Dis/Place In this place, we swear and sing and hail and honk. This is a noisy little island, loud in color, exuberant in sound. We paint our houses the colors of flamingoes and goldfish, vivid indigoes, mints, saffron and coral. Even the sunsets are washes of hasty undiluted color, quick […]
Betty Jean Owens, an African American woman who was raped by four white men—Patrick Gene Scarborough, David Erwin Beagles, Ollie Odell Stoutamire, and William Ted Collinsworth– in Tallahassee, Fl; May, 1959. The trial was a landmark case, covered at the time by the BBC and international news outlets. This was […]
Stay Lit The day after Charlottesville was lit with tiki torches, not lit like parties making night shine like Hennessey, but lit like crosses or a man’s eyes before rope tightens. I found myself with no tears available, all rage exhausted. I walked to my kitchen and concentrated on tearing […]
I’m a leaning tower of 8-track tapes, Dust-sparkled in the living room sun, Gleaming against burnt coffee table Ash before an altar of plastic slipcovers, A 72-inch of James Brown singles—Say it Loud, I’m black and I’m proud—Baby- Baby-baby baby-bay-beh screams crackling Static into the air, ricocheting off […]
Specter Sometimes I dream him but he is not beating me with his words telling me how to fix my hair my clothes, my laugh, telling me not to touch him. He merely hovers on the edge of everything, reminding me I am not good enough, and in the midnight […]
When she first found the bird, she wondered how a dead thing could flaunt such silk feathers. She even started to prod it with her gaze, then her finger— newly lacquered red with a bleeding brush. She asked the air, but how this thing reach here? It just drop so […]
Nat’s Vision in the garden black flowers growing like trees uninterested by the wind and like towers of shadowed bone and in the arcade the white death a funeral of shawls and dresses all strung like carnival lights and lanterns that reflected into themselves an infinite fire where moths found […]
We Don’t ( ) Anymore we don’t bare our teeth anymore no grit or disgruntled out in public keep your mouth a closeted fist keep your mouth a closed tomb keep your mouth a wired phone careful not to spill out too many too many’s careful not to show […]
There’s a joke in British politics that New Labour, the rebranding of the mainstream left led by Tony Blair in the mid-1990s, quickly morphed into neo-liberalism. Speak with a drawl and New Labour and neo liberal even sound similar. Voted in by the British electorate in 1997 on the promise […]
An interview Essay with Victor LaValle I first met Victor Lavalle in a Dunkin’ Donuts in Washington Heights (NYC) during the time he was drafting what would become his award-winning novel The Changeling. He was writing there, he told me, because it had just the right amount and kind of […]
In Praise of SeditionNovember 22, 2020
Notes to Self and Other PoemsNovember 22, 2020
from Where Here Were WeNovember 22, 2020
from A History of the Bitch (AHOTB)November 22, 2020