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Dear Saint Patrick, this is Peggy, Or maybe it’s Pegeen to you, Well, I’m really Stella Mae. Peggy’s my nickname, But anyway, will you please tell me What to do about the rattlesnake That’s in my room? I know it’s there, But I can’t find it anywhere I search. I’ve ransacked the closet more than…
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Deprived of their original language, the captured and indentured tribes create their own, accreting and secreting fragments of an old, an epic vocabulary, from Asia and from Africa, but to an ancestral, an ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture, while nouns are renamed and the given names of…
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In the World language, sometimes called Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola under it is a symbol for speculation. Thumbs down to ear and tongue: World can be written and read, even painted but not spoken. People use their own words. Latin letters are in it for names, for e.g. OK and H2SO4,…
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A noun sentence, no verb to it or in it: to the sea the scent of the bed after making love … a salty perfume or a sour one. A noun sentence: my wounded joy like the sunset at your strange windows. My flower green like the phoenix. My heart exceeding my need, hesitant between…
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Strange but true is the story of the sea-turtle and the shark- the instinctive drive of the weak to survive in the oceanic dark. Driven, riven by hunger from abyss to shoal, sometimes the shark swallows the sea-turtle whole. The sly reptilian marine withdraws, into the shell of his undersea craft, his leathery head and…
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The below quote is taken from the chapter, Framing the Panther – Assata Shakur and Black Female Agency by Joy James [Assata Shakur’s] eulogy for Safiya Bukhari, given in Havana on August 29, 2003, is haunting. Bukhari collapsed hours after she buried her own mother-the grandmother who raised Safiya Bukhari’s young daughter the day…
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Two of my poems, The Death of California Revisited & Weaver Woman, were just published by Outward Link. Check them out!
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I am starting to work my slow way through Omeros. I stopped to google Omeros – Derek Walcott. I found the following link. It’s him reading a very brief excerpt and then taking questions from the audience. You will have to scroll through the list of names to find Walcott. They also have episodes with…
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For the rest of the year, I will be posting bits and pieces from books I’ve read this year…even if they didn’t make it on my end of the year roundup. Today’s “bit” is Belle Waring’s It Was My First Nursing Job excerpted from Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. …