Friday, July 31, 7-9pm
It's COOL. It's FREE. And it's back by popular demand!

The vibe in the Museum's Terrace Cafe during the first night of spoken word was electric. At the request of participants and guests eager for another evening full of powerful performances, BMA Speaks is set to rock the house again in July. HBO Def Poetry Jam artist Sharrif Simmons returns to host this night featuring local spoken word artists. To submit your poetry for selection, contact Kristen Greenwood at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or 205.254.2856. Cash bar opens at 6pm.

Highlights from the last BMA Speaks event include two poems by renowned poet Patricia Smith, inspired by pieces from the Museum’s collection.

LADY HELEN

The angle of a shoulder can conjure its own language,
its own system of breath. The cottony cut of a cheekbone
is a soft hallelujah and hallelujah again, the pinched nose
abrupt and necessary, the mouth, quite simply, a horizon.
Her clenched teeth hold back a sun which insists upon rising.
A proper lady’s whispered religion is her landscape of skin,
inviting, scented calm like linen and light, unscarred,
practically requiring the slow questions of some man’s hand.

Beneath crisp, crackling layers of organza and silk, her taut
body quivers, prickles pink and wanting, her sleek muscles
are urged into chaos and silence. The painter, breathing
hard parallel with his subject, swears aloud, forgets to smile,
and stirs and re-stirs his quieter oils, searching for the color
of the sweat dotting the map of her chest. This woman is a wife,
he thinks. This wife is a woman, he answers himself, and knows
then, to simply think of silver and her skin will shimmer.
He does not see her move her hand and slip a forefinger
into the breast line of her dress, he does not see the tug
downward, the too-long golden chain she insisted on wearing
swinging lazily, a metronome in the shrinking room.

The space between them is warm--a copper day crouches
at the window, shaming his colors and begging to be let in.
A raven sprig of hair springs free and clings to her forehead.
She waits for him to wait for her to brush it back with her hand,
to pin it down, but it steams there just above her right eye
and seems to move her hold body forward. He rushes to paint
something, just one thing that does not strain toward him, and
he works for an hour on her right hand until it twists away from
both of them, not part of the room at all. He  struggles to recreate
the upturned finger, every shadowed crevice and crease,
he locked his eyes upon the misting pores of that wayward hand,
studies staccato pulse throbbing beneath, the carnation moans
of each perfectly arced fingernail. Avoiding the thunder
of her eyes, he possesses and disowns that hand, swipes it
alive then dead on the canvas, until his head pounds, his vision
splinters, and he knows that she holds his next breath,
his skipping heart,
his painter's soul,
in a hand that is not yet closed.

BREATH SEWN IN

Fingers lose their bones easily, lost in
the ritual of metronome stitch, a birth
in a length of burnished thread,
a death in a paisley square,
a tortured move from country to city,
from Alabama to Chicago, is trapped
in a loop of thick, stunning red.

My grandmother never stood completely
upright, she existed bended, not yessir
or yes ma’am, but the curve of creation
in her spine, her eyesight slimmed
to sliver, thin fingers working revolution,
screaming, screeching, murmuring,
resurrecting lost fathers, sons in uniform,
a granddaughter who is first and foremost
a backlot slugger, a tugger of skirts.

Now I am a half century of silver--and when
midnight runs its chill fingers down the small
of my back, whispering sleep, I reach
to the foot of my bed, pull up the quilt
to cover my shivering with my own history,
and my grandmother’s voice.