Let's read some more random poetry...
by Chard deNiord / 2021
I was in awe of them, the way they stood
in the shadow of the door and sipped their wine.
The way they laughed and cried.
I watched a Cessna hum across the sky
as something that was there for a while
in the form of pure idea, as something
that would burn one day like straw.
by Cameron Barnett / 2021
My love mentions that people see stars best
from the corners of their eyes, that cones
catch color in the centers, but it’s the rods
on the outsides that fetch the dimmest portions
of the visible spectrum—and I am forced
to reconcile with the fact that something so round
as vision still pushes people into corners
like those I drive by in the hood, and wonder:
if spacetime had bent me a different path
I could be a man or a mural on some concrete
patch like these, and that either way I’d be
painted away eventually. I’m forced to consider
a future son, half white, and whether or not
to ever call him my nigga; that if I ever did,
something somewhere between us might break
jagged forever, push us to the other sides
of rooms, a hypotenuse of hypotheticals
always between us. I’m forced to consider
my child’s heart like a comma, caught up in clauses,
murmuring a steady syntax the way a ghost
drags its lips over everything unspoken
caught in its chest, a soul full of expectations
never met; I’m reconciling how black and white
the edges of most things are, the steady strain
of looking into every corner of the sky and never
finding a black constellation—already knowing
the brilliance of stars is a billion years
worth of old news; to reconcile with my friend
confessing he never expected to make it past
eighteen, and I don’t know what’s harder to believe:
his confession or the doctorate diploma he thumbs
on the corner of his thirties—
to reconcile with the elderly who hear my poems
and come to me, stumbling their way towards
I don’t see color—and I can’t tell if it’s glaucoma
or Glaucon sitting in the center of their lenses,
spinning the ring of Gyges on his finger; and
their mouths like a heart pulsing so petulantly
I take their hand to my chest, tap out a sweet staccato:
Do you see me? Shut your eyes—I am either side
of that which blinds you.
by Jane Hirshfield / Unknown year of publishing
Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.
Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.
Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.
Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.
Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.
Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.
by Margaret Walker / 2021
My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weaned in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf, mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know me.
Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong with the smell of fresh pine, with the trail of coon, and the spring growth of wild onion.
I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam-heated flats with the music of El and subway in my ears, walled in by steel and wood and brick far from the sky.
I want the cotton fields, tobacco and the cane. I want to walk along with sacks of seed to drop in fallow ground. Restless music is in my heart and I am eager to be gone.
O Southland, sorrow home, melody beating in my bone and blood! How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and the chain gangs keep me from my own?
by Staceyann Chin / 2021
Downtown Brooklyn is easy for me
long sheer skirts do little to hide my open legged stride
see-through button-down sleeveless blouses hug my bodice
so tight my nipples are barely concealed
by the carefully chosen push-up bra from Macy's
see, I'm a femme
a real lipstick lesbian
so I can pass—
smelling like a straight girl in my Victoria's Secret
satin panties pressing against the men who walk alongside me
passing—the way my yellow-skinned grandmother passed
as white women sat in judgment
on planation stools overlooking fields
of cotton and sugarcane sweetened by gallons
of Black blood and sweat running down thick
between the full breasts of the women
who lay still as blue-eyed men pierced their hearts deep
through the folds joining their legs
it's Jay Street-Borough Hall
and my friend is in trouble
someone takes the time to notice
that the young boy is really a young girl
and the red, white, and blue jacket is not enough
to cover the tattoo on her belly
two naked women wrapped around each other
like pretzels that came out different from the rest
it takes two minutes for them to break two ribs
one for her lover who passes all the time
the other she keeps for herself
and as those bones set
her sorrow breaks wide open
because she knows SHE can never pass
she knows that butch bodies are too strong
too strange, too dark
like those bronze bodies that smell
too thickly of rebellions and revolutions
and we know that revolutions take time
and sacrifice and lives to turn this world around
sometimes it makes me angry
that they think I look like them
so they can convince themselves I am okay
but I hasten to show them the tangled wool between my thighs
and I am quick to remind them
that the funk from me only rises
when my woman touches me
that I can only come
when she calls my name
we need to let them know
we do not wish to pass as semi-white
or almost straight
or nearly normal
so we can hold down corporate jobs
stroking narrow-minded dicks
so we can be invited to family dinners
to disown our brothers and sisters who cannot pass
who will not pass
we must let them know
that after the broken bones have healed
that we will still be here
that along after the bruised hearts have ceased to hurt
we will still be here and long,
long after our mothers no longer weep
we will still be here
still gay
still Black
still survivors in the face of this blatant bigotry
that will one day force us to lace arms and strike back