Irony in Retrospect
Posted by Lauren Yates | Filed under Poetry, Print
When I was a little girl, I said to my grandfather:
“I know my mind isn’t ripe yet, but can we copyright it anyway?
Someday my ideas will be good enough to steal.”
Parade
Posted by Alysia Harris | Filed under Poetry, Print
…counts old money its years in rooms and imported price
no future/slave in sight…
Separating sea and segregation is a thin
diet of road
where during the day I guarantee
each house sits
bloated, white wedding dress.
Longed after but not
touched the houses
crystallize.
And the afternoon, inside an iron
maiden, sobs its age.
Time changes sex.
And when night
is at its most masculine,
stroking its mountain beard
full of star lice,
the antebellum guards stand
watch, platoons of porches
stifling laugh lines
in their floor boards.
For you, love and slavery are the same beautiful.
Only a virgin’s imagination has dreamt the sordid adulteries
spreading hand to mouth
in the spaces
between a light switch.
[What an Old Southern trick! Secrets sausaged between who we are
and what we’ve done.
Secrets only
the help can whisper ]
In my cab, a man with powdered sugar English
shows me the southern hospitality only middle easterners know.
He hears in my voice a twinge of distain for the Anglicized
name he slave-labors in. Mansur,
I too know the sound of
distance. He sees draped
around my neck
the rags of my best friend
and Home [previously unwelcome] bullies its way through his throat traffic.
“You speak Arabic?”
“You are my family.”
I think Home few times in life.
But to call today familiar
would be too white of a lie.
It is mine.
Down to the hopeless toes, five peninsulas praying to God-rock.
It is mine.
Every confederate-refugee-thick-tongued-lowland-skin-covered inch of it.
It is mine the way
baby teeth were
mine… an interesting word for possession.
They mined the banks of the river
all the way to the Big House
looking for their bones.
A fortune
promised in the break.
…Swamp seek
Knee deep
Air boat
Lynch rope…
And somewhere
nearly far
enough away
people are spoons, salvaging the nothingness
and serving it over rice.
Everyone is a hunger
pain’s earthquake further from whole
closer to gaps with
another beginning to stomach ache.
Another land before time
that could have been mine and was almost
theirs
but today is standing in its aftershock
philosophizing over rubble.
One Home
3 generations still digging underneath it.
Betting everything on the dog fight between poverty and pride.
I overheard them
talking triggers and Patois
in kitchens, stranding
history
on the gutter islands of our palettes.
Je ne sais pas le mot pour la mienne.
Is it a presidential palace
dipping against
the skyline, looking nothing like a tango?
Mish arfa al kalima lii baytii, lii 3latii.
Is it the skinny neck of a desert, guillotined between
some people and no place?
Is it swamps and Spanish moss with Corinthian capitals whispering about wealth?
Is it strip malls so suburban it’s sickening?
I’ve walked in rooms black women were raped in.
Then went shopping.
I don’t know the word for home.
Is it anything
close to bastard?
