AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "POODLES AND SOUR CREAM" BY TRINIDADIAN POET CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR



CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR is a poet, author, and curator. Born in Arima, Trinidad & Tobago, in December 1950, she migrated to Queens, New York, at the age of thirteen years. She is the mother of late Trinidadian American hip-hop artiste Malik Izaak Taylor aka Phife Dawg of the group A Tribe Called Quest.


After completing high school, she earned an undergraduate degree at City College of New York in Theatre. She later earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Poetry from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine and a Master of Social Work (MSW) from Fordham University.


She is the author of the following seven collections of poetry:

  • Raw Air (1997)
  • Night When Moon Follows (2000)
  • Convincing the Body (2005)
  • Arrival (2017), finalist for the 2018 Paterson Poetry Award
  • Mama Phife Represents (2021), tribute to her late son hip-hop legend Malik, winner of Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and listed as one of New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2021
  • We Are Not Wearing Helmets (2022) and
  • The Limitless Heart: New and Selected Poems 1997-2022 (2023), winner of the 2024 CLMP Firecracker Award

A VONA fellow—the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation for nurturing writers of color since 1999— her work has been published in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Pluck!, Killings Journal of Arts & Letters, and Adrienne.


The recipient of the 2015 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, Boyce-Taylor is the founder and curator of Calypso Muse and the Glitter Pomegranate Performance Series. In her community, she has judged poetry entries to The New York Foundation for the Arts and The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, and facilitated poetry workshops for Cave Canem, Poets & Writers, and The Caribbean Literary and Cultural Center. Her poetry has been commissioned by The Joyce Theater and the National Endowment for the Arts for Ronald K. Brown’s EVIDENCE, A Dance Company.


She has led numerous poetry workshops for Cave Canem, the New York Public Library, Urban Word NYC, and Poets House, among others. Her life papers and portfolio are stored at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her partner, Ceni.



Learn more: Cheryl Boyce-Taylor official website [http://cherylboycetaylor.net]

Photo of poet by Dominique Sindayiganza




POODLES AND SOUR CREAM BY CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR



I am the third generation of daughters

whose mother worked as a domestic

in that Great Neck house of poodles and sour cream

girls younger than me

called my mother by a nickname


Genie, what's for breakfast

Genie, wash my hair

Genie, take my bike out

Genie, get my boots off


my mother who raised me to call elders

tanty, uncle, granny, related or not

Tanty Evelyn, Tanty Vida, Uncle Dadoo, Uncle Horatio

even the bum with the limp was called Mister Broke-up-foot


in that cold New York house

my mother spent three years eating mashed potatoes

and sour cream doing sleep-in work

waiting for her green card to come


and every night crying for she beloved daughter

she could not care for while raising the white lady chiren.



SOURCE: Poem from the collection The Limitless Heart: New and Selected Poems (1997-2022) by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, published by Haymarket Books, Chicago, Illinois, 2023, p. 66.