‘Misplaced Love Note to All the Women in the Drake Songs’
— Nix Thérèse
To my displeasure, Drake is the kind of cultural icon that’s hard to knock off his pedestal. We can all love a bottle pop in the club where the bubbly spills over onto the floor, as long as we don’t step in it. But Martina’s calling us to stand in the mess, to consider all the things we’ve glossed over in being too into the party, namely the women surrounding Champagne Papi™. The ever-present she is “the gold headed girl without a ride home // he the human with the high top fade / and ‘new phone, who this’ smile.” She’s stranded in her desire to be seen, and regardless of whether that hunger is fed, his humanity will continue to be recognized while she’s just the girl. All of this gives us reason to pause and reel ourselves back from the edge of that dance track.
Her voice is also a line pulling us back, simultaneously sweet and horrifying: “stick your fist(s) inside of me / starfish your fingers between my jaw and roof / to shatter hard palate, to make me million.” This is the kind of midnight dare that makes you blush in consideration. The sense of powerplay becomes heady when you consider that the rest of the poem is a straight detail of how she looks in the eyes of men, how she titillates without speaking. The girl is a siren, beckoning us closer with her voice for a moment, only to let us swim back out into Drake and company’s projections of her. We’re asked to choose our company wisely, to consider which mouth we’re willing to feed. Even though she wants another’s teeth wrapped around her neck, hers is the mouth I won’t forget.