Rhonda, Maybe
By: Terry Trueman
Tags: Sex, Justice, Trust, Love, Racism

Rhonda, Maybe

Image courtesy of Matt Artz, Unsplash

Rhonda

is not her real name

and I feel

bad that I don’t remember

it, but then I’m getting to an age

where I forget a lot of

people’s names.

She is the only

woman

of African-American ancestry

with whom I ever made love/had sex

(I’m at a loss to say

with certainty,

how much of each ingredient

went into

what we were doing,

at least for me.)

I was twenty years older than her

and she clearly had to

talk herself into

going to bed with me;

my efforts at persuasion

wouldn’t have made it work

without her finally chipping-in.

Her skin was dark and

beautiful, her features

pretty.

And she was still

nursing her toddler

(Andrew was his name)

that another white guy,

long gone by the time I met her,

had fathered.

Her breasts

were large

and as we did it

they began to leak

heavily.

I found it

off-putting in a gross,

sexist way — and this

even though,

I’ve always been a

boobs man.

Come to think of it

she was also the first and only

nursing mother I recall

ever being with,

or at least

the first and only one

who had such a wet reaction.

We were together just a few

weeks.

I was a loser poet, not

much $ to speak of,

and she was writing

half-hour ‘scripts’ for future episodes of

Star Trek even though

the show had been cancelled

years before

and there didn’t appear, back then,

to be any

big screen stuff coming

(in other words, she was nuts).

A few weeks,

after we’d parted ways,

a break-up without any drama

and absent much discussion about it,

she phoned me one evening

out of the blue,

and asked if I’d give her my

Visa card number so

she could pay for a pizza for

Andrew and her,

their dinner that night.

I hesitated a little

and finally asked that she only use the

card for just that one

purchase.

Image courtesy of Markus Spizke, Unsplash

She promised she would.

So I gave her the number.

She was a poor single mom

alone in the world

with her half-white baby,

and we had broken-up

shortly after that afternoon

when I’d nearly drowned

in her leaking breast milk,

so she had, in many ways,

to my liberal mind,

every right to seek

direct reparations

in an immediate

manner.

After all,

my family, on my dad’s side,

were proud white Alabamans.

So,

again,

I gave her my credit card #.

The days passed,

turning to weeks

and months;

I never heard from her again.

And she never made another

charge to my credit card.

If I look back on this with some surprise

at her keeping her word

does that make me racist?

If you were surprised when

this story ended the way it did,

does that make you racist?

Does my starting all of this

by identifying Rhonda by race

say anything?

I mean, was her race of any

consequence/importance/significance

to the rest of what happened?

Does my not even remembering her

real name matter?

I don’t know if ‘we’

(our nation/community/world)

have a long

ways to go

when it comes to racial

equality

and seeing ‘others’

fairly . . .

Image courtesy of Sushil Nash, Unsplash

. . . But I’m pretty sure

that I still do.

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Wikipedia & Encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Trueman

All my books can be found on Amazon.com, of course, and at many other places including Latahbooks.com. The poem Rhonda Maybe is in this book: