If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert

Natalie Diaz 1978

I will swing my lasso of headlightsacross your front porch,

let it drop like a rope of knotted lightat your feet.

While I put the car in park,

you will tie and tighten the loop

of light around your waist —and I will be there with the other end

wrapped three timesaround my hips horned with loneliness.

Reel me in across the glow-throbbing seaof greenthread, bluestem prickly poppy,the white inflorescence of yucca bells,up the dust-lit stairs into your arms.If you say to me,This is not your new housebut I am your new home,

I will enter the door of your throat,

hang my last lariat in the hallway,

build my altar of best books on your bedside table,

turn the lamp on and off, 

on and off, on and off.

I will lie down in you.

Eat my meals at the red table of your heart.

Each steaming bowl will be,Just right.I will eat it all up,

break all your chairs to pieces.

If I try running off into the deep-purpling scrub brush,

you will remind me,

There is nowhere to go if you are already here,and pat your hand on your lap lightedby the topazion lux of the moon through the window, say, Here, Love, sit here— when I do,I will say, And here I still am. Until then, Where are you? What is your address?I am hurting. I am riding the nighton a full tank of gas and my headlightsare reaching out for something.

The World

Jennifer Chang

One winter I lived north, alone

and effortless, dreaming myself

into the past. Perhaps, I thought, words could replenish privacy.

Outside, a red bicycle frozeinto form, made the world falserin its white austerity. So muchhappens after harvest: the moonperforming novelty: slaughter,snow. One hour the sameas the next, I held my handsor held the snow. I was like sculpture, forgetting or, perhaps, rememberingeverything. Red wings in the snow, red thoughts ablaze in the warI was having with myself again.Everything I hate about the worldI hate about myself, even nowwriting as if this were a lawof nature. Say there were deerfleet in the snow, walking outthe cold, and more gingkoesbare in the beggar’s grove. SayI was not the only one who sawor heard the trees, their diffidencegreater than my noise. Perhapsthe future is a tiny flameI’ll nick from a candle. First, I’m burning.Then, numb. Why must every wintergrow colder, and more sure?

This Is a Photograph of Me

Margaret Atwood1939 –

It was taken some time ago.

At first it seems to bea smearedprint: blurred lines and grey flecks

blended with the paper;

then, as you scanit, you see in the left-hand cornera thing that is like a branch: part of a tree(balsam or spruce) emergingand, to the right, halfway upwhat ought to be a gentleslope, a small frame house.In the background there is a lake,and beyond that, some low hills.(The photograph was takenthe day after I drowned.I am in the lake, in the centerof the picture, just under the surface.It is difficult to say whereprecisely, or to sayhow large or small I am:the effect of wateron light is a distortionbut if you look long enough,eventuallyyou will be able to see me.)

BLACK POETRY DAY

 

"On October 17, Black Poetry Day celebrates the powerful voices, past and present, that have shaped and enriched the American cultural landscape."

https://nationaldaycalendar.com/celebrations/black-poetry-day-october-17

Blonde Bombshell

By Lynn Emanuel

Love is boring and passé, all that old baggage,

the bloody bric-a-brac, the bad, the gothic,

retrograde, obscurantist hum and drum of it

needs to be swept away. So, night after night,

we sit in the dark of the Roxy beside grandmothers

with their shanks tied up in the tourniquets

of rolled stockings and open ourselves, like earth

to rain, to the blue fire of the movie screen

where love surrenders suddenly to gangsters

and their cuties. There in the narrow,

mote-filled finger of light, is a blonde,

so blonde, so blinding, she is a blizzard, a huge

spook, and lights up like the sun the audience

in its galoshes. She bulges like a deuce coupe.

When we see her we say good-bye to Kansas.

She is everything spare, cool, and clean,

like a gas station on a dark night and the cold

dependable light of rage coming in on schedule like a bus.

Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings

BY Juan Felipe Herrera

for Charles Fishman

Before you go further,

let me tell you what a poem brings,

first, you must know the secret, there is no poem

to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,

yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this,

instead of going day by day against the razors, well,

the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacket

sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from

the outside you think you are being entertained,

when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise,

your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold

standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course,

is always open for business too, except, as you can see,

it isn’t exactly business that pulls your spirit into

the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play,

you can even join in on the gossip—the mist, that is,

the mist becomes central to your existence.

A Black Man Talks of Reaping

By Arna Bontemps

I have sown beside all waters in my day.

I planted deep, within my heart the fear

that wind or fowl would take the grain away.

I planted safe against this stark, lean year.

I scattered seed enough to plant the land

in rows from Canada to Mexico

but for my reaping only what the hand

can hold at once is all that I can show.

Yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields

my brother's sons are gathering stalk and root;

small wonder then my children glean in fields

they have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit.

We acknowledge ourselves

BY Aisa Warden

before we bring this meeting to order

we want to acknowledge ourselves, the Kaktoviġmiut

yes, Siliun, this is how they are doing things nowadays

                  we are doing it right

                     we acknowledge ourselves, the Kaktoviġmiut

  we are the people of this island and of the mountains and lands around us

                           and all our traditional hunting areas

                                                                                                       since before the military came

                                                                      and bulldozed our old sod houses our entire village

                                               so they could make a runway and yes we are still angry about that

                                                                  and we are still wanting reparations for what they did

                                                                               they finally did take that hangar down and it

looks better without that big old thing on there

and I know we are still looking for

                       what was lost in the nuna on that day

                                                                                        what they did was wrong

and we are still here

                       and even though the military still today has that huge other hangar

                                                                                                      on the other side with that

                                                                                                                             military man

                                                                                                   who lives in there that we have

                                                                                                                                      never met

                                                               and the other that relieves him every three weeks or so  

we were here before

they put those big humongous radar ears up       

and then took them down   

and yes they left many barrels and still never got all of them

we all want all their residue

               to be

    off our island forever

                                                     we were here before

                              the government started drawing arbitrary lines

                                        encasing us into this wildlife refuge

                                      without our full knowledge or consent

where strangers break into our cabins on our own land

                                                     up in the mountains each and every year

                       no matter how many signs we put or what kind of locks we use

         and because of these borders not our own

                                          we cannot hunt the way

                                                      our relatives in other

                                                                                     villages hunt

we have more restrictions and regulations than the others

                          yet we still are able to get the food we need

                                               around the land we care for and know

ii, we are still fighting these arbitrary borders and lines today, thank you Ekowan

and also thank you aŋaaluk for those letters you put out

                                                                               they needed to see that

and all of us fighting for our ways of life and as we continue to fight

even in this strange language

we had to learn to fight them with

                                                        arii, piliaqsuŋa taniktun uqaġama

we acknowledge our Elders that are still on this land

and our Ancestors                               buried just over there and over there too

                                       and our own people who are still living here

                                          especially the little ones like Uqumaiḷaq here

                                                         and all our future relatives yet to be born

we acknowledge and remember

           that the military did experiments without our consent

                      on our Elders when they were kids

                               and the government has never owned up to these injustices

but we remember what was done

and yes some Elders did get compensated for that radioactive iodine they put in their veins

                                                                  yet not for the other forced experiments

and we remember how we were also made to send our young people away

to go to school

         and how they came back

                   having to relearn their own language

                              and many of them left right away again

                                                               yet many stayed home

                                                                      and the others always return

                                                                                       and belong home here

we the Kaktoviġmiut remember how we have always been whole

                                              nakuurugut

                                     we are good we have always been good

                       living here in the ways taught to us by our Elders

                                                                                 and our Elders’ Elders’ Elders

and even though there were two waves of diseases that we didn’t know

                         how to fight

                                  naturally

                           we lost many of our people

                                 yet many of us survived

                                           those waves

and since we are talking about these things in a community hall meeting

                     might as well mention the alcohol that came to kill us

                        and the cancers that we can guess where those came from too

                            and the fog of smoke and qaaq that has stayed and lingered

and I know that we aren’t used to acknowledging ourselves

            but when me and Fannie went to the big meeting in Anchorage

                                                                           they did one of these

                                                 land acknowledgments

                                so apparently everyone is starting to remember

and we remember too

         how to acknowledge one another

                and how we remember our relatives and how we are related

                   we remember how to sing and dance and how to take care of

                      the land

because we need to acknowledge our young people too

        even the ones who are pretending they don’t understand

                                                                       or can’t talk yet

                                                                            we know you are paying attention

yet we also want to say the young ones have also been having a lack of

   listening

                             and they need to fix that right now

oh and of course

our relationship to the animals

           the aġviq, the tuttu, the fish, the nanuk, the qavvik

                           oh yes and the aiviq and the beluga whale

                                 and I know I am forgetting some animals thank you Ukpik

     and we were here before the tourists started to travel here to see our

       polar bears

                                                                    without giving back to our community

                                        and yes we are starting to regulate those tourists too

                            as a community

                    working together

yes the amaġuq and I know we have too many animals to mention right now

       and we need to get started with these door prizes soon

                   yet let me say one more time

                            because I see that Michael just came in the door

                          we the Kaktoviġmiut acknowledge ourselves

                                     sovereign here on our own land

                                        sovereign here forevermore

                                                                       despite all of these other ways

                                            in which they thought they could make us forget

                                                                       or think we were broken

              we are whole and good and we remember all of it

                                                                       an unbroken line

                                                                             going all the way

                                                                                         all the way

                                                                                             all the way

                                                                                                           back

from the time before the time before

                                                            nakuurugut

            we are the Kaktoviġmiut, the original people of this place

            we have never ceded our lands

            we always remember our long long long ago ways

that we are living even today and even though we are thankful for many

    modern tools

that we put to use in the ways that our Elders agree with

the outsiders’ ways are not our ways

we belong here

              and on our mountains and all the places near that we travel for food

                                                                                                   and on the ocean

            we remember who we are

            today and forevermore

            we acknowledge ourselves

            in our power as Iñupiaq

                          aulayaiqsimarugut Kaktoviġmiut

                                                            tavra!

now Alasuuraq will draw the first prize because I believe he is our oldest

    Elder here

   we will draw a couple few more door prizes

                                                        now at the start

                             and then the rest at the end of the meeting

                                  I know we have a lot to talk about