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?
Sensationalism
Posted by Alysia Harris | Filed under Poetry, Print
A shower laced
coaxed me into
its blunt
and I cannot argue.
I am filthy with a weeks
worth of myself, whomever.
Maybe now, maybe soon,
tomorrow but the past is no fiction.
Editorials of dirt
publish from my back
stories scurry and
drain
as I think,
“I am no intellectual.
I cannot think and
write.
Only feel. There is nothing rational
the way I scratch my
thigh for blood.”
I grabbed the body wash with glowing silver
specks marketed to
housewives all of
them as
glamorous as Tuesday.
Idea of it on my hands,
I scrub.
Skin cries shivers.
This is what its like to
be done with it.
I think, I feel.
I left my jewelry on, trying to prove
a point.
My ring
eager for the floor tried Virginia suicide
but I stopped it with my foot.
I wished all silvers could be stopped by a foot.
Not all can. Not hope
not time.
Maybe hope.
I stand there till pickled,
the bitter
smack of rag
and wash convincing my arms
the world never used me.
Fashion Update
Posted by Alysia Harris | Filed under Announcements
You know, not everything is poems, mic tricks, and sad love stories with us. We like other things as well, such as fly kicks and fresh hoodies. Sooo on the fresh hoody tip, I just got the dopest, sickest, illest hoodie EVER. I would say the designer just technicolor dookied all over this thing… only it’s black and white. Find me on the streets of Philadelphia and you will understand. The designer is called Custo Barcelona. Check it out. and Check me out!! Holla.
New York New York, That Wide Penetrable
Posted by Alysia Harris | Filed under Poetry, Print
Few things are more beautiful than watching the city
open up before you- a constructed
pearl in oyster dark.
It does not snake, like most cities
thickening
and thinning, emboldened by a sudden dip/ sink in the landscape
Gotham asserts its trauma on the skyline. Unapologetic
a child striking an immense and wonderous piñata till it caves.
This weekend, we thumped to electro pop, spiked the sprite
and gorged fast food in fast cabs driven by taxi drivers
with laughing black tongues.
To be young and scale 4 flights of stairs older than our mother’s mothers
press wildly into the arms of expensive sheets,
rest in the thought of my thighs.
We strolled in the finest of November light,
admired street artists
and purchased foreign fruits in the markets of Chinatown.
We were underdressed amongst her groupies and
thus remained uncompromised;
holding hands as the hours fanned into color panels and sound.
Then we went home, claiming the itis, to the same sheets
as the night before.
Writhed for awhile. Did not struggle with our honest bodies.
Watched porn with subtitles and felt cosmopolitan.
I claimed I was disturbed.
Secretly, I was wet.
What is it about this city
that turns us all into such eager sluts
such willing experiments.
