They need no big words, nor long poems. Like Miller, Jordan has his mind on the tongue, which licks this poem right between "starve" and "flesh." We are reminded that every tongue is about the same size, not very big, but they pack all the sexual power a human being can conjure and give us language.
Jordan plays with this double duty of the tongue, sexual pleasure and self-expression, in a miniature poem in a nuptial series, "Wedding Night":
let's strip off our words
to speak without our tongues. let's
try to tongue without
saying a word. let's turn speech
back into struggle tonight.
"Struggle": oh yeah, that burden. Miller and Jordan are black men in America and they are mindful of turbulence outside of sex's delicious haven. The poets, who are friends (Miller's name appears in Jordan's acknowledgements), share an interest in historical portraits of struggle. Miller imagines the minds of Frederick Douglass's first wife and a mistress of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Jordan puts himself in A. Philip Randolph's shoes as he recruits union activists.
In fact, Jordan's entire project is framed as a historical poetic sequence. His book tells the true story of MacNolia Cox, the first African American to reach the final round of a national spelling bee (in 1936), whose talent for language languished in adult life, when she worked as a domestic. This sequence is less successful than the best individual poems, however, as the spelling bee fails to support much dramatic weight. M - A - C - N - O - L - I - A contains unfortunate moments of bathos.
Interestingly, longer narrative poems are among Miller's weaker efforts. How We Sleep on the Nights We Don't Make Love includes a sequence about a black girl's friendship with an Arab boy at school. These pieces have the feel of forced good will, as if they are intended to provide a positive Muslim character to compensate for the apocalyptic Muslim terrorists who haunt the book in the refractory passages between sex poems.
One of those poems, "Honey & Watermelons," is an unnerving evocation of a suicide bomber's thought process. It unfolds through seven simple four-line stanzas, with an unnamed man building a bomb while thinking of the legendary host of virgins awaiting him in the afterlife. The final stanza shows that Miller knows something about how to end a story:
A man is walking down
the street with a bomb.
He stops next to a man
