I could’ve been given chocolate and flowers. Opening my door I could’ve screamed at Saturday night roses and Sunday morning compliments of “oh you’re so beautiful,” “oh I love you so,” “what beautiful eyes you have,” or “I’d give you the world and my love like honey as a sauce to sugar.” There could’ve been something more for me, but then I realize no land was promised to me. There was no hope for love and no question of it setting me free. Whether he call me black bitch or a nigger, I was promised a land to work on and not one to liberate. And I think again and again how I wanted to be a sweet talking bitch: one who only spoke pretty words well pronounced, one who said yes and please and thank you, a bitch that said little because men don’t want no loud-mouth, back-talking bitch, but somehow that quaintness wasn’t for me. I wanted to wake up on Saturday mornings and tidy myself before the Mister woke in search of his fantasy of someone else’s submission. I wanted to make him breakfast in bed and watch him light up and watch the green eyes turn hazel, and the gray eyes turn blue, and the brown eyes turn raven. I wanted a hope of a simple complexity, but it never came. I could’ve danced my nights away, head in his chest listening to music that sounded of the work of poets writing about love, death and flowers, but the promises never came, and I never stopped waiting. I think again to the promised land and who promised it. A land promised by a white god. A land promised by a male god. It was a land promised to white men. There was no place in that land for me. I think to the Shakespearian witch who gave birth to monster and man only to have her island taken. Then I have to pull myself from fantasy and remember no sweet talking bitch thinks of these things. I remember my thoughts should’ve been simpler and better pronounced.