A Small Needful Fact, by Ross Gay (2015)
Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.
[Published in The Quarry, 2015]
1 note
·
View note
Two American Sonnets Starring Octavia Butler, by Terrance Hayes (2022)
I.
In Julie Dash’s Octavia Butler the director washes Octavia’s
Monumental feet & toenails in buckets of government water
When there are no seas or rivers handy. It takes too long
Awaiting God’s drizzle though there are open barrels outside
The camera’s frame in the scene where Butler lies outdoors
Letting her entire mouth fill with tap-water, then spitting the water
Into the air as rain blessed & better after the taste of her speech.
If you don’t see suffering’s potential as art, will it remain suffering?
When Butler tells Dash she’s dreamed of storms all week,
Dash asks to film the dreams. The camera watches Butler sleep
A full moon humming something in the same baritone she uses
When she speaks. Of course, Octavia Butler stars in Octavia Butler.
She buys blouses with patterns of leaves & flowers in the off hours
And listens to the young hotel desk clerk worry about precipitous weather.
II.
In Gordon Parks’ lost Octavia Butler photos Parks parks Butler
In Central Park & shoots her against the stars beginning to burn
Between the leaves & city some twilight evening in 1963.
She’s a teen, but tall & nearly as quiet as the trees & policemen
Hovering over the scene. Parks shoots her near the tallest tree
Leaning into its shade, then clutching a hatchet, then transformed
Into a small black bird perched in its branches. No police dogs
Are on the attack. Rain makes the tree bark appear
To be sweating. The surface of everything cries over the black
Holes between capitalism & spirituality; the manholes between
Building & property. When asked about the banter shared
During their time together, Butler & Parks recalled different things.
If you see suffering’s potential as art, is it art or suffering?
If you see life’s potential as art, is it artful or artificial living?
[Published in The Believer, no. 140, Dec. 9, 2022]
1 note
·
View note
His Eye on The Sparrow, by Airea D. Matthews (2022)
after hanif
I guess black people can write about flowers at a time like this since every
poem turns on itself. Starts one way to end another. We see
it in nature too. How seed turns to
leaf regardless of its earth or the thought inside my head
blossoms into a hyacinth with as sweet a scent. Even in dreams,
thought’s pretend cousin, I often see Mamie Till. She walks the
church aisle toward her son’s body while wisteria bloats the casket’s brim and
papered bougainvillea bracts emerge from where his eye once was. An
entire garden from the nutrients of once human. And not to mention all
those awed birds that circle Emmett’s pillowed corpse. So many in
the tabernacle. Not predators of the fleshly bloom or harbingers of his
God’s descent, not refugees fleeing his body exilic but eternity’s
messengers. We, who pull breath, confuse death’s irony. Whoever dies and is
remembered stays living.
0 notes
How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This, by Hanif Abdurraqib (2018)
dear reader, with our heels digging into the good
mud at a swamp’s edge, you might tell me something
about the dandelion & how it is not a flower itself
but a plant made up of several small flowers at its crown
& lord knows I have been called by what I look like
more than I have been called by what I actually am &
I wish to return the favor for the purpose of this
exercise. which, too, is an attempt at fashioning
something pretty out of seeds refusing to make anything
worthwhile of their burial. size me up & skip whatever semantics arrive
to the tongue first. say: that boy he look like a hollowed-out grandfather
clock. he look like a million-dollar god with a two-cent
heaven. like all it takes is one kiss & before morning,
you could scatter his whole mind across a field.
0 notes
Midnight Air in Louisville, by Afaa Michael Weaver (2022)
for Breonna Taylor
Dear Breonna,
How many times, I ask,
how many times
have I chased the thought
of writing to you,
of catching the poem where
it cannot leave,
of knocking open the door to a grief
we all hold, our hearts
full of questions.
We leave our houses to work,
to look for what we need to live,
or what we need
to make the pain go away,
and your voice rises:
“Oh hell to the no,
no he didn’t,
Satan get behind me,
whatever, whatever
the hell you think you are.”
I imagine that in leaving
all of us you said:
“I am done
I am let out into the world,
breath I took in from it
breath that I give back in love.”
May I see you in flight
filling the space
beyond clouds and stars
where there is no need
of sun or moon, where
a grand city lives
in prophecies beaten
by the wheels of history
where you are not invisible
to ancestors who saw
these long roads down through time
to this one night in Louisville.
Bright Angel,
Luminescence, Woman Who Saved Lives
in Emergency Rooms,
Invocation of Heaven’s Law,
Living Song Riding
the Eternal Dawn.
These titles I summon from license
given by Eternal Mysteries to hold you.
Fly now, in the woven air of the saints.
0 notes
Hood Aesthetic, by Amy M. Alvarez (2016)
Naturally, broken glass, throbbing bass, a roll of bills and a paper bag passed between the hands of hustlers. Just as true: the rows of corn planted by the family at the end of the street. Even in this leaded soil, stalks grow fat cobs. The squeal and clatter of barefoot children chasing each other on asphalt, tight braids flying, shoes abandoned at the back door, rounds of Happy Birthday to ya! from an open apartment window, the shuffle of sneaker and swish of net from the basketball players beneath. In the morning, I step outside to starlings, wings like oil slicks, construction and the smell of hot tar releasing a wavering haze of heat. I wave to a neighbor sitting on the stoop, shirtless, smiling. What neither of us knows is that he will be dead a year from now. His body will lie at the front steps of our building. His dreadlocks will splay across concrete. Another makeshift altar erected at the lamppost on the corner: candles, silk flowers, laminated pictures, empty liquor bottles. But for today, Al Green’s falsetto wafts across the street, as the blue faces of cornflowers overwhelm the empty lot where a building once burned, as August clutches us to her chest, leaving us slick with possibility.
0 notes
How to Draw a Perfect Circle, by Terrance Hayes (2014)
I can imitate the spheres of the model’s body, her head,
Her mouth, the chin she rests at the bend of her elbow
But nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiral
From her gaze. Everything the eye sees enters a circle,
The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrils
And any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circle
Is a circle, the egg fallen outside the nest the serpent circles
Rests in the serpent’s gaze the way my gaze rests on the model.
In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subject
Without observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connected
By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake
Swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself,
A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman.
To draw the model’s nipples I have to let myself be carried away.
I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curves
As there are jewels of matrimony, as many whirls as there are teeth
In the mouth of the future: the mute pearls a bride wears to her wedding,
The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel.
The doors of the subway car imitate an O opening and closing,
In the blood the O spirals its helix of defects, genetic shadows,
But there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy.
When one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the face
And the cop, bleeding from his eye, kills the assailant, no one traveling
To the subway sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone witness.
The scene must be carried on the tongue, it must be carried
On the news into the future where it will distract the eyes working
Lines into paper. This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me.
At the center of God looms an O, the devil believes justice is shaped
Like a zero, a militant helmet or war drum, a fist or gun barrel,
A barrel of ruined eggs or skulls. To lift anything from a field
The lifter bends like a broken O. The weight of the body
Lowered into a hole can make anyone say Oh: the onlookers,
The mother, the brothers and sisters. Omen begins with an O.
When I looked into my past I saw the boy I had not seen in years
Do a standing backflip so daring the onlookers called him crazy.
I did not see a moon as white as an onion but I saw a paper plate
Upon which the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat.
An assailant is a man with history. His mother struggles
To cut an onion preparing a meal to be served after the funeral.
The onion is the best symbol of the O. Sliced, a volatile gas stings
The slicer’s eyes like a punishment clouding them until they see
What someone trapped beneath a lid of water sees:
A soft-edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat.
The onion is pungent, its scent infects the air with sadness,
All the pallbearers smell it. The mourners watch each other,
They watch the pastor’s ambivalence, they wait for the doors to open,
They wait for the appearance of the wounded one-eyed victim
And his advocates, strangers who do not consider the assailant’s funeral
Appeasement. Before that day the officer had never fired his gun
In the line of duty. He was chatting with a cabdriver
Beneath the tracks when my cousin circled him holding a knife.
The wound caused no brain damage though his eyeball was severed.
I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps. In the Odyssey
Pink water descends the Cyclops’s cratered face after Odysseus
Drives a burning log into it. Anyone could do it. Anyone could
Begin the day with his eyes and end it blind or deceased,
Anyone could lose his mind or his vision. When I go crazy
I am afraid I will walk the streets naked, I am afraid I will shout
Every fucked up thing that troubles or enchants me, I will try to murder
Or make love to everybody before the police handcuff or murder me.
Though the bullet exits a perfect hole it does not leave perfect holes
In the body. A wound is a cell and portal. Without it the blood runs
With no outlet. It is possible to draw handcuffs using loops
Shaped like the symbol for infinity, from the Latin infinitas
Meaning unboundedness. The way you get to anything
Is context. In a blind contour it is not possible to give your subject
A disconnected gaze. Separated from the hand the artist’s eye
Begins its own journey. It could have been the same for the Cyclops,
A giant whose gouged eye socket was so large a whole onion
Could fit into it. Separated from the body the eye begins
Its own journey. The world comes full circle: the hours, the harvests,
When the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposed
It becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything: blemish, cell,
Womb, parts of the body no one can see. I watched the model
Pull a button loose on her jeans and step out of them
As one might out of a hole in a blue valley, a sea. I found myself
In the dark, I found myself entering her body like a delicate shell
Or soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips.
You must look without looking to make the perfect circle.
The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquid
Until the drawing is complete.
2 notes
·
View notes
Boy Breaking Glass by Gwendolyn Brooks (1987)
To Marc Crawford
from whom the commission
Whose broken window is a cry of art
(success, that winks aware
as elegance, as a treasonable faith)
is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première.
Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.
Our barbarous and metal little man.
“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
If not an overture, a desecration.”
Full of pepper and light
and Salt and night and cargoes.
“Don’t go down the plank
if you see there’s no extension.
Each to his grief, each to
his loneliness and fidgety revenge.
Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.”
The only sanity is a cup of tea.
The music is in minors.
Each one other
is having different weather.
“It was you, it was you who threw away my name!
And this is everything I have for me.”
Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,
the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,
runs. A sloppy amalgamation.
A mistake.
A cliff.
A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.
0 notes
The Best Nightmares by Pat Parker
In English Lit.
they told me
Kafka was good
because he created
the best nightmares ever.
I think I should
go find that professor
& ask why
we didn’t study
the S.F. Police Dept.
1 note
·
View note
Power by Audre Lorde
The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles
and my stomach
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.
A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and
there are tapes to prove it. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
“I didn't notice the size nor nothing else
only the color”. And
there are tapes to prove that, too.
Today that 37 year old white man
with 13 years of police forcing
was set free
by eleven white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one Black Woman who said
“They convinced me” meaning
they had dragged her 4'10'' black Woman's frame
over the hot coals
of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go
the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.
I have not been able to touch the destruction
within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85 year old white woman
who is somebody's mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time
“Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”
2 notes
·
View notes