Scroll down to find a specific poet. (in chronological order of original posting):
Lamont Steptoe Lewis Grupper Zaineb Alani Chocolate Waters Robert Gibbons Sarah Cozort Mitchel Cohen Colleen Erin Christine Goodman Paul Aaron Maria Chisolm Precious Jones Gary Esolen Penelope McGuffin
Lamont Steptoe
AT THE SHORE
At the Shore
Shackled and chained
Hobbled in Iron
Many of the African captives
Grabbed fistfuls of earth
For the last time
Filled their mouths with Mother Africa
They swallowed their culture
Filling their bellies with Black Power
Before sailing into the unknown
The sun was a bloody mucus
That sizzled as it slipped beneath the horizon
They ate the continent they were leaving
An unusual kind of grieving
This was the last meal of the condemned
The stink and confinement of a ships hole
Awaited them
The rage of whips and curses and rape
The cruel jaws of sharks
The deep dungeon of unmerciful salt water
Stood as their future
The journey they faced
Left them zombies if they survived
Death was a blessing
At the shore
They swallowed their land
Like a communion wafer
Of a religion the other side of nightmare
(Originally postedJuly 24, 2008)
To contact Lamont Steptoe send an email to: maybellesboy@yahoo.com
Lewis Grupper
BEAUTY
AND THE BEAST
Birds flying in
formation
Curling on the currents’
Waves of winds
Only one U.S.soldier was killed in Iraq today
Only one family in mourning
Only one
(Originally posted July 24, 2008)
To contact Lewis Grupper send an email to: Lewgru@aol.com
Zaineb Alani
DAD'S WAKE-UP CALL
Like he was kissing God’s face, on the prayer rug every dawn as he bent to kiss our sleeping cheeks.
Every morning, always . . . the few irresistable moments before our wake-up time . . .
(Originally posted August 17, 2008) To contact Zaineb Alani send an email to: zainebalani@gmail.com or visit: www.thewordsthatcomeout.blogspot.com
Chocolate Waters
QUESTION I AM SOMETIMES ASKED
Do you want to be the next Adrienne Rich? No. I want to be the first Chocolate Waters.
(Originally posted October 4, 2008)
To contact Chocolate Waters send email to: cwatersATnycDOTrrDOTcom or visit: www.chocolatewaters.com
Robert Gibbons
A JIM CROW ROW
(a tribute to Jesse B. Semple) Homage to James Langston Hughes
Semple enrolls in Central Middle School in Cleveland. His 7th grade teacher decides to divide the class based on color. She did not know that one of her students in that row had a history and would make history. She called the row a Jim Crow row. She did not know his great grand- father, Lewis Leary, fought with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. She did not know his grandfather was the famous abolitionist, Charles Langston. She did not know that his uncle the legendary John Mercer Langston would not become President of Howard University, and the first African-American member of Congress from Virginia. She did not know that the state of Oklahoma would eventually have a Langston University named after this family. It was simple to accept his segregation, but as you know though he is Jesse B. Semple, simple is just not good enough. All she knew was: a row of tragic mulattoes a row of tomato/tomatoes a row of demarcation a row of gentrification a row of pro-choice a row from the Village voice a row with sounds of the tom-tom a row that followed Raymond’s run a row with no emancipation a row with a proclamation a row in the tenderloins a row on a sharecropper’s farm a row on the church pew a row of a darker hue don’t you know it was a Jim Crow row
There were two Bolshevik women, and she lay down between them. One was a pale, supple perovskia atriplicifolia, the Russian wild flower, and lay strong, unguarded, solitary as in a remote field. The other was nothing more than a woman, but strangely greater than the sum of her woman's parts, and both were close but unreachable. Only their breath in the dark, metered, slightly out of tune as a distant song, was indistinguishable one from the other and from her own.
Two vast and trunkless legs of steel Like silent Pharaohs over Wall Street stood Scraping the vast canvas of immortality
How many died erecting those towers: Welders of iron, exoskeletal beams? Manhattan is missing her two front teeth Can you help me find them?
What were their thoughts on that morning's long fall? Beat, you wings! Just another few breaths! Millions of fingers - of Flesh, of Memory - Sift and sift that ancient dust
Manhattan is missing her two front teeth Help me find them!
Now, only a torn, disfigured pedestal remains And on it these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.*
Autumn, impervious, Mocking our imperial pretense, Swirls her bluest skirt, whips her hips, Casts the bones of September Like I-Ching sticks over Baghdad Throwing sunsets to die for.
*Stanza recycled from Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias," 1817.
Poem reprinted from Mitchel Cohen's The Permanent Carnival, 2006.
The tow truck finally arrives to take their car
away. It's been three years since they died; motionless in the driveway
all that time, the snow piling on top of the hood and the autumn leaves
rotting underneath the windshield wipers and the summer rain rusting
the hubcaps. A postmodern sculpture changes with the seasons. Scrapmetal,
I watch as the slow funereal procession makes its way past my window, but it is
raining and so I have to rub the moisture away.
It was a quiet storm on a quiet North
Carolina February day. Saura, your eyes opened widely. Our curtains
shivered in the spirited wind.
Out the window flew my soul
with yours as rain fell hard from my eyelids. It was all over
so suddenly.
It was then the tree limbs fell around us. Earth
split open its craggy domain. Rocks falling, as from the sky meant
nothing to me but a cover for your grave.
And there was
nothing. Birds and buzz saws were silent. Car engines faded off into
the distance. A last whistle sounded from the train. You will be
with us no more.
The breasts that I loved to touch are cold
now, a last lingering kiss on cold lips, no longer a lover’s thrill,
but “good-bye.”
We do not need to fight with the wind
and the rain. Nature's bigger moment has come upon us.
After
the storm is over there is a quiet blue in the silent sky.
(Originally posted December 7, 2008)
To
contact Paul Aaron send an email to: doc@paulaaron.com
Maria Chisolm
DANCING WITH DADDY
I hear the sounds of the tap tap
dancer. Memories from my childhood.
He wore a black suit
and bowtie. A top hat and a twirling cane with white rubber tips and a
smile, always a smile for the camera.
He had jokes
to tell and songs to sing and yes, there were showgirls with flashy head
dresses, pantyhose legs with low cut and high cut skimpy wear.
Joe Chisolm
Peg Leg Bates Lon Chaney The Clark Brothers Sammy Davis Jr.
and Gregory Hines
are a few
names that were black tap dancers. I hear the sounds. Tah Tap. Tah Tah Tah
Tap.
Ya know when I was a little girl I used to
watch my father tap. He had people to speak with. Autographs to sign.
Busy. Busy. Busy in the lime light of show business around the
world.
One day he took my hand and we danced. He
taught me how. I had black patent leather shoes, a mini skirt and a white
blouse with my hair always pulled back.
We
had rehearsals over and over again. “Can you hear it?” He’d ask. “Can you
feel it?” He’d ask. I would struggle, trip, and fall then lose
count. I wanted to get it right and I did. I heard the rhythm and was able
to impersonate the routine that he created. “That’s it!” He said. “Come
on! Make it real! Here we go! Here-We-Go!”
Tah
Tap. Tah Tap. Tah Tah Tah Tah Tap! And Ooow!
TeeTee TeeTee TeeTee Dap! Tic-e-dee Tic-e-dee
Tic-e-dee Tic-e-dee Bah! And slide. Dah Dah! “Bring it back.” Click Click
Bah!
“Posture.” He reminded me. “Focus
and count. 1 and 2 and 3 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 1 and 2 and 3. Loosen up.
Relax. Move. Move. Move. Dance!” Yes, I was dancing with
Daddy!
“Don’t curve your shoulders.” He said. “Where are your
arms? Balance Darling. Focus and count. 1 and 2 and 3 and 1
and 2 and 3 and 1 and 2 and 3 . Hips! Let’s see those hips! Yes I know you
have blistered feet but keep smilin’. Always smile for the camera cause
that’s show business little girl!”
He was Mr.
Entertainer for the rest of his life. The write ups. The pictures. It was
the extravaganza of it all with showgirls and flashy head dresses,
pantyhose legs with low cut, and high cut skimpy wear.
Yet in time people slow down. Being three thousand miles
away we got the call to say, “Your father is falling into a dream. It’s
cancer. Please come.” “Don’t stop breathing.” I said to myself on
the plane. “Just don’t stop breathing.” But he did. Just a few hours
before we got there. And as I viewed him in the chapel room at rest, I saw
a perfect picture of success. I saw vulnerability, family and
friends. I saw gentleness, freedom, and quiet. And the quiet led my
passivity to remember how we danced years ago.
Joe Chisolm Peg
Leg Bates Lon Chaney The Clark
Brothers Sammy Davis Jr. and
Gregory Hines
Click Click Bah!
(Originally posted December 28,
2008)
To contact Maria Chisolm send an email to:
steve@stevebloompoetry.net and I will pass it on for you.
Precious Jones WHEN I SAY I'M TIRED OF WRITING
When I say I haven’t written a
poem in two months what I mean is
I can’t sleep thinking about
my friend’s broken nose in need of surgery—her husband’s mistress
showed up at the job unannounced—there’s no metaphor for violence when
it’s your face held up, bloody, to the light. I won’t title this for two
weeks, nameless, unlike my cousin’s baby, Maria for three months,
aborted three days ago. I read more issues of Vanity Fair than ever
before sitting in the waiting room, a young Asian man’s arms around his
lover, crying.
No woman does this for fun, like writing a poem,
an invasive procedure, all of you exposed and expelled; I can’t
write recuperating from latex gloves that irritate me more than a split
infinitive. When I say I’m tired of writing, means I’m ready for
real-time love that ain’t bogged down in tropes ‘cause I finally found a
woman who says what she means. When I say I’ve put poetry on the back
burner, I’ve buried an uncle who meant more to me than a
three-minute slam poem mocking the republican mafia; I’d like to unearth
memories of him without rhyme & wit on the tip of my tongue.
Ten months into the year, every poem’s a morgue preoccupied with
death: the coming of cancer, lumpectomies, chemo scheduled in between open
mikes. I’ve seen women lose breasts as swiftly as the elderly lose
memory, seen cancer in remission return like a boogey man to finish the
job; suddenly a poem making love to the sweet and supple curves of a
woman ends with her body embalmed in an elegy.
When I say I’m tired
of writing, I mean I’d like to be alone, though we’re never alone, ‘cause
the dead are as entitled as the living to sunsets from a front porch
in South Carolina, where Nanna’s first love was lynched with a poem in his
shirt pocket, the strangled verse of the departed buried in the
dense cotton air of Orangeburg whose history I can’t unwrite; an heirloom
undesirable as a fetus, an aborted memory caught between Nanna’s grief
and the dead-weight of my pen.
No metaphor for violence when
it’s your face, bloody, your breasts, when it’s your lover held up,
bloody, to the light, your words held up, bloody, and a poem or two
overdue.
(Originally posted January 4,
2009)
To contact Precious Jones send an email to:
s_mecca@hotmail.com
Gary Esolen
PROVERBS
Every choice is a forced choice. If you're a nail,
stand still. If you're a hammer, strike. Plant turnips, eat turnips.
Bury the dead, or smell them. If your wife is drunk, the bottle's
empty. The sprout can't hide in the seed. Say yes or say no.
Maybe is no, unless it's yes.
(Originally posted January 18, 2009)
To contact Gary Esolen send an email
to: gesolen@gmail.com
Penelope
McGuffin REMEMBERING ETHEL R.
She knew she should live so
she wouldn't die. She didn't want to leave her love, her babies
or the world that she spent only a few decades
inhabiting. She wouldn't die. So they gave the chair
more juice and her decision was overruled!
(Originally postedJanuary 28, 2009)
To contact Penelope
McGuffin send an email to: Steve@stevebloompoetry.net and he will pass
your message along.
