black poetry

for the darker community

[ofblackpoetry]

for Aunt Margaret my aunts type amen into comment sections because they have seen God work through even smaller gestures whole kingdoms planted in their backyards who knew a squash could say I love you an ocean’s floor of water will not save her husband’s favorite tomatoes when she picks them she tries not to think of his heart they got their gardens and a tree has never called them nigger

Tyree Daye, Green Thumbed (via Wildness)

[ofblackpoetry]

i thumb and twist the free coils of his hair, still stubborn steerage refusing my hands as pilot the bed is stubborn steerage or the hardest water bed ever slept in, he wants me to tell him his name, i tell him it doesn’t matter. not because i love him. no, we just met and are covered in 2(?) hours of sweat and i know his name. i am running away from his finger but to his command, like tomorrow’s massacre, return to it with conviction. no, no, no, really, it doesn’t matter what your name is.

jonathan jacob moore, one night stand with colorblind black (via the Shade Journal)

[ofblackpoetry]

Pandemic of lilies dreaming majesty hovers like sweat & unwraps you & you are in love it makes you bad, bad is your name is the desert is movement long kiss heavy gut slow slow hands in your seeds

Morgan Parker, <i>My Sister Says White Supremacy Is Turning Her Crazy</i> (via Poetry)

[ofblackpoetry]

after Baba Badji & francine j. harris It must be my lust for the musk of the master. Nights it finds me. In the knick between vertebrae, it flickers ambition to future inferno. It huffs at the door of my heat, my laundress humidity come loose and whipping the keyhole. I confess: sometimes I let it sorry white down the lumber. There’s the tick in my tailbone, a spasm of glut. It slobs out there a century, saying it won’t let itself happen again. And because I hold in me a clutch of grains I call a healthy self, because I’m flattered my blood can still beacon, I answer No but with my nose, my chin already steering the back arch. I sigh a neigh the wrong way like the end of a question coming. I can’t help anything limp across a bed of straw at times like these, though the cricket business beckons squarely through the backdoor screen— I can’t tell a courting from a fight song after all. Dang. See me knob inside my hips, dribble into sump more comfortable. Here it go: drape its whole hazy swole over the moonbreak backstroking floorboards, flush the light in the wink to a less sad elsewhere, jerk like a snout there. Lemme pretend I don’t let it in, the cornered vermin of my brain meat all sag and screech like a cot under coitus. Pretend I don’t still want its hand in me. Like the sleep isn’t different after my poppet mouth watermelons to the shack seams’ nursery-rhymed ache. Like this is just a dream, these nights it skunks down here and delayers me to the red velvet. It’s real stink on my lip when sun rivers in but otherwise hardly a trickle of. I’ve been thinking about— like a run in a stocking or mosquito through a mission of mesh— this tenant of my cockles, how its given me maybe a grief to run off at the mouth about, but then, when the blotches don’t diminish in the wash, I get to chatter-gnawing at the tail end of a slip to give it. I get to talking about running off as if there aren’t six feet between us.

Justin Phillip Reed, The Personal Animal (via The Boston Review)

[ofblackpoetry]

Coming home, I find you still in bed, but when I pull back the blanket, I see your stomach is flat as an iron. You’ve done it, as you warned me you would and left the fetus wrapped in wax paper for me to look at. My son. Woman, loving you no matter what you do, what can I say, except that I've heard the poor have no children, just small people and there is room only for one man in this house.

Ai, Abortion

[ofblackpoetry]

Once I wrote a poem larger than any man, even Jesus. So tall the furrow of hair couldn’t be tousled, feet large as lakes.  I titled it Personification so it would live, Godzilla in parenthesis so it would kill. There was blood.  Testicles lay in the streets like confetti post-parade.  I was glad: Diana after Actaeon’s own salivating pack consumed him— limb by limb licked, tendons trailing. I rode the shoulder of my poem, wanting to see their faces, none specific, all malevolent, calling out last moments in ridiculous language—love, affection, Tender, one screamed.  Not loudly enough and too late. I wore red paint, salvaging neither plated breast, nor firm mouth.  Not once was I tender. I wanted them wasted—him, him, him, him, him

CM Burroughs, “Raving: I”

[ofblackpoetry]

Before I return to that ruinous city of lonely smoke stacks, puffing rotton clouds against graysky, i catch you inside another woman, your coyote’s coat strewn on the floor, body of a hungry man, beautiful in every wrong way. I pull the revolver from my coat. Fire. Casings shatter before they hit the floor. I want to see what shred bullets can do to flesh, how they pierce and lodge hard in the bone. I am standing at your hollow door turning the key. There are two wet towels littered from the bathroom to the bedroom. I haven’t seen her face. Surrender your hands as your mouth bleats. Tell me it’s not what I thought. Not the confession you transmit from towers. Go ahead. Time it to the cylinder’s click click click. In the morning, everything burns. Hairs inside my nose, curled      and brittle darlings. Throat, after-clawed. Hands sweat- fresh and black with residue. A finch jangles a chime outside      my window. This bed will never know the rattle of pelvis against my wrist, my begging grip, what giving up looks      like, though I know I’ve already pulled the trigger.            Buried the gun in the snow.

Aricka Foreman, Dream With a Glass Chamber

[ofblackpoetry]

I killed a spider Not a murderous brown recluse Nor even a black widow And if the truth were told this Was only a small Sort of papery spider Who should have run When I picked up the book But she didn't And she scared me And I smashed her I don't think I'm allowed To kill something Because I am Frightened

Nikki Giovanni, Allowables

[ofblackpoetry]

They are like those crazy women who tore Orpheus when he refused to sing, these men grinding in the strobe & black lights of Pegasus. All shadow & sound. "I'm just here for the music," I tell the man who asks me to the floor. But I have held a boy on my back before. Curtis & I used to leap barefoot into the creek; dance among maggots & piss, beer bottles & tadpoles slippery as sperm; we used to pull off our shirts, & slap music into our skin. He wouldn't know me now at the edge of these lovers' gyre, glitter & steam, fire, bodies blurred sexless by the music's spinning light. A young man slips his thumb into the mouth of an old one, & I am not that far away. The whole scene raw & delicate as Curtis's foot gashed on a sunken bottle shard. They press hip to hip, each breathless as a boy carrying a friend on his back. The foot swelling green as the sewage in that creek. We never went back. But I remember his weight better than I remember my first kiss. These men know something I used to know. How could I not find them beautiful, the way they dive & spill into each other, the way the dance floor takes them, wet & holy in its mouth.

Terrance Hayes, At Pegasus

[ofblackpoetry]

dancing arum lily turned in his rich gold swathed mouth chewed and cursed among a company of friends who breathed in ageless dispositions. drunken. bruised. raw. drugs dissolving in carbon air. time h a s s t r e t c h e d l on g e r since i broke citrus juice into the belly of my palm in your bed two dawns and an unremembered mist of forever ago. la. ana la urid ay. my hair a climbing bronze crown of vines on a white wall your back like a sheen of sweat over civilization my bombed train of thought like an apology written over skeleton leaf your moan like crushed crisp white shirt hanging on a tight breast we were like a photograph that questioned the presence of god in history amethyst is stuck in my throat. my feet make stampedes in crowds of roses strewn across the pavement. i find myself praying sometimes in bold and tender reseconds you must take the maroon curtains with you.

meryem nuh, We Were Not Anatomical (via WILDNESS)

[ofblackpoetry]

– If you say someone’s engaged in ‘kumbaya,’ you’re saying that person isn’t serious, it’s designed to disempower someone who’s trying to do something. Thomas S. De Luca, NY Times, 2010 –How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Psalm 137 And here I am again asking myself how a Negro spiritual about liberation came to be a term for naïve hopefulness or for holding the hand that beats you through whatever torture they decide is coming next and even though I know the answer to this question, sometimes asking rhetorically helps me feel better or more peaceful or more like a quaint smile at the use of the word to mean a foolish compromise even knowing always, as I have that kumbaya is a mistranslation of come by here is not an invitation for frivolous peace talks but an invocation to the Lord or whichever Gods with changed names we had and hid for protection for salvation. … What happens when you hide your language in another tongue ‘cause you want to keep it from dying but you realize too late that staying alive and living ain’t the same thing and they catch it anyway; take the words from your mouth and call it a mixed blessing call it bipartisan call it poor, peace loving liberal speech call us stupid Negros still waiting’ on a chariot ain’t even bother to ask whose hand is whipping the horse ?

Breauna L. Roach, On the Etymology of a Negro Spiritual (via Vinyl Poetry)

[ofblackpoetry]

I wish I knew how It would feel to be free I wish I could break All the chains holding me —Nina Simone today i am a black woman in america & i am singing a melody ridden lullaby it sounds like: the gentrification of a brooklyn stoop the rent raised three times my wages the bodega and laundromat burned down on the corner the people on the corner each lock & key of their chromosomes a note of ash & inquiry on their tongues today i am a black woman in a hopeless state i will apply for financial aid and food stamps with the same mouth i spit poems from i will ask the angels of a creative god to lessen the blows & i will beg for forgiveness when i curse the rising sun today, i am a black woman in a body of coal i am always burning and no one knows my name i am a nameless fury, i am a blues scratched from the throat of ms. nina—i am always angry i am always a bumble hive of hello i love like this too loudly, my neighbors think i am an unforgiving bitter sometimes, i think my neighbors are right most times i think my neighbors are nosey today, i am a cold country, a storm brewing, a heat wave of a woman wearing red pumps to the funeral of my ex-lover’s today, i am a woman, a brown and black & brew woman dreaming of freedom today, i am a mother, & my country is burning and i forgot how to flee from such a flamboyant backdraft —i’m too in awe of how beautiful i look on fire

Mohagany Browne, litany (via Poets.org)

[ofblackpoetry]

He says papillon and you want to take his word for it. The thorax is missing its yellow wing. What do you say when that happens. Muer. he says. He says you thought it meant woman. But no, he says, and his chin. The slender proboscis drinks nectar. Like a straw, you say. Yes, he says. Has one ever fallen on your sweat in summer. won’t always get enough salt, from flower. The ocean, you think. Alive, he says they are hidden in tree limbs, mimic the bark. You think: yeah, but the trees here are rotten and burned. and it looks like a moth, torn. Others, he says, sniff the air for stem. You want to ask: how many fingers to tear up the butterfly. But you know he’ll say if they are only children, it does not count. You would smoke from the wingtip and flame the wing. You say the sun is shot here. Everyone’s on edge. He says any excuse, you’d trap butterflies in tupperware and ask strangers dumb questions like: What do you call it when a dead thing’s wing comes off? You say you’d tell someone anyway. You say you’d get the crying over with. If it was a little girl in dirt, touch her sun-edged hair. Tender he says, what doesn’t know how to treat limb’s fruit. The same to you. You want the one in the bowl who has lost her articulated flutter. To stand up to the claws. To fight back. He says, you’d still snuff it out. Ask any one. You say: your french words make me feel bad. You should ask if he means it. If he means papillon you. Is he thinking of a dead one. one that smells of fennel. What would he have called it when he was a boy in the dirt. tearing wings in the dirt. He says, well then. then, who do we blame.

francine j. harris, Anise swallowtail, molting (via Pen.org)

[ofblackpoetry]

& it’s a wild thing when you first discover porn at an age where you’ve finally come to accept that girls do not have cooties & what a way to disprove this except with the recording of two people, close enough to be indistinguishable from the other; “pleasure,” in such a new format that you become frightened of it, the way a face looks in the eye of a camera: undressed & unapologetic, their genitalia knitted & glazed as if dipped in oil, seeming to be so edible that you have to try it: the dish of salt-sleeked skin, a woman’s oval valley flushed & fluid with gelatinous light, a man holding the base of the woman’s bottom against the wall, ascended in the air with her legs corralling his hip like a belt & I often think that this is how I wish to be held in the stark night but thank god the human invented secrecy, for I couldn’t tell my mom the things I’ve learned, how the areola often desires a tongue to blanket it, how desire has become the word that governs me, sex thickening my imagination, wanting sex to be done beneath the light-loosed coverings of the sun, beneath the shade of a forest, in a room dark enough to not see what you touch, knowing only that you are & there is such risk, to know your eyes do not tell you much of anything but when looking at a video of a man smoking while a woman’s mouth becomes the sheath to the cock as his hand holds the neck down, I’ve then become the witness of a culture of dominion, with a series of no’s slipping into the sky as prayer & I only speak of this knowing I’ve also been taken in the brooding dark, my own body abandoning itself when facing a mirror because of what has stained me, the imprint of a hand that I can still recall on my shoulder, the disturbed flesh in a slight quiver, the bones ringing like wind chimes, loose & unresisting to what slips through it; a feeling of the body being shear, common ground for the damaged, being as weightless as a phallus without blood, as the curtain of a labia; the parts most ashamed but look there- the video shows us a woman smiling, the grin of a man, both in union, even their shadows making love in independence, so of course there’s a lucid form of joy here but when the camera sleeps, when the outside’s eyes cannot see how pleasure defines us, I depart my room, exhausted from a lonely fantasy, wondering how will the world fall inside the open parts of me, with all its terror, loud enough to almost be a moan.

Nkosi Nkululeko, Culture of Dominion (via Vinyl Poetry)

[ofblackpoetry]

Today, November 28th, 2005, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I am staring at my hands in the common pose of the hungry and penitent. I am studying again the emptiness of my clasped hands, wherein I see my sister-in-law days from birthing the small thing which will erase, in some sense, the mystery of my father’s departure; their child will emerge with ten fingers, and toes, howling, and his mother will hold his gummy mouth to her breast and the stars will hang above them and not one bomb will be heard through that night. And my brother will stir, waking with his wife the first few days, and he will run his long fingers along the soft terrain of his child’s skull and not once will he cover the child’s ears or throw the two to the ground and cover them from the blasts. And this child will gaze into a night which is black and quiet. She will pull herself up to her feet standing like a buoy in wind-grooved waters, falling, and rising again, never shaken by an explosion. And her grandmother will watch her stumble through a park or playground, will watch her sail through the air on swings, howling with joy, and never once will she snatch her from the swing and run for shelter because again, the bombs are falling. The two will drink cocoa, the beautiful lines in my mother’s face growing deeper as she smiles at the beautiful boy flipping the pages of a book with pictures of dinosaurs, and no bomb will blast glass into this child’s face, leaving the one eye useless. No bomb will loosen the roof, crushing my mother while this child sees plaster and wood and blood where once his Nana sat. This child will not sit with his Nana, killed by a bomb, for hours. I will never drive across two states to help my brother bury my mother this way. To pray and weep and beg this child to speak again. She will go to school with other children, and some of them will have more food than others, and some will be the witnesses of great crimes, and some will describe flavors with colors, and some will have seizures, and some will read two grade levels ahead, but none of them will tip their desks and shield their faces, nor watch as their teacher falls out of her shoes, clinging to the nearest child. This child will bleed and cry and curse his living parents and slam doors and be hurt and hurt again. And she will feel clover on her bare feet. Will swim in frigid waters. Will climb trees and spy cardinal chicks blind and peeping. And no bomb will kill this child’s parents. No bomb will kill this child’s grandparents. No bomb will kill this child’s uncles. And no bomb will kill this child, who will raise to his mouth some small morsel of food of which there is more while bombs fall from the sky like dust brushed from the hands of a stupid god and children whose parents named them will become dust and their parents will drape themselves in black and dream of the tiny mouths which once reared to suckle or gasp at some bird sailing by and their tears will make a mud which will heal nothing, and today I will speak no word except the name of that child whose absence makes the hands of her parents shiver. A name which had a meaning. As will yours.                                                  —for Mikayla Grace

Ross Gay, Prayer for My Unborn Niece or Nephew (via Poets.org)

[ofblackpoetry]

I dug beneath my jagged pieces, wedged the chunks off and piled them in a milk crate—saved for kindling. I am learning to paste the pieces back with sap and saliva. Ants have infested the pile. They crawl over me, carrying fragments of wood and the dead. I cannot brush them off. I let them fashion a home here. I tell them I am still learning to build.

Marlin M. Jenkins, Bark (via Heart Journal Online)

[ofblackpoetry]

A body doesn’t accuse you of things. Silent. A body has a thug mouth, huge gun. Or no gun. Or fists. Or a wheelchair. Cane. Crutches. A body doesn’t fly. Limp. No muscle, tongue. Hoodie, no handshake. A body is drained. A body is prodded. Mute strains of nothing. Broken. Head twisted, shot, corroded, snapped. A body doesn’t rise. A body stays limp. A body doesn’t shake off pavement. A body doesn’t collide with stars. A body’s hours aren’t hours, they are centuries, redlined centuries. A body can choke you. Break you. Wreck you beyond reckoning.

Allison Joseph, Carcass (via Heart Journal Online)