by David Lehman
I know some readers need to see their lives reflected from the page—
It lets them know they aren’t alone.
The art it takes to make that kind of comfort
is not something I look upon with scorn.
But after a while, you start to feel like, to the world, white
is all you’ll ever be.
And gradually, after all the struggling against,
after tasting your own fear of being
only what you are,
you accept—
Then, with fresh determination, you lean forward again.
You write whiter and whiter.
from The Paris Review
MAJOR JACKSON
* * *
OK Cupid
Dating a Catholic is like dating a tribe
and dating a tribe is like dating a nation
and dating a nation is like dating a football star
and dating a football star is like dating a new car
and dating a new car is like dating an air freshener
and dating an air freshener is like dating a fake tree
and dating a fake tree is like dating silver tinsel
and dating silver tinsel is like dating a holiday
and dating a holiday is like dating a black man
and dating a black man is like dating a top
and dating a top is like dating a bottom
and dating a bottom is like dating a Tibetan
and dating a Tibetan is like dating a dragon
and dating a dragon is like dating a fireplace
and dating a fireplace is like dating a mantel
and dating a mantel is like dating a picture frame
and dating a picture frame is like dating Martin Luther King with Jesus
and dating Martin Luther King & Jesus is like dating a threesome
and dating a threesome is like dating a commune
and dating a commune is like dating an unachievable idea
and dating an idea is like dating the Enlightenment
and dating the Enlightenment is like dating science
and dating science is like dating a beaker
and dating a beaker is like dating a pharmacy
and dating a pharmacy is like dating a dealer
and dating a dealer is like dating a supply chain
and dating a supply chain is like dating a Republican
and dating a Republican is like dating winter
and dating winter is like dating Demeter
and dating Demeter is like dating corn
and dating corn is like dating pancakes
and dating pancakes is like dating an orgasm
and dating an orgasm is like dating Utopia
and dating Utopia is like dating an Amish woman
and dating an Amish woman is like dating a Luddite
and dating a Luddite is like dating a folk hero
and dating a folk hero is like dating Robert Zimmerman
and dating Robert Zimmerman is like dating history
and dating history is like dating a white man
and dating a white man is like dating insecurity
and dating insecurity is like dating a Hummer
and dating a Hummer is like dating The Pentagon
and dating The Pentagon is like dating a lost star
and dating a lost star is like dating a liberal
and dating a liberal is like dating a Jew
and dating a Jew is like dating a lamp
and dating a lamp is like dating a blonde
and dating a blonde is like dating a Swede
and dating a Swede is like dating IKEA
and dating IKEA is like dating Whole Foods
and dating Whole Foods is like dating a yoga instructor
and dating a yoga instructor is like dating an e-reader
and dating an e-reader is like dating a television
and dating a television is like dating a commercial
and dating a commercial is like dating a serial murderer
and dating a serial murderer is like dating Raskolnikov
and dating Raskolnikov is like dating a rationalist
and dating a rationalist is like dating an academic
and dating an academic is like dating a CV
and dating a CV is like dating a white woman
and dating a white woman is like dating a bread line
and dating a bread line is like dating a refugee
and dating a refugee is like dating a Cuban
and dating a Cuban is like dating a propane flame
and dating a flame is like dating a topless jihadist
and dating a jihadist is like dating a femme fatale
and dating a femme fatale is like dating Paris Hilton
and dating Paris Hilton is like dating a tabloid
and dating a tabloid is like dating a Communist
and dating a Communist is like dating cut flowers
and dating cut flowers is like dating infidelity
and dating infidelity is like dating a pool
from Tin House
AMAUD JAMAUL JOHNSON
* * *
L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates Dead at 83
—We were the finest.
So the parents blamed the children,
and the children marched barefoot
through the alleys, spray-painting
their age. And the preacher introduced
the word “lascivious” and accused
the congregation of not tiding
when the daughter died.
And the deacon board smoked.
And the economists saluted Reagan.
And the police called it an economy of dust.
Our meteorologist predicted
a low-pressure system in the abdomen.
And the junkies swore perfume rung the air.
The grocer had his union; the butcher couldn’t
outrun his quarter of spoiled blood.
And the girls wore extra rings
and caked their skin with Vaseline.
And the men slept the afternoon,
growing childishly morose as they dreamed.
And I think I thought we’d burn then,
when the refinery blew, and rust began
to bleed through the whitewashed fence,
when the lawns were done, and the schoolyard
darkened, and the side streets began to split.
from Crazyhorse
DOUGLAS KEARNEY
* * *
The Labor of Stagger Lee: Boar
pigs prey to piggishnesses. get ate from the rooter to the tooter.
I’m a hog for you baby, I can’t get enough go the wolfish crooner.
the gust buffeted porker roll in the hay or laid down
in twig rapine. let me in, let me in.
no drum-gut, Stagger’s stomach a tenement:
his deadeye bigger than his brick house.
Stagger Lee live by the want and die by the noose,
whose greedy void like a whorehouse
full of empties getting full. can’t get enough!
rumored Stagger would root through pussy
to plumb a fat boy. here piggy! what Lee see he seize.
manful, ham-fisted. sorry Billy,
your name mud and who love dirt like swine?
they get in it like a straw house. it’ll be cold out
before Lee admit his squeals weren’t howls.
he got down. he get dirty.
from Poetry
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
* * *
Negritude
I have also been left singing “Careless Love”
but my negritude is nobody’s coonskin cap
&nb
sp; on a mountaintop or down by the riverside.
My negritude has sucked all the joy juice
from the days of wild virginal forests
I made to kneel with axe & crosscut.
My negritude has beaten tom-toms
till the drawstring of doubt unraveled
& blood leaked on my blue suede shoes.
My negritude came a long ways to find me
in Louisiana beside beckoning quicksand,
a disappearing act & the double limbo.
My negritude is the caul worked into soil
brought back to life by cosmic desire
& gratitude baked into my daily bread.
My negritude sways before a viper’s
truth serum on an iron spearhead,
belladonna tucked behind my left ear.
From afar, Cesaire, your wit & fidelity
made me stumble-dance a half mile
here, beyond any puppet’s hallelujah,
while Grandmama sat in a wheelchair
among the tangled rows of collards,
okra, speckled peas, & sweet corn,
digging with a hoe honed so many years
the blade was a quarter moon—all the
strength she had in her twisted body.
Now, even if this is a sign of my negritude,
I still remember a rain-drenched sun
rising out of the loony old scrub oaks.
Sure, I know the tiger neither speaks
of her tigritude nor the blood she’s left
on grass & wildflowers around the tombs.
from Gris-Gris
HAILEY LEITHAUSER
* * *
In My Last Past Life
In my last past life I had a nut brown wife,
a gray and white house looking over the sea,
a forest for love and a river for grief,
a lantern for hope, for courage a knife,
a city for distance, lights spread on the sea.
In my last past life I had a brown wife
subtle and busy and contented and brief,
(she stood in the dusk silhouette with the sea)
a forest and love and a river, and grief
was a ghost hidden green in the leaves,
an echo off cliffs that bound back the sea.
In that life it would last, my past and my wife,
the wren in the garden, the moon on the roof,
the day winds that flirted and teased at the sea,
the forest that loved and the river that grieved
the life that was garden and day wind and thief
(each sunrise and sundown the turn of the sea)
the life that I had, and my last brown wife,
a forest for love, a still river for grief.
from Southwest Review
LARRY LEVIS
* * *
Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze inside It
The idea turned out to be no more than a cart wheel
Stuck in mud, & unturned fields spreading to the horizon while
Two guys in a tavern went on drinking tsuica & recalling their one
Accomplishment in life—the seduction of a virgin on the blank
Pedestal of a statue where Stalin had once stood.
The State is an old man’s withered arm.
~
The only surviving son of Jesus Christ was Karl Marx.
You can tell by the last letter of his name,
Which has the shape & frail balance of an overturned cross
On a windswept hillside. It marked the end of things.
Of lumber that rots & falls. The czar is a shattered teacup,
The trouble with a good idea is that it has to work:
The only surviving son of Jesus Christ survives now
Mostly in English departments & untended graves.
One thing he said I still remember, a thing that’s never there
When I try to look it up, was: “Sex should be no more important . . .
Than a glass of water.” It sounded vaguely like the kind of thing
Christ might have said if Christ had a sense of humor.
The empty bar that someone was supposed to swing to him
Did not arrive, & so his outstretched flesh itself became
A darkening trapeze. The two other acrobats were thieves.
~
My colleague Otto Fick, who twenty years ago
Wrote brilliant lectures on the air, sometimes
Would pause & seem to consult notes left
On a podium, & then resume. A student once
Went up after class to look at them & found
Only a blank sheet of paper. Nothing there.
“In theory, I believe in Marx. In fact, my wife
Has to go in next week for another
Biopsy. Fact is disbelief. One day it swells up
In front of you, the sky, the sunlight on everything,
Traffic, kids on surfboards waiting for the next
Big set off San Onofre. It’s all still there . . . just
There for someone else, not for you.” This is what
My friend Otto told me as we drove to work.
~
I worked with men in vineyards once who were paid
In wages thin as water, cash that evaporated & rose like heat.
They lived in rows of makeshift sheds the owner hauled
Into an orchard too old to bother picking anymore,
And where, at dusk, a visible rushing hunger
Raced along the limbs of the trees surrounding them.
Their kids would watch it happen until a whole tree would seem
To vanish under it. There were so many of them.
By then the rats were flying over a sickening trapeze of leaves
And the tree would darken suddenly. It would look like brown water
Rushing silently & spreading everywhere
Before it got dark anyway & the kids went in.
“There was more rats in there than there was beads on all the rosaries of the dead.
We wen’ to confession all the time then ’cause we thought we might disappear
Under them trees. There was a bruja in the camp but we dint go to her no more.
She couldn’t predict nothing. And she’d always cry when you asked her questions,”
A woman said who had stayed there for a while.
Every revolution ends, or it begins, in memory:
Someone remembering her diminishment & pain, the way
Her scuffed shoes looked in the pale light,
How she inhaled steel filings in the grinding shed
For thirty years without complaining once about it,
How she might have done things differently. But didn’t.
How it is too late to change things now. How it isn’t.
from Blackbird
GARY COPELAND LILLEY
* * *
Sermon of the Dreadnaught
The guitar: I take communion
daily in this shack of a church
with a moaner’s bench rubbed
smooth by repentant backsliders.
I listen to the seventh note,
graced by God, it is my battle-axe,
a joyful noise no more modern
than that old-time religion
cooking on the woodstove
in my grandmothers’ kitchens.
Holy ghosted, I have been washed
in the blackwater cypress swamp
that flows inside my guitar.
A solid top, and I play it righteous
as any stingy brim disciple that ever
has played a small town bus stop,
and I got a missing canine tooth
from the right side of my mouth
and now my gospel is cobalt blue.
I remember the purity of
the old guys,
Lucky Strike smokers and homebrew
drinkers with open tunings, sanctified
imperfections, scarred and battered
harmonies. They have introduced me
to the hollering haints who now hold
late night prayer service in my guitar.
I believe in the palm oil that anoints
the guitar. I believe in life as sure
as I believe in death. I confess
the ancestor spirits and their love
accompanies me. The bloodline
has dressed me in that glorious suit
that we only wear when we are
our true selves. In the ascending heat
there is a train of guitar moments,
boxcars of dualities in the everyday
choices that we make. I have been
delivered, blessed by this guitar
that brought me home from forty years
in the urban American deserts,
back to the piney woods of Carolina,
this old rugged guitar, my cross
to bear, this everlasting church
of the mule-driving sharecroppers.
from MiPOesias
FRANNIE LINDSAY
* * *
Elegy for My Mother
But I still have my river-mother
and all of her glittering fish,
my sycamore-mother who never is cold,
my star-white mother whose eyes
need no closing,
whose wind-stripped hands need not crochet,
whose dove-plain dress does not rip
on the drag of the gutter’s wind,
whose kicked-off galoshes never lined up
with all the black pumps of the mothers
of Hillcrest Road,
my mother whose fiddle has two
curved hurts for its f-holes,
magnolia-mother shedding her petals of snow,
tearless November mother refusing soup,
leaving her wig on the steps
for the grackles to nest in,
