Black History Month, Poetry Thursday (a day late)

 Carnivorous, with a varied and opportunistic diet

~Daria-Ann Martineau

Call me lagahoo, soucouyant. Call me other.

I came ravenous: mongoose consuming

fresh landscapes until I made myself

new species of the Indies.

Christen me how you wish, my muzzle

matted with blood of fresh invertebrates.

I disappear your problems

without thought to consequence.

Call me Obeah. Watch me cut

through cane, chase

sugar-hungry rats. Giggling

at mating season, I grow fat

multiples, litters thick as tropic air.

Don’t you find me beautiful? My soft animal

features, this body streamlined ruthless,

claws that won’t retract. You desire them.

You never ask me what I want. I take

your chickens, your iguana,

you watch me and wonder

when you will be outnumbered.

My offspring stalking your village,

ecosystems uprooted, roosts

swallowed whole.

I am not native. Not domesticated.

I am naturalized, resistant

to snake venoms, your colony’s toxins—

everything you brought me to,

this land. I chew and spit back

reptile and bird bone

prophecy strewn across stones.

Copyright © 2020 by Daria-Ann Martineau. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 2, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Black History Month, back posting

 Benediction
~Georgia Douglas Johnson 

Go forth, my son,
Winged by my heart’s desire!
Great reaches, yet unknown,
Await
For your possession.
I may not, if I would,
Retrace the way with you,
My pilgrimage is through,
But life is calling you!
Fare high and far, my son,
A new day has begun,
Thy star-ways must be won!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 6, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Black History Month, back posting

 My People
~Langston Hughes

Dream-singers,
Story-tellers,
Dancers,
Loud laughers in the hands of Fate—
           My People.
Dish-washers,
Elevator-boys,
Ladies’ maids,
Crap-shooters,
Cooks,
Waiters,
Jazzers,
Nurses of babies,
Loaders of ships,
Porters,
Hairdressers,
Comedians in vaudeville
And band-men in circuses—
Dream-singers all,
Story-tellers all.
Dancers—
God! What dancers!
Singers—
God! What singers!
Singers and dancers,
Dancers and laughers.
Laughers?
Yes, laughers….laughers…..laughers—
Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands of Fate.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 20, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Black History Month, back posting

 The Sun Went Down in Beauty
~George Marion McClellan

The sun went down in beauty
    Beyond the Mississippi side,
As I stood on the banks of the river
    And watched its waters glide;
Its swelling currents resembling
    The longing restless soul,
Surging, swelling, and pursuing
    Its ever receding goal.

The sun went down in beauty,
    But the restless tide flowed on,
And the phantom of absent loved ones
    Danced on the waves and were gone;
Fleeting phantoms of loved ones,
    Their faces jubilant with glee,
In the spray seemed to rise and beckon,
    And then rush on to the sea.

The sun went down in beauty,
    While I stood musing alone,
Stood watching the rushing river
    And heard its restless moan;
Longings, vague, intenable,
    So far from speech apart,
Like the endless rush of the river,
    Went surging through my heart.

The sun went down in beauty,
    Peacefully sank to rest,
Leaving its golden reflection
    On the great Mississippi’s breast;
Gleaming on the turbulent river,
    In the coming gray twilight,
Soothing its restless surging,
    And kissing its waters goodnight.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 4, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Black History Month, back posting

Sunshine After Cloud
~Josephine D. Heard

Come, “Will,” let’s be good friends again, 
     Our wrongs let’s be forgetting, 
For words bring only useless pain, 
     So wherefore then be fretting. 

Let’s lay aside imagined wrongs, 
    And ne’er give way to grieving,
Life should be filled with joyous songs, 
    No time left for deceiving. 

I’ll try and not give way to wrath, 
    Nor be so often crying; 
There must some thorns be in our path, 
    Let’s move them now by trying. 

How, like a foolish pair were we, 
    To fume about a letter; 
Time is so precious, you and me; 
    Must spend ours doing better. 

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 6, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets. 

Black History Month, Poetry Edition, I'm behind...

 [th(e)reat] → siege engine

~Trace Howard DePass

                                in my own body ← here i am a siege

                                overthrowing a home where no one lives

                                but me. i’m too big for my too big head

                                too barely anything for want, my love

                                built me from a nail in the wall galloped

                                to meet the socks on the floor → now a hole

                                in the wall i would peek thru & run some

                                cable thru so we all could watch cable.

                   now, there’s a good amount of good reasons

                   why no one lives here, no one lives with me.

                   my cat even tries to leave. he jumps out

                   the window, off the roof, & waits for me

                   to catch him with the neighbors. & i too

                   trynna be beautiful & loved this way.

i  ←  suppose: perching for life to begin

is this flatline moving me, failed, forward,

feathered closer to grace each time; going

mother after mother i wake up as

a dove picking lilies from her black i

suppose i love so i know i ain’t know

                brevity without withholding a breath  ←

                loved those flying ants,  infiltrating  thru  all  fronts’

                doors til i (w)as a room entered watching

                for  bites tender thicker  than all-time’s

                to consume ← consistency dragged → this long

                makes me  wanna bite bird feet  ← too   baby

                cat  i love you too,...   ache in my bones you

                remind me of  what is it(?) to be  picked ←

Copyright © 2020 by Trace Howard DePass. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 19, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Black History Month, back posting

 Legacy
~Rhonda M. Ward

Now and then the phone will ring and it will be
someone from my youth. The voice of a favorite cousin
stretched across many miles sounding exactly as she always has:
that trained concentration of one who stutters—
the slight hesitations, the drawn-out syllables,
the occasional lapse into a stammer.

When asked, she says my aunt is well for her age but
she forgets. I remember the last time I saw my aunt—
leaning on her cane, skin smooth as river rock,
mahogany brown, gray hair braided into two plaits
stretched atop her head and held in place
with black bobby pins.

She called to say James Lee has died. And did I know
Aunt Mary, who had four crippled children
and went blind after uncle Benny died, died last year?

I did not.

We wander back awhile, reminding and remembering:

Me under the streetlight outside our front yard
face buried in the crook of my arm held close
to the telephone pole as I closed my eyes and sang the words:
Last night, night before, twenty-four robbers at my door
I got up to let them in... hit ‘em in the head with a rolling pin,
then counted up to ten while they ran and hid.

Visiting the graves of grandparents I never knew.
Placing blush-pink peonies my father grew and cut
for the occasion into mason jars. Saying nothing.
Simply staring at the way our lives come down
to a concrete slab.

Copyright © 2020 by Rhonda M. Ward. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 4, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

they say, I hear...

 They take advantage of my strength.

So sure are they that I will always bend and never break

So sure are they that I have infinite capacity to give, they take and take and take.

Even better, they criticize what I give. If only you...

I learned the hard way that I have to stand up for myself.

But when I do, I get labeled the asshole.

Ok, I'm an asshole.

Now what?

The truth is I cannot bend anymore.

I am at the breaking point, and they are still arguing about whether or not I gave enough, or in the right way, or if it doesn't matter because I wasn't smiling while I did it.

ok.

-------------------

Just be happy.

You can choose to just be happy.

Subtext: you're doing it wrong.

Ok, maybe that's not what they meant, but I am here to tell you, that's what I heard.

You see someone exhausted from life

What do you do?

Offer some more things that person should do

Offer a platitude, tomorrow is another day

You don't want to know what I think when I hear that.

-------------------

Shattered.

Broken into a million pieces.

No strength left to pick up each piece and try to fit it together - even if making a new picture is the only way out of the darkness.

Exhausted. Overwhelmed. Done.

I am not just frustrated, I'm tired of trying to make it all work.

This broken clock is not even right twice a day.

And, finally, when I feel like I cannot go on one more day, you care, kind of... 

I am only worthy of compassion or empathy if I am a pool of water on the floor

or a glass shattered beyond repair.

You could have listened any of the million times I told you explicitly or implicitly that I was drowning.

But you waited until I could not go on to demand that I must.

And I am supposed to be what? grateful?

I'm not, but I am an asshole, so it is not surprising.

Black History Month, back posting

 YOUR BRAIN IS NOT A PRISON!
~Sasha Debevec-McKenney

A prison is the only place that’s a prison.
Maybe your brain is a beehive—or, better:
an ants nest? A spin class?
The sand stuck in an hourglass? Your brain is like
stop it. So you practice driving with your knees,
you get all the way out to the complex of Little League fields,
you get chicken fingers with four kinds of mustard—
spicy, whole grain, Dijon, yellow—
you walk from field to field, you watch yourself
play every position, you circle each identical game,
each predictable outcome. On one field you catch.
On one field you pitch. You are center field. You are left.
Sometimes you have steady hands and French braids.
Sometimes you slide too hard into second on purpose.
It feels as good to get the bloody knee as it does to kick yourself in the shin.
You wait for the bottom of the ninth to lay your blanket out in the sun.
Admit it, Sasha, the sun helps. Today,
the red team hits the home run. Red floods every field.
A wasp lands on your thigh. You know this feeling.

Copyright © 2020 by Sasha Debevec-McKenney. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 26, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Black History Month, day 1, back posting

 Denial is a Cliff We Are Driven Over
~Joy Priest

I want to believe Don West
when he writes: none of mine

ever made their living by driving slaves.
But in my grandfather’s mouth that utterance

would’ve taken on another meaning:
In the memory my mother shares,

he is flitting across Louisville
in his taxi, passing back-and-forth

like a cardinal, red-faced, proud-breasted,
delivering Black folks their dry cleaning—

had to, she tells me, as part of his route—
but once he started his second shift and turned

on the cab light, he wouldn’t accept
Black fare. I recall him reciting

the early presidents’
racist pseudoscience—American

at its liver—to rationalize his hatred
of my father, his denial

of my Blackness. That denial a peril
I survived, a cliff he could have driven me over

at any moment of my childhood. Maybe,
I want to think, because they were poor men

who labored, farmed tobacco and dug for oil,
my grandfather’s people resisted

slavery, felt a kinship with my father’s people.
Or that because my grandfather

was one of eleven mouths to feed
on their homestead—reduced to dirt

across the Great Depression—
he had a white identity to be proud of, a legacy

that didn’t join our names
in a bill of sale, but in struggle.

I search his surname and it travels
back to Germany, appears

on the deed to the house he inherited,
retired and died in, poor-white resentment

inflaming his stomach and liver.
But when I search the name I share with my father,

my only inheritance                      disappears
into the 19th century, sixth generation:

my ancestor bred
to produce 248 offspring

for his owner, from whence comes
our family name. Mr. West, here

we are different. Here, is where
my grandfather found his love for me discordant

as the voice of the dead whispering
history. Here is where we are connected,

not by class, but blood & slavery.

Copyright © 2020 by Joy Priest. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 28, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, de virgenes y iguanas

Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas
~Brenda Cárdenas

      (after Graciela Iturbide’s 1979 photograph)

My warm morning skin bristles
in the jungle hut’s frigid shower

as shrill chirps trill
off my inner ear’s high-hat.

What tropical bird lurks
outside this screen-less window?

I imagine lime green wings,
a feathered turquoise face,

but when its squeak rattles
into a hiss that creeps

behind me like a shadow, I turn
to stare straight into the onyx

eye of an iguana, iridescent
crown gleaming down

on my miserable wet head, tail
coiling the shower pole, tongue reach-

ing for my splashed shoulder.
I slink back, leave dirt in the bends

of elbows and knees, relinquish
a chance to feel eyes licked

into the back of my head. I am not
la Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas

donning her Zapotec headdress
of protruding limbs about to leap,

folded faces, triple chins. Not
Iturbide’s pebble squint refusing to blink

as it latches onto the queen of Juchitán
so far away, yet so near to where I stand

dripping on this poured concrete floor.

Copyright © 2020 by Brenda Cárdenas. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 7, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Not Poetry Thursday, For Chila

When I Am a Hummingbird
 ~Alan Michael Parker

I love two dogs, even when they’re killing
a baby possum near the columbines,
shaking the varmint
until the death squeal chokes to a gargle,

and both dogs stand before the bloody marsupial
nosing it to move,

because that’s Nature, right?
(And whom did I just ask whether that was right?)
(And what’s a moral quandary for a possum?)

I love the dog who leans,
matter-of-fact in her need,
and the big smile of the small Pit Bull.

But when I am a hummingbird, finally,
I will beat my wings
eighty times per second,

thousands of seconds
and eighty thousands and thousands

of my splendiferous beating wings,
faster than all of the eighty thousand
beautiful things in the world,

and no one will stop me or catch me
or take my picture, I will be too fast,

and I will dive into the meat
of the possum
and beat there,
the mean, bloody thing alive again.

Copyright © 2019 Alan Michael Parker. Used with permission of the author.

On War and Lives Lost for Veterans Day, Not Poetry Thursday

On Receiving the First News of the War
 ~Isaac Rosenberg

Snow is a strange white word;
No ice or frost
Has asked of bud or bird
For Winter’s cost.

Yet ice and frost and snow
From earth to sky
This Summer land doth know;
No man knows why.

In all men’s hearts it is:
Some spirit old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould.

Red fangs have torn His face,
God’s blood is shed:
He mourns from His lone place
His children dead.

O ancient crimson curse!
Corrode, consume;
Give back this universe
Its pristine bloom.
 
This poem is in the public domain.

Poetry Thursday - for Tim and my mom and their promesa

When I Became La Promesa
~Peggy Robles–Alvarado

For every unexpected illness that required medical insurance,
every second-trimester miscarriage, every chaos unemployment
caused, every looming eviction, every arrest warrant gone
unanswered, the women in my family made promesas to plaster
cast statues worshipped in overcrowded apartments with rum
poured over linoleum, nine-day candles coughing black soot
until the wick surrendered, Florida water perfuming doorways
and the backs of necks.

Promesas: barters/contracts with a God they didn’t vow to
change for but always appeased/ bowls of fruit/ paper bags filled
with coconut candy and caserolas de ajiaco/ left at busy intersections,
an oak tree in High bridge park, the doorway of the 34th precinct,
and when mar pacifico and rompe saraguey refused to grow on
Washington Heights windowsills, the youngest became part of
the trade.

Unsullied and unaware: cousin Mari pissed about having to dress
in green and red for twenty-one days to keep Tío Pablo out of jail/
Luisito scratching at an anklet made of braided corn silk to help
Tía Lorna find a new job/ and my hair not to be cut until Papi’s
tumor was removed.

Gathered in tight buns or sectioned pigtails, falling long past my
waist when asymmetrical bobs were in fashion, unaware my crown
had the necessary coercion to dislodge a mass from a colon, I grabbed
my older brother’s clippers, ran thirsty blades across my right temple
to the back of my ear, massaged the softness that emerged as strands
surrendered on bathroom tiles. My desire to mimic freestyle icons,
whose albums my cousins and I scratched on old record players,
wagered against Papi’s large intestine.

My unsteady hand: a fist
in the face of God.

Copyright © 2020 by Peggy Robles–Alvarado. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 6, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Not Poetry Thursday, Mary Oliver's Wild Geese - because we all need this reminder

Wild Geese
~Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I have been moved to tears over the simplest things for the past few weeks - and it is mostly because I am carrying so much for myself and others right now. Not to say that they tears were not appropriate ... but I haven't been allowing myself to feel my own pain, so it spills out when I see that of others.

I do not have to be good or walk on my knees -- or hold in my pain. 

Neither do you.

Wishing you space to feel all the feelings in safety.

Poetry Thursday, Self care and boundaries are hard...

Time-Lapse Video of Trans Woman Collapsing Inward Like a Dying Star
~Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

I beg for invisible fire.

Every night I pray to love,
please invent yourself.

I imagine a place after this place
and I laugh quietly to no one
as the hair on my chin
weeds through old makeup.

When I go to sleep
I am vinegar inside clouded glass.
The world comes to an end
when I wake up and wonder
who will be next to me.

Police sirens and coyote howls
blend together in morning’s net.
Once, I walked out past the cars
and stood on a natural rock formation
that seemed placed there to be stood on.
I felt something like kinship.
It was the first time.

Once, I believed god
was a blanket of energy
stretched out around
our most vulnerable
places,

when really,

she’s the sound
of a promise
breaking

Copyright © 2020 by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 14, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

“Many of my poems involve figures who are desperately attempting to invent a means of survival under conditions that seem determined to prevent them from surviving. This poem is concerned with what happens when performing the daily magic of saving oneself becomes too tiring, so that the only remaining option is to scream out the pain, loneliness, and desperation, and allow the collapse to happen. This is a cry for help, one that enacts, through its own existence, proof of self-love and a desire to keep living, despite everything.”

—Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Poetry Thursday, Hispanic Heritage Month

Legend
~Helena Mesa

During the war, women hid messages
   inside white flowers
tucked in their hair. They crossed
   enemy lines, slipped the blossoms
into soldiers’ fists. What might
   have been a child’s crown
for her communion, an offering
   at a grave, might win the war.
The ovule, the style, the stigma—
   what seemed to unfurl overnight
took weeks, even years.
   Dream your hand plucks the bloom,
its widest petals like porcelain,
   and a halo of bees skims your arms.
Upon waking, walk to the docks,
   the bloom heavy behind your ear,
and breathe in its sweet persistence,
   its scent of sea salt and gutted fish.

Copyright © 2019 by Helena Mesa. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 9, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

We need more poetry - and I have been AWOL, not Poetry Thursday, Hispanic Heritage Month edition

 Nó, Actually, Soy Salvadoreño
~Javier Zamora

“EL Sal-va-doh-RE-AN Salva-doh-RAN, Salva-DOH-RÍ-an,”
los mui-muis, we don’t even know what
to call ourselves. How to eat
a pupusa: ¿fork & knife? or
¿open it up & treat it like a taco? but
then, we’re betraying our nationalistic (read:
anti-black, anti-indigenous) impulse
to not mix with anyone else. ¿& what’s
with jalapeños in the curtido,
cipotes? ¿With using spicy “salsa”
instead of salsa de tomate? There’s too many
“restaurantes,” one side of the menu: Mexican,
the other, platos típicos. Typically
I want to order the ensalada, but then
they bring me an actual salad.
I say: cóman miercoles, they
want to charge me extra for harina de arroz. Extra
por los nueagados. There’s
nowhere I’d rather be most
than in Abuelita’s kitchen, watching her
throw bay leaves, tomatoes, garlic, orégano
into the blender, then chicharrón,
helping her sell to everyone that knows
she made the best pupusas
from 1985 to 2004. By then,
Salvadoreños became “Hermanos Lejanos,”
we traded Colón for Washingtón. By then,
Los Hermanos Flores looked for new singers
every time they returned from Los Yunaited
to San Salvador. Stay, no se vayan,
es-tei, no sean dundos, was all
those Salvadoreños could say.
We didn’t listen & came here
only to be called Mexican or Puerto Rican,
depending on the coast. We had to fight
for our better horchata, not
the lazy whiter one with only rice. & when
we didn’t want to fight
we tried to blend, speak more “Mexican,”
more ira, more popote, more
no pos guao. ¡Nó, majes!
¡No se me hagan dundos,
ponganse trucha vos!
When anyone wants to call you: Mexican.
You can just say: Nó,
actually, andáte a la M—
racista cara de nacionalista.

Copyright © 2020 by Javier Zamora. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 9, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Hispanic Heritage Month, on borders and maps and geography...

Maps
 ~Yesenia Montilla
For Marcelo

Some maps have blue borders
like the blue of your name
or the tributary lacing of
veins running through your
father’s hands. & how the last
time I saw you, you held
me for so long I saw whole
lifetimes flooding by me
small tentacles reaching
for both our faces. I wish
maps would be without
borders & that we belonged
to no one & to everyone
at once, what a world that
would be. Or not a world
maybe we would call it
something more intrinsic
like forgiving or something
simplistic like river or dirt.
& if I were to see you
tomorrow & everyone you
came from had disappeared
I would weep with you & drown
out any black lines that this
earth allowed us to give it—
because what is a map but
a useless prison? We are all
so lost & no naming of blank
spaces can save us. & what
is a map but the delusion of
safety? The line drawn is always
in the sand & folds on itself
before we’re done making it.
& that line, there, south of
el rio, how it dares to cover
up the bodies, as though we
would forget who died there
& for what? As if we could
forget that if you spin a globe
& stop it with your finger
you’ll land it on top of someone
living, someone who was not
expecting to be crushed by thirst—

Copyright © 2017 Yesenia Montilla. Used with permission of the author.

Poetry Thursday, Hispanic Heritage Month

This Moment / Right Now
 ~Roberto Carlos Garcia
                                 for Monica Hand

there’s a whispered prayer blowing
the crumbs of a season’s harvest
                 off a girl’s plate

& a roar breaks from her insides,
the roar a lioness
                 a beast that knows

& a man kneels somewhere
cupping his tears
                 for the loneliness he feels

though he’s surrounded by the world,
& a finch in a tree singing
                 for a lover as the buds on its branch

pop into leaves that will flourish
& welcome the green grasses,
                 Right now    a boy is wondering

if people can really dodge bullets
& is he one of them & somewhere nobody bothers
                 to ask, they simply wait

Wind spins across the landscape
they say God is twirling his fingers—

The heartbroken hook new bodies,
night after night, drink after drink

& I dance—my feet mashing grapes
for wine & I sing mockingly—
                 what is life / what is life

Copyright © 2017 Roberto Carlos Garcia. Used with permission of the author.