Featured Poem: Chet’la Sebree

 

Chet’la Sebree

 

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At a Dinner Party for White (Wo)men

 

[T]he other plates are creatively imagined vaginas…The Sojourner Truth plate is the only one in the collection that shows—instead of a vagina—a face.

Alice Walker, in response to Judy Chicago’s 1970 exhibit The Dinner Party

 

Everyone else is invited to meet their vaginas—

different denominations and colors—

 

except me, the magical negress.  My box

always absent because desire is not a privilege

 

for disenfranchised women

descendent from slaves—

 

we, still, their dark continent.

 

They cannot imagine my yawning labia

because I do not pink at their touch,

 

cannot imagine me wet when I want to be,

decidedly igniting follicles on my body.

 

At best, undressed, I am invisible, neutered, neutral—

a breast-faced mammy assuaging centuries of shame

 

with archetypical depictions of tears and rage—

a place at the table they refuse to learn to set.

 

 

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Chet’la Sebree was the 2014-2016 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry. She holds an MFA from American University and has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Guernica, and Gulf Coast.