For My Own Protection by Essex Hemphill

For My Own Protection

 

I want to start 

an organization

to save my life.

If whales, snails,

dogs, cats

Chrysler and Nixon

can be saved,

the lives of Black men 

are priceless

and can be saved.

We should be able

to save each other.

I don’t want to wait 

for the Heritage Foundation

to release a study

stating Black men 

are almost extinct.

I don’t want to be

the living dead

pacified with drugs

and sex.

 

If a human chain

can be formed

around missile sites,

then surely Black men

can form human chains

around Anacostia, Harlem,

South Africa, Wall Street, 

Hollywood, each other.

 

If we have to take tomorrow 

with our blood are we ready?

Do our s curls,

dreadlocks, and Phillies

make us any more ready

than a bush or a conkaline?

I’m not concerned

about the attire of a soldier.

All I want to know

for my own protection

is are we capable

of whatever

whenever?

Think of Others by Mahmoud Darwish

Think of Others  

As you prepare your breakfast, think of others 

(do not forget the pigeon's food).  

As you conduct your wars, think of others 

(do not forget those who seek peace).  

As you pay your water bill, think of others 

(those who are nursed by clouds).  

As you return home, to your home, think of others 

(do not forget the people of the camps).  

As you sleep and count the stars, think of others 

(those who have nowhere to sleep).  

As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others 

(those who have lost the right to speak).  

As you think of others far away, think of yourself 

(say: "If only I were a candle in the dark"). 

(Translated by Mohammed Shaheen)

Most Days I Want to Live by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Most Days I Want to Live 

Not all days. But most days

I do. Most days the garden’s

almost enough: little pink flowers

on the sage, even though

the man said we couldn’t eat

it. Not this kind. And I said,

Then, gosh. What’s the point?

The flowers themselves,

I suppose. The rain came

and then the hail came and my love

brought them in. Even tipped

over they look optimistic.

I know it’s too late to envy

the flowers. That century’s

over and done. And hope?

That’s a jinx. But I did set them

right. I patted them a little.

And prayed for myself, which

is embarrassing to admit

in this day and age. But I did it.

Because no one was looking

or listening anyway.

My Grandfather Was a Terrorist by Mosab Abu Toha

My Grandfather Was a Terrorist

 

My grandfather was a terrorist—

He tended to his field,

watered the roses in the courtyard,

smoked cigarettes with grandmother

on the yellow beach, lying there

like a prayer rug.

 

My grandfather was a terrorist—

He picked oranges and lemons,

went fishing with brothers until noon,

sang a comforting song en route

to the farrier’s with his piebald horse.

 

My grandfather was a terrorist—

He made a cup of tea with milk,

sat on his verdant land, as soft as silk.

 

My grandfather was a terrorist—

He departed his house, leaving it for the coming guests,

left some water on the table, his best,

lest the guests die of thirst after their conquest.

 

My grandfather was a terrorist—

He walked to the closest safe town,

empty as the sullen sky,

vacant as a deserted tent,

dark as a starless night.

 

My grandfather was a terrorist—

My grandfather was a man,

a breadwinner for ten,

whose luxury was to have a tent,

with a blue UN flag set on the rusting pole,

on the beach next to a cemetery.

 

600 days in the genocide by Omar Sakr

600 days in the genocide

The hour is late as I usher my sons to bed.

My family is watching a game called State

Of Origin where men from all over the world 

Claim tribal heritage to land not their own.

I can't stop thinking of Ward, who survived 

And of Shaaban al-Dalou, who did not.

My babies, strangers to hardship, whimper

In the dark as if they, too, can feel the heat

Licking at their hands and feet. When we

Dream, scientists say we enter paralysis:

A safety mechanism to keep us from rolling

Into the campfire, or off a cliff. Some of us

are blessed with broken mechanisms,

Some of us walk even in our sleep.

I watch, God forgive me not, I keep watch

When I should be running towards the blaze.

Your Name by Silvina Ocampo

Your Name

No one can pronounce your name.

I alone know the perfect inflection.

They lack the tenderness in which it flows

and the sweetness in the consonants.

They don't know how to distinguish the color

of the exact musical note.

That's why each day I respond

by inventing a name:

blue, bird, breeze, light.

Common words

that can be said simply

even without knowing you, without loving you.

(Translated by Jason Weiss)

The Triumph of the Infinite by Mark Strand

The Triumph of the Infinite

I got up in the night and went to the end of the hall. Over the door in large letters it said, “This is the next life. Please come in.” I opened the door. Across the room a bearded man in a pale green suit turned to me and said, “Better get ready, we’re taking the long way.” “Now I’ll wake up,” I thought, but I was wrong. We began our journey over golden tundra and patches of ice. Then there was nothing for miles around, and all I could hear was my heart pumping and pumping so hard I thought I would die all over again. 

Fox by Alice Oswald

Fox

 

I heard a cough

as if a thief was there

outside my sleep

a sharp intake of air

 

a fox in her fox-fur

stepping across

the grass in her black gloves

barked at my house

 

just so abrupt and odd

the way she went

hungrily asking

in the heart's thick accent

 

in such serious sleepless

trespass she came

a woman with a man's voice

but no name

 

as if to say: it's midnight

and my life

is laid beneath my children

like gold leaf

The Goddess Who Created This Passing World by Alice Notley

The Goddess Who Created This Passing World

The Goddess who created this passing world

Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction

Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled

Cars & the variously shod feet were born

And the past & future & I born too

Light as airmail paper away she flew

To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley

Or both but instantly

Clarified, composed, forever was I

Meant by her to recognize a painting

As beautiful or a movie stunning

And to adore the finitude of words

And understand as surfaces my dreams

Know the eye the organ of affection

And depths to be inflections

Of her voice & wrist & smile

Children of Light by Robert Lowell

Children of Light

 

Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones

And fenced their gardens with the Redmen's bones;

Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,

Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva's night,

They planted here the Serpent's seeds of light;

And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock

The riotous glass houses built on rock,

And candles gutter by an empty altar,

And light is where the landless blood of Cain

Is burning, burning the unburied grain.

Thirteen Ways of Looking by Ama Codjoe

Thirteen Ways of Looking

     after David Hammons’s Close Your Eyes and See Black

1. Smear your forearms with something like shea butter or sunscreen and lean over a bright piece of paperboard, facedown. Hover there, then print your body onto to the paper below. See how your forearms, printed there, make the top half of a diamond?

2. There is no clear narrative. What is clear, scanning the artwork from top to bottom, are details of a naked, muscular torso: two nipples, a hairy chest in the shape of a heart, the elastic band and wrinkled beginnings of a pair of trousers—and strikingly, within the torso, the portrait of a face—cupped by two hands.

3. Close your eyes and see black.

4. What is the texture and mood of your blackness? What seeking, sweetness, or sorrows does it hold?

5. Then the bottom edge of the frame.

6. In Close Your Eyes and See Black, the white space is not white. It is golden, a deep royal hue. Everywhere the body print isn’t is the color of a peeled Georgia peach.

7. Place your hands over your head and make the shape of a diamond.

8. Back to the portrait of a face. It appears like a ghost: centered in the torso, centered in the lower half of the frame. It appears beneath the nipples and above the elastic of wrinkled pants. It appears to be a photographic image of a Black man. It appears this man is closing his eyes, is seeing black.

9. What blacknesses do you see? What blacknesses have printed themselves onto you?

10. To make this body print, David Hammons coated his hair, skin, and clothes with grease and pressed his body onto the paperboard. Then the artist dusted a dark pigment on top, which adhered to the grease’s stickiness.

11. There is no face in the top half of the art work. Instead, a negative space, a rich, golden hue breathes into the space of the diamond.

12. The color of a lucky, double-yolk egg.

13. What must it feel like to shine in shadow; to glow darkly in the sun?

If This Were a Movie, You’d Think It Real by Aleksandar Hemon

If This Were a Movie, You’d Think It Real

 

That which doesn’t have to be named

just keeps being until it’s all undone.

Beyond all that, the world is negotiable

 

and cool, with readjusted coloring,

invisible pain—an ad for a harmless hell.

See the Styrofoam moon in a painted sky,

 

casting no light, just matted reflections,

the stars lurking through the tin-sky holes,

designed in a void that has never moved.

 

But just below, the passing birds, notches

in the night, with news of the cursed tribe

whose stories have no end or beginning,

 

who never lived but must now all be killed.

Cities razed, boats sunk, children drowned,

kindle wood carved from ancient olive trees,

 

shrapnel-shredded bodies in tall heaps.

The birds sing in mourning for the absent

gone unburied, never, nowhere to be found,

 

those who were there or here not so long ago,

asking us: Your name? Where do you come from?

Why are you with us when the others are dead?

 

Memory by Anthony Hecht

Memory

 

Sepia oval portraits of the family,

Black-framed, adorned the small brown-papered hall,

But the parlor was kept unused, never disturbed.

Under a glass bell, the dried hydrangeas

Had bleached to the hue of ancient newspaper,

Though once, someone affirmed, they had been pink.

Pink still were the shiny curling orifices

Of matching seashells stationed on the mantel

With mated, spiked, wrought-iron candlesticks.

The room contained a tufted ottoman,

A large elephant-foot umbrella stand

With two malacca canes, and two peacock

Tail-feathers sprouting from a small-necked vase.

On a teak side table lay, side by side,

A Bible and a magnifying glass.

Green velvet drapes kept the room dark and airless

Until on sunny days toward midsummer

The brass andirons caught a shaft of light

For twenty minutes in late afternoon

In a radiance dimly akin to happiness—

The dusty gleam of temporary wealth.

A Certain Light by Marie Howe

A Certain Light

 

He had taken the right pills the night before.

We had counted them out

 

from the egg carton where they were numbered so there’d be no mistake.

He had taken the morphine and prednisone and amitriptiline

 

and florinef and vancomycin and halcion too quickly

and had thrown up in the bowl Joe brought to the bed—a thin string

 

of blue spit—then waited a few minutes, to calm himself,

before he took them all again. And had slept through the night

 

and the morning and was still sleeping at noon, or not sleeping.

He was breathing maybe twice a minute, and we couldn’t wake him,

 

we couldn’t wake him until we shook him hard calling, John wake up now

John wake up—Who is the president?

 

And he couldn’t answer.

His doctor told us we’d have to keep him up for hours.

 

He was all bones and skin, no tissue to absorb the medicine.

He couldn’t walk unless two people held him.

 

And we made him talk about the movies: What was the best moment in

On The Waterfront? What was the music in Gone With The Wind?

 

And for seven hours he answered, if only to please us, mumbling

I like the morphine, sinking, rising, sleeping, rousing,

 

then only in pain again. But wakened.

So wakened that late that night, in one of those still blue moments

 

that were a kind of paradise, he finally opened his eyes wide,

and the room filled with a certain light we thought we’d never see again.

 

Look at you two, he said. And we did.

And Joe said, Look at you.    And John said, How do I look?

 

And Joe said, Handsome.

  

Continuity by Terrance Hayes

Continuity

 

Before getting into the cab, she hands him a cup.
Then, after they kiss, she hands him the cup again.

As they walk, she hands him a man-made substance.
Then, after they kiss, she hands him the cup again.

She hands him a chalice of lightning
& he hands her a chalice of fire.

Then in the next shot, after they kiss,
They exchange chalices again.

When she goes through the metal detector,
She carefully places a pair of hoop earrings in a plastic tray.

When she retrieves them,
They are two silver bangles she fits to her wrists.

When they climb from the cab in the rain, her hair is wet,
But when they kiss on the sidewalk her hair is dry again.

After she takes off her helmet & breastplate,
& enters the water wearing nothing but courage,

She says to him, “You are nude,
But you must be naked to win.”

Or she says, “To survive you must lay bare
The heart,” according to the closed captions.

When they climb from the river, her hair is a river
Where night has fallen, tangled with twigs & stars,

Parting like a path of escape.
But in the very next shot,

As they climb from the river,
Her hair is braided with wire & string.

When he bangs on the rain-streaked window
Of the cab yelling her name in a pivotal scene,

Briefly reflected in the window in the rain
Tangled with wires & stars above a river

Is the hand of a fan or stagehand or bodyguard,
Body double, bystander, interloper, beloved ghost,

& the two of us watching from a bridge on the far side.

 

To Stammering by Kenneth Koch

To Stammering

 

Where did you come from, lamentable quality?

Before I had a life you were about to ruin my life.

The mystery of this stays with me.

“Don’t brood about things,” my elders said.

I hadn’t any other experience of enemies from inside.

They were all from outside—big boys

Who cursed me and hit me; motorists; falling trees.

All these you were as bad as, yet inside. When I spoke, you were there.

I could avoid you by singing or acting.

I acted in school plays but was no good at singing.

Immediately after the play you were there again.

You ruined the cast party.

You were not a sign of confidence.

You were not a sign of manliness.

You were stronger than good luck and bad; you survived them both.

You were slowly edged out of my throat by psychoanalysis

You who had been brought in, it seems, like a hired thug

To beat up both sides and distract them

From the main issue: oedipal love. You were horrible!

Tell them, now that you’re back in your thug country,

That you don’t have to be so rough next time you’re called in

But can be milder and have the same effect—unhappiness and pain.

Théâtre de l'Odéon by Emily Fragos

Théâtre de l'Odéon

I could not rise from the dark and go out into the cool,

night air of that beautiful city,

could not get on with my conniving, young life.

What had been smooth and good became impossible, slowly,

 

mechanically, placing one foot in front of the next, so that legs,

as if buried in snow, might inch along the river

 

and the alleys with the clochards and the cats,

and I might seem a bright young thing again.

 

And all this before the shock of loss, the dying, who linger

with their weak bodies and blank faces,

 

and my own stupid share of human harm

inflicted upon the innocent,

 

and long before Time, that asp,

started laughing, laughing at me.

Minstrel Man by Langston Hughes

Minstrel Man

Because my mouth

Is wide with laughter

And my throat

Is deep with song,

You did not think

I suffer after

I've held my pain

So long.

 

Because my mouth

Is wide with laughter

You do not hear

My inner cry:

Because my feet

Are gay with dancing,

You do not know

I die.

Sonnet: The Wall by Donald Justice

Sonnet: The Wall

 

The walls surrounding them they never saw; 

The angels, often.  Angels were as common 

As birds or butterflies, but looked more human. 

As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe. 

Beasts, too, were friendly.  They could find no flaw 

In all of Eden:  this was the first omen. 

The second was the dream which woke the woman. 

She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw. 

As for the fruit, it had no taste at all. 

They had been warned of what was bound to happen. 

They had been told and told of something called the world. 

They had told and told about the wall. 

They saw it now; the gate was standing open. 

As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.

Travel by Frank O'Hara

Travel

Sometimes I know I love you better

than all the others I kiss it’s funny

 

but it’s true and I wouldn’t roll

from one to the next so fast if you

 

hadn’t knocked them all down like

ninepins when you roared by my bed

 

 

I keep trying to race ahead and catch

you at the newest station or whistle

 

stop but you are flighty about

schedules and always soar away just

 

as leaning from my taxicab my breath

reaches for the back of your neck

Affection by Emily Jungmin Yoon

Affection

We watch the moving topography of brutality, the red slopes

and orbs mapping deaths from virus, from fire, from firearms.

It feels impossible to think redand visualize beauty and yet

red roses are splashed all around the city, so brazenly alive

that they stupefy me. People stop, pose, take pictures

of their loved ones under the mess of flowers.

I love the red beak of the rose-ringed parakeet even after I find

the threat they pose on the land I live. Affectionmeans both

     fondnessand disease.

Words reflect the world, which is to say nothing makes sense.

If we say only civilization can finishthe world,

does it mean to completeor destroy? If we say the world might

     weather—

to endure or wear away?

Blueberries for Cal by Brenda Shaughnessy

Blueberries for Cal

 

Watching little Henry, six, scoop up blueberries

and shovel them into his mouth, possessed.

 

I’m so glad I brought blueberries—wish my kids

could/would eat them. Cal can’t; Simone won’t.

 

Henry’s sisters Lucy & Jane took turns feeding each

other goldfish crackers and sips of juice.

 

Arms around each other’s neck and back. Tiny things.

I wish my daughter had a sister like that

 

and my son a nervous system that let him walk

and munch berries. Sometimes I can’t bear

 

all the things Cal doesn’t get to do. I want to curse

everything I can’t give him.

 

Admire/compare/despair—that’s not the most real

feeling I’m feeling, is it? I feel joy in Henry’s joy.

 

Blueberries for the child who wants them.

There’s all this energetic sweetness, enough to go around,

 

to give and taste and trust. More than enough.

For Cal, too. I want to remember this.

 

My children seem to subsist on music and frosting.

Where there’s frosting, there’s cake.

 

Where there’s music, someone chose to make a song

over all other things on this earth.

Shahid Reads His Own Palm by Reginald Dwayne Betts

Shahid Reads His Own Palm

 I come from the cracked hands of men who used

           the smoldering ends of blunts to blow shotguns,

 men who arranged their lives around the mystery

          of the moon breaking a street corner in half.

 I come from "Swann Road" written in a child's

           slanted block letters across a playground fence,

 the orange globe with black stripes in Bishop's left

          hand, untethered and rolling to the sideline,

 a crowd openmouthed, waiting to see the end

           of the sweetest crossover in a Virginia state pen.

 I come from Friday night's humid and musty air,

           Junk Yard Band cranking in a stolen Bonneville,

 a tilted bottle of Wild Irish Rose against my lips

           and King Hedley's secret written in the lines of my palm.

 I come from beneath a cloud of white smoke, a lit pipe

           and the way glass heats rocks into a piece of heaven,

from the weight of nothing in my palm,

           a bullet in an unfired snub-nosed revolver.

And every day the small muscles in my finger threaten to pull

           a trigger, slight and curved like my woman's eyelashes.

Fence of Sticks by Deborah Digges

Fence of Sticks 

As I was building a fence of sticks I heard the question,

Weren’t there times worse than this for art?

Weren’t there those who, rather, bristled were they understood,

who worked alone, the manuscripts thrown out or bled beyond the margins.

I was sewing the wire between the pine and sycamore,

tightening the warp with willow and forsythia, some just in bloom.

I thought of those who’d rather hang themselves than call truth heresy.

Upon whose deaths the citizens rejoiced.

They who burned everything.

Those who died longing to say more, whose heads rolled singing.

I was strict with myself, worked long past noon.

The gloves made the weaving hard so I wrought barehanded.

So many pages ending _____, or neatly numbered, or written across the mind.

Those for whom art was not an occupation.

Indeed some never wrote again after what war or famine. Some wrote of nothing else.

I gathered the climbing roses’ whips almost impossible to fit,

that made a lovely spiraling pulled taut, resisting,

each section a stay against the ocean of dead leaves.

A wind came up, the early heat unnerving. Those who refused to make it easy.

They who’d be damned to change a word. The way it came to them

so they would claim. The way was given. How heavy the lengths,

year after year, of pine boughs, Christmas wreaths brown to the bone,

red ribbons like a shout, like an embarrassment,

the holly sprigs still sharp as thorns. Those who died having said too much.

Or who must stop every few lines to dip the quill. They who ran out of time.

Those who ripped folios from the classics.

The boxwood leaves, like oaks’, hold to the bough.

You must strip them by hand, yank the twigs backwards.

I took an ax to the twisted yew, blow after blow, and still it tore.

Its sap ruins this page. I had to pull myself away to write is this not happiness?