You Go to My Head

BY Carole Boston Weatherford

I sang my songs so much

that they becamethe soundtrack for my dreams,

the melody of my moods,

a room I lived in,and a balm for my wounds. 

I sang my songs enoughto know them backwardand forward, enoughto wonder if they could lift mefrom hometown hauntsto center stage. 

I’d sung my songs enough

to think I could take on

Baltimore’s best talent

at the Harlem Theatre

Amateur Hourand maybe even win. 

If you sing a song enough,it can go to your head that way.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

Wallace Stevens

1879 –1955

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

“The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens 

The Honey Alone

Bees come from out of the sun, God’s fevered eye. Any simple child can see. Tears are gifts from the mother of God, as are memory and imagination, as are seeing, hearing, breathing, thinking, and feeling. There’s nothing but gifts on this poor earth. But only the wise child realizes, after drowsing among the flowers, wasting an entire summer of his best hours, the bees are his earliest ancestors, and he is their honey-loving, venom-bearing, six-sided-dreaming, I Ching–reciting descendant and fellow minion of the sun, he with his pollen-dusted eyelashes and skullcap, he with his maps legible only to other murmuring, winged, round-bellied alchemists. As for the wicked child who can’t remember what Virgil said about the vanishing of the bees, he may have to witness sweetness disappear from the earth in his lifetime and never know why. And what about the child who doesn’t even know what questions to ask? Tell him bees feed on sweat running down the ribs and inner arms and thighs of the mother of God, and on Her tears, to make the honey which alone satisfies the daily hunger of God. Tell him, Her tears are for us to cry.

In Lieu of Flowers

BY Carolyn Forché

Appears

We weren’t told as children there is no going back.

But we are allowed to keep with us a few times and places 

thin as tissue paper in the mind.

Finding these in the mind is like moving through a forest at night.

We do this alone in our rooms in the dark by light of an open door.

Then a thought comes like a bird landing on a blanket.

Someone else’s papa coming toward us with his belt off.

“Ever since he came home from the war,” we would say of him.

While we children hid in the holes we had dug in the fields, 

in the houses we built in the trees.

This is a house of spider-lace and blankets filled with down 

from geese that once flew in the clouds.

In the carpenter’s atelier, there is the beginning of a boat that will 

someday move along the river.

It will take on water in the rain but will never sink. 

It will know what it is doing among the reeds. 

It will sail even in a heavy dew. As light a river as that.

Wondrous to be floating in a boat we have made from oaks sealed with pitch.

Wondrous to think that we are all floating in a boat we ourselves have made.

Our river, glazed with light, moves more swiftly for some than others.

It is not bottomless. Not without a vast sea into which it will vanish at the end.

Strange, after so many centuries, to be alive at the end.

The Specific Ocean

Jenny Browne

Once upon the child from her torn red booster seat shouts: Look!         It’s the Specific Ocean!                                                                       & who was I to say she was mistaken? The specific pelican chased down a flash of plastic lure as if fresh bonito. The specific fisherman in his bloodied yellow coat pointing toward the horizon          with fixed devotion. At the end of the diving board, she was going to wait as long as she was going to wait.                                                & if our enemy was never water the last wave on the intake form remains:         How many live births? Some languages have the same word for time & for weather & which daughter          was it again? A squabble of gulls hovered closer to shore. Maybe bored. Maybe getting warmer.          The ocean remained specifically violent as the love note bleeding out on a paper towel: Be back, maybe. Specific as the sandbar of memory mistaking itself          again for rock, gone darker          down low, where last it was touched.

Capture an idea.

Make it your own.

Just you better be careful on how you do it.

Before your cover is blown.

#BENOTEWORTHY

#piccadillyinc

July 28

Akwaeke Emezi

will i remember moments like this, standing on grass, the sky yawning over me

swahili beating out of speakers, dancing with a crowd of strangers

wondering how love has done nothing more to my body other than deform

the left side of my chest

will i remember brooklyn, the shocking beauty of a lighted train

running above ground and against the sky, before night wraps around fulton

an old woman kissing the bus driver’s cheek

green tennis balls poured over the courts on malcolm x

a little Black girl i do not know shouting adios amigo as she crosses the street

the smell of a roti shop, silk sliding on my arms

yellow kitchens, guavas and parathas

a white box fan whirring in our last summer