BEAST BENT ON GRACE

black trans 90s cartoon character here sharing poems i love for as long as i can get away with it

[beastbent]

I Could Touch It, by Ellen Bass (2018)

When my wife was breaking apart, my son was falling in love.

She lay on the couch with a heated sack of rice on her belly, sometimes dozing, sometimes staring out the window at the olive tree

as it broke into tiny white blossoms, as it swelled into bitter black fruit.

At first, I wanted to spare him. I wished he was still farming up north, tucking bulbs of green onions into their beds and watering the lettuce, his hands gritty, his head haloed in a straw hat.

But as the months deepened, I grew selfish.

I wanted him here with his new love. When I passed the open bathroom door, I wanted to see them brushing their teeth,

one perched on the toilet lid, one on the side of the tub, laughing and talking through their foamy mouths, toothbrushes rattling against their teeth.

Like sage gives its scent when you crush it. Like stone is hard. They were happy and I could touch it.

[Published in Poetry, 2018]

[beastbent]

Push the Week, by Jackie Kay (2017)

(for P.) If I had cash, I could get some cassava gari Down Great Western Road, shop in Solly’s And make some sukuma wiki, stretch the week. But this card don’t buy me African food Or let me shop in Marie Curie (although they have nice things in there). Only in the Salvation Army Store. (Where the clothes are a bit of a bore.) You think just because you’re an asylum seeker You don’t care what you wear? And from eating the wrong food, my stomach’s sore. If I didn’t just have this card to use I would buy some maize meal flour, avocado, yam. If my mother was here she would say: That woman is not my daughter. If I had cash I could buy some corn pones, Dried fish, beef . . . curried mung beans . . . Kachumbari, my God, how I wish! Expand the chest. My spirits would lift, eh? Ugali would make me less depressed! Not so homesick. Nyama Choma. No cash for cane row, no Makimo, For monthlies, for sweet potato. The week repeats. We are scattered families. Now it’s HIV. No TV. Just CCTV — watching me. Non-stop scrutiny. Anyone shouts Asylum Seeker Bash them with your saucepan. Man Stealer! (I have yet to see one to write home about)! Cassava! In your imagination, you have new friends to dinner. You picture a cooker. A table. You light a candle. You shine some cutlery. You see your face in it. And you say Stick in till you stick oot, and you say, Help yourself. Go ahead. Have some chapati, mbazi, gari. Here’s what we eat in my country. You see.

Re-published on The Slow Down (2019)

[beastbent]

Black Frasier Crane, by Rio Cortez (2022)

As lonely in her overthinking and as forgiven Black Frasier Crane is a woman in a multi- generational household with more than enough square feet

Black Frasier has a small staff but she treats them “like family”; she has a soothing radio voice and reserved parking at both her condo and the office

Black Frasier complains about little everythings because what is more important than the fine dusting of cinnamon on the perfect ratio of foam to espresso except the knowing that you and only you have the sense to complain

And who else could understand but a sister two Black Cranes in custom Italian suits joking about Freud: Isn’t this the hardest work? To be happy

when you already have everything to have so much you give some up not away but to the beast in you that just takes and takes until there are no more brûlées and no more canapés just the mind’s endless narration

[Published & recorded in The New Yorker, 2022]

[beastbent]

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]

[beastbent]

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]

[beastbent]

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.

[beastbent]

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.

[beastbent]

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.

[beastbent]

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.

[beastbent]

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.

[beastbent]

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.

[beastbent]

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.

[beastbent]

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.”