in the middle of the night ~c.l.~

vi

She tugged on the breaking strap of her pink tote bag. This thing has turned to shit, she thought.

One thing Chloe didn't like about New York City was how fast it was. Even though she had been here five years, she still had to duck into a shop when a falling-apart shoe fell off her heel. She hadn't yet acquired the Magical Super Quick New-Yorker handiwork.

Her tote was giving her serious problems. It was the swim bag she lugged every Monday to the giant local YMCA near her apartment, and it had taken a beating from years of wear and tear from chlorine-soaked bathing suits and dirty sneakers.

The bag dropped in front of her, spilling out all her swimming and working out necessities on to the sidewalk. "Fuck!" She spat, frantically throwing everything into the bag and speeding into the nearest non-sketchy shop she saw.

It was an artsy pizza place. with dark-purple walls and a huge chalkboard with the whole entire menu and a full, in-color Chewbacca sketched on it. And there was a small stage with a microphone on it. And on the stage was a girl.

And she was incredibly beautiful. Dark brown hair piled into a bun, smooth, burnt-sienna skin, full lips glossed black, short and curvy. She had on the dress of a pinup, red and collared and polka-dotted that drew in at her waist, and tattoos all up and down her arms. Chloe caught a large tattoo of a black pinup girl blowing a kiss, a cross, a rainbow, something in Spanish? Chloe craned her neck to get a closer look. As if by magic, the girl twisted: Mal de muchos, consuelo de tontos was written in perfect cursive. But it wasn't the generic kind you get at the tattoo shop. This cursive was handwritten.

She had no idea what it meant. She took French in school. Had it said Il fait froid, or it is cold outside, which was basically the only French Chloe remembered, she might understand.

Chloe had never seen anyone so pretty. Seriously. And she had been to thousands of modeling sessions and dance competitions, hell, she had even been to a Miss America show. No one as .... celestial as this girl.

They seemed to have some sort of thing going on. There was a group of people gathered around the stage, eagerly waiting for her to sing? Say something? Chloe didn't know. All she knew was she was mesmerized by this woman.

Said woman, with one swift removal of a pin, unbunned her hair. Said woman shook it out, breathed into the microphone, and started whatever she was going to say.

She spoke with importance, like she knew what she was doing:

"The women in my family are bitches;
Cranky bitches, stuck-up bitches, customer-service-gone-wrong bitches,"

She continued on. Chloe couldn't get what she was doing at first, but then it hit her: This woman was a slam poet.

And slam she did. The whole poem was about the women in this lady's family, how they were classified as bitches, which at first in the poem took a negative connotation: cranky, stuck-up, customer-service-gone-wrong.
But then it took a kinder connotation, one unique to the woman's family: pray before the baby comes, she has my eyes, my big mouth, and my fight, sing to the scabs on her knees when she falls down, what's that kind of love called again? Bitches.

As the applause flooded, she bent, wrapped her hair round her fingers, and tacked a bun on her head with the pin.

Chloe was in love.

And the scariest thing was, the woman was sashaying her way towards her, all swing and lipstick and tattoos and Chloe, absolutely trembling at her beauty.

this happened.
Also the poem I used is a slam poem called "bitches" by Melissa Lozada-Olivia it's gr8.

someone help me what should this lady's name be