no chloroform in the house, she conceded that she would not go out like a poet. But she updated her status, just the same:

                    A final peace out

                    before I end it all.

              Treat your life like bread,

                  no edge too small

                          to butter.

            Jilly was not a poet or even an aspiring one. She just liked varying her posts as much as possible.

Copyright © by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. From Heads of the Colored People: Stories by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Published by 37 Ink/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.