Poetry
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Animals were once, for all of us, teachers. They instructed us in ways of being and perceiving that extended our imaginations, that were models for additional possibilities. We watched them make their way through the intricacies of their lives with wonder and with awe.
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the women wet the waterfront with womb water, delivering coral children whose ceilings are fluid and permutable.
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like choppy water, frothy and forthright, she spouts destroying the placidity of my man made emotions structurally unsound deficient of reason wet like woman she is fit only for swallowing
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Citizen, enemy, mama’s boy, sucker, utter garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht; a scalp so often scalded with boiled water that the puny brain feels completely cooked. Yes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden rubble which you now arrive to sift. All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven. Also: we didn’t…
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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and…
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The Help: I know I’m a day late and a dollar short in discussing The Help but I recently saw an interview/discussion between Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Tavis Smiley that made me order the book. I read it relatively quickly over a weekend. During my reading of it, a quote from Alice Walker…
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So long had life together been that now the second of January fell again on Tuesday, making her astonished brow lift like a windshield wiper in the rain, so that her misty sadness cleared, and showed a cloudless distance waiting up the road. So long had life together been that once the snow…
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A think brown-haired girl pouts high on stage. She cannot swing her slight body round the new pole. It runs floor to ceiling, piercing the strip club like a shaft of light the way the voice of God appears in movies. Except this pole is plastic and God would gurgle because it’s full of liquid…
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Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. First, there was the heaving oil, heavy as chaos; then, likea light at the end of a tunnel, the lantern of a caravel, and that was…
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(To Che, not in memoriam) Your skin linked to the bone was lost in the earth. The tear, the poem and the memory are carving on the fire the song of death with golden machine-guns from wherever you are. And here, each night your books are searched for the just motive of all action and…
Tichaona Chinyelu 