#NationalPoetryMonth

For Baltimore

by Alice

When I hear on the news “they are burning their own neighborhoods”

I remember how refugees detained half-a-world away protest
by sewing their own mouths shut,
how overcast stitches of twine finish the cut edges
of faces that might otherwise unravel
into howls.

Which is more silent: a stitched mouth
or a crushed larynx?

(Freddy Gray howled, the last time we heard him speaking.)

In one corner of my mind, gratitude mixes with grief
for a city still shouting even as
its voices

burn.

(via)
(via)

Links on the situation in Baltimore — especially as regards media coverage and issues of violence/nonviolence — follow below the jump.  Continue reading “For Baltimore” →

Rising with Her Red Hair

by Alice

Masaccio-TheExpulsionOfAdamAndEveFromEden-Restoration

I have never forgotten                     the night

my father looked at my body and saw only
another fuckable woman living

under his roof.

Women are places
where men                              put things:

bits of flesh
intimate and embarrassing,

emotions too unmasculine to carry            openly
like a purse. Demeaningly useful,

better to deny.

Like landfill next to a gleaming city:
the spires shine best in the dying light

at sunset

as trash heaps heat
to stink their worst.

The oldest profession: Blaming the object coveted

for our own desire.
Did anyone check under Adam’s fig leaf

the day the snake took itself off for a walk
to talk from a tree?

Adam got to blame Eve for the naked

lust lodging in his eyes
while Eve’s eyes got wide

and finally clear.

Suddenly
I am

on-my-knees hands-to-god
PRAISEJESUS grateful

that on the night my father saw how

droit du seigneur coupled                    with a daughter

in the house
made its own brutal but algebraic

logic —

he resolved to resolve his equation with fury          instead,

disemboweling his self-hatred
over top of me.                           Preferable

to what
thought he needed rage to drown

the night a man saw not his child
but a gash

broken open to the world.

[featured image via]

Lives Draw Breath

by Alice

(for Rekia Boyd)

In the first days

before we knew how #AllLives #AllLives #AllLives
would ring out like a social media
machine gun
aimed at the heart of those crying
#OurLivesToo! —

a friend and I exchanged impossible messages:

“Black lives matter,” I wrote.
“Yes,” her reply. “All lives matter.”

Saying: hers too.
Saying: this rainbow coalition of everyone she loves, too.

“Yes,” my echo, “yes. All lives.”

Asking: are you well are you safe are you loved.
Asking: where can rage and anguish go, when all of the air is taken. 
Continue reading “Lives Draw Breath” →

Egg

by Alice

“A poet writes a poem as a hen lays an egg,
and both of them feel better afterwards.” — Samuel Butler

eggpoem

I misread the first time.
That’s how much sense I found, saying “yes!
of course the poet and the poem, both
feeling much improved for their process.”

Only after reading again did I realize: the we
who are meant to feel better
includes the hen alone.
The poem, like the egg, impartial to its experience.

I looked down at the treasure I held,
warm moments before
from the heat of my body,
now cold brass.

Then I remembered “one makes the meaning
one needs to find”
and again we three are smiling —

me,

this golden egg
cradled in my palm,

the poem hatching.

~a.i.

[image via]

This Is Not A Poem

by Alice

1024px-Rhododendron＆Vast_ocean_of_clouds、コバノミツバツツジ＆篠山盆地雲海、盃ヶ岳4256293

This Is Not A Poem

All metaphors point to the insufficiency of languages.

I animate my body like a puppet.
In conversation, the tongue and teeth you argue against
are no more than my hand in a sock.

This is not a metaphor.

Why do the depersonalized find themselves holding
not No Person
but many persons?
The core, the shell, the flesh —
the self that would speak for the flesh if she found
an audience to listen.

The rhododendron in my yard ignites each spring in fuchsia blooms.
I am all my selves but one that can speak “I am”
and know its truth.

And you?
If a stranger reaches out a hand in a crowd to greet you,
do you recognize when that stranger

is yourself?

~a.i.

[Image: “Rhododendron＆Vast ocean of clouds、コバノミツバツツジ＆篠山盆地雲海、盃ヶ岳4256293” by 松岡明芳 – 松岡明芳. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons]

The Taste of Ice

by Alice

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After the attending ordered you shackled to the gurney
and fed ash that you geysered back
like an anguished volcano —

After the medical student inquired about your scarred arms
and lectured on “liver function impairment won’t show
for another 24 to 48 hrs” —

After the technician adjusted the slow pulsing drip of your IV
and left a cup of ice chips to feed you
if you ever woke up —

I watched even the backs of your hands sweat
and thought I heard in every rattling breath
a cart pushing closer through the hospital halls:

Nurse Death, making his rounds.

~a.i. 

[image via]