NarrativeNortheast

MALE VIOLENCE: ARE WE PRISONERS OF MASCULINITY? — Quassan Castro

on June 17 | in Creative Nonfiction & Memoir | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Men and boys have become increasingly violent. Within the last 13 years, all too common is the scenario of a male entering a public place, shooting folks and taking his life or that of other human beings. Imagine the terror in the eyes of the innocent as they are violently confronted by the wounded male. A few days ago, Roswell school shooter Mason Campbell was deemed competent to stand trial during a hearing. The 12-year-old had allegedly fired several shots from a gun on January 14. Two students, Nathaniel Tavarez and Kendal Sanders, were severely wounded in the shooting.

The remedy for ending male violence does not solely lie in ridding the world of guns or calling for tougher gun laws that seek to minimize the visibility of guns. While calling for tougher gun laws is a conversation that should take place, we also need to have a dialogue about the suffering emotional lives of boys and men. A conversation about healing the emotional lives of boys and men is often the meal less desired. Like discussions of religion and sexuality, discussions of the emotional well being of males stir up uncomfortable feelings for some.

From boyhood we are taught to be strong as men. We are taught to “tough it out” when faced with hurt. We are taught that our emotional self can dominate over our physical self. We are taught if one hits or strikes us, we must not be weak; we must strike back or be labeled as a “punk” or a “sissy.” We are also taught that we are to dominate others. I cannot discuss the male violence trend without speaking of patriarchy. When boys break free from identifying with wayward notions of masculinity, they are severely punished in a system of societal patriarchy, such is the case of 9-year-old Grayson Bruce who was harassed at school for carrying a My Little Pony backpack, which he uses as a lunch box.

Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists males are superior and everyone else is weak. Patriarchy enforces domination over the weak through various rituals of inflicted psychological wounds and violent impulses. One alarming aspect of patriarchy is the teaching that suggests males must not feel or express pain. This aspect of patriarchy suggests males should avoid emotional connectedness. When boys come home self-expressive, beaten or too emotional, a system of patriarchy mourns. The male learns to suppress his feelings and emotions at all cost in a system that punishes an emotionally expressive male.

When we decide to ignore all factors that contribute to men and boys violent impulses, we are enforcing patriarchy. The wounded male that has not healed of patriarchy is more prone to enter into public places and kill in moments of rage. Healing the wounded male spirit should be an all inclusive community affair.

Patriarchy violates the male psyche and spirit, which undermines and prevents the emotional well being of males from a path of healing. It creates a culture where male pain remains stifled. Nihilism coupled with patriarchy is a recipe for an explosion inside of the hurting male. He hurts, so he hurts others. Let us expand our conversation as it relates to what we need to do as Americans to stop these violent shootings, which have unfortunately become a trend. We cannot continue to discuss men obsession with violence without discussing the emotional lives of boys.

Feminism is the one consistent place where patriarchy is challenged. Until healing the emotional lives of males become just as important as the air we breathe, we will continue to be undermined by patriarchal thinking. One thing I understand as being certain is until we confront and seek to not only have conversations about patriarchy but to eradicate the system, we will continue to experience massive shootings from men and boys with stifled pain.

This piece was published previously in Huffington Post and used with permission by the author, Quassan Castro.

He has a MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. He is a journalist, columnist, entertainment and culture critic, poet and author. His work ranges from personal essays, fiction, poetry, music and book reviews, celebrity interviews and culture writing. Quassan is social media publicist for Dr. bell hooks. His works have been featured in top national magazines and top online outlets that include Essence Magazine, Essence Magazine Online, Heart and Soul Magazine Online, BET (Black Entertainment Television), Black Enterprise Online, Jet Magazine Online, National Education Association and Huffington Post. His work has published in several college literary anthologies including The Sundance Writer: A Rhetoric Handbook, Get Writing: Sentences and Paragraphs, Sundance Choice Composition and Structured Reading.
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MARGIE’S — Allyson Parker

on June 14 | in Creative Nonfiction & Memoir | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Tonight I am wishing I were two. I’d like to start all over again, right with the potty training, even, and try to do everything right this time.

I remember potty training, believe it or not. And for those of you that like to laugh at humorous yarns, this is not one of them so you might want to skip it.

So there we are in Margie’s dooryard. Margie lives in the farmhouse across the hill. When it’s hot it’s always fun to walk through the barn and smell the hay and trampled dust. Hide and seek with the chickens. Swat flies with the cows’ tails. Big lumbering Murray, Margie’s youngest son, is milking the cows and he’ll squirt some warm milk directly into my mouth then laugh when I smile because I like it. He’s proud of me that I’m not wearing diapers and my nickname won’t be Stinky-lady-dink anymore. But it was my nickname for a long time after that, I think; my later memories bring feelings of shame. But not when I was two, that’s just what Murray called me, so everybody else did, too.

So there we are at Margie’s. Everyone is in the kitchen that smells like coffee and sour dishrags. The adults are talking so fervently, I guess. I don’t know, I don’t remember my exact thoughts, remember? I do remember the panic of being caught behind Margie’s torn up chintz covered farm couch, the one all the cats were allowed to sleep on. There the cats were, lazing in the sun slant, and there I was. I must have felt like I had to go to the potty but I don’t think I really did anything until I got caught. Behind the couch. But who knows? Memories from two to now sure can be tangled.

So there we are in Margie’s bathroom, in the old farmhouse across the hill. It’s got lots of discarded clothing on the floor and lots of pictures of butterflies. I certainly won’t profess to remember what I thought or said during those potty-training moments, but I sure as hell remember the process, the why I became trained. Anything foul, even your own soiled underwear, will make a lasting impression if it’s rubbed in your face, forced into your memory. The taste of your own piss when you lick your lips never goes away.

So there we are in the creek (“crick” as Margie calls it) down behind the cornfield. This is a vivid memory, because we used to go there all the time, all summer. Every summer. I remember being seven; Kristine, my sister, is four. Mum is yelling at us. “You kids put sneakers on in the creek! I’m not pulling any bloodsuckers off of you!” Margie wades out in her old-lady bathing suit with the funny looking skirt that just makes her legs look fatter than they are. She hands us our Keds, which we think are totally yucky, and screeches just like Mum: “I ain’t pullin’ off no leeches, neither!” I can already feel one as I run my hands over my leg. They’re probably all over my toes, too. I lift a foot up and wave it at my sister. She grins and digs her fingernails in to pull them off for me. We have conspired on this always. We love leeches. We throw them in her bucket and put just enough water in. Later we will dump salt on them and watch them explode. We do not think this is gross. Mum and Margie do, but they think we don’t do this any more since last time they hit us with the wooden spoon with “Mother’s Helper” written on it in black permanent marker. Mum and Margie sit under the trees and read books. They drink beer. We drink creek water.

So here we are up at the lot. Dad and the workmen are raising the frame for the new house. Krissy and I play on the lumber piles, throw sawdust at each other. We take naps in the little camper we borrow from Uncle Tommy. It’s so hot in there; I dream of wading in the creek. I would even like to see some bloodsuckers right now; they live in the cool underwater world where it’s not so hot. I am eleven and I have small pointy breasts developing. The workman with the orange bandanna in his pocket comments about how fast little girls grow up nowadays. He stares at my chest in my too-small swimming suit top and I now know the feeling of being self-conscious.

So now I am sixteen and I am in high school. I am a shy overweight teenager and I am raped by a teacher I thought was my friend. He tells me he cares, he drives me around in his convertible MG, he buys me exotic ice cream. He takes me to his apartment one afternoon and pins me to the floor, I am captured in a slant of sunlight yet it feels so cold. He shoves himself inside me and he is shocked when I bleed.

I remember going numb, but not too numb. Not too numb to run into his bathroom and lock the door, wondering about how I am going to get home. I remember the pain, the physical, the deep inside where no one will ever invade again pain. The taste of your own fear when you lick your lips

never goes away.

So twelve years later I tell Ellen, my partner, my friend, all about this pain. It is only fair. She is angry with the jokers, the cruel schoolkids who never knew the real situation; they made it out to be all my fault.

So I think back to my mother, who never said she knew what happened. She had to know, didn’t she? Ellen says yes, my mum had to know; but she couldn’t, wouldn’t accept what happened to her little girl. She blamed me, my mother did. She too thought I asked for it. When you don’t wear your sneakers in the creek the bloodsuckers know it. They’ll seep the life right out of you.

So here we are, my mother and I, arguing yet again, screaming nasties at one another until we cry. I am thirty-something and Margie is not here but she still has her chintz-covered couch. And all the cats—children of the ones when I was two—still laze in the sun slant as perhaps they were trained to do.

My mother’s voice is abrasive, insisting that I’m a loser. She calls me many things. I shut myself in the bathroom, the only door with a lock.

She’s still yelling but I’m thinking of butterflies on the wall, back at Margie’s, wishing I was two so I could start all over again and do everything right this time.

Alysson B. Parker is a writer by passion but a secondary school teacher, freelance editor, and journalist by financial necessity. She has published work with Driftwood Press, The Binnacle, Northern New England Review, Ophelia Street, Scars, Kota, Deep South (New Zealand), A Room of Her Own, ExPat Lit, and other miscellaneous publications. A regular contributor to EnPointe magazine, she has lived in many different countries and a variety of funky situations, but right now she and her family – plus two cats and a mutt who should be paying rent – live north of Boston.

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The Cheapness of Daily Life – Marge Piercy

on May 30 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

I might be killed because I’m a Jew
visiting a Holocaust museum or going
to study Torah. I might be shot
or stabbed because I’m a woman

and some man feels entitled
and deprived because other women
didn’t fuck him when he wanted,
didn’t devote herself to him.

I could be murdered because
a husband out of work feels useless
with media-bred anger like a chainsaw
running in his brain and the fault

has to be mine because I’m there.
I could have been killed because
I was a poor kid in the Detroit
ghetto where bullets spray like spittle

and nobody cares what girl or boy
happens to get in the explosive
way of revenge, profit, initiation
of some man whom rage entitles.

Knopf brought out Piercy’s 18^th poetry book THE HUNGER MOON: New & Selected Poems 1980-2010 in paperback. Other recent poetry includes THE CROOKED INHERITANCE; COLORS PASSING THOUGH US; WHAT ARE BIG GIRLS MADE OF. Piercy has published 17 novels, most recently SEX WARS; others include GONE TO SOLDIERS, THREE WOMEN, HE, SHE AND IT, and WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME. PM Press just republished DANCE THE EAGLE TO SLEEP, VIDA and BRAIDED LIVES with new introductions by Piercy. Her first collected short stories THE COST OF LUNCH, ETC. will be out in April. Her memoir is SLEEPING WITH CATS, Harper Perennial. Her work has been translated into 19 languages and she’s given readings, workshops or lectures at well over 450 venues here and abroad. Her CD is LOUDER, WE CAN’T HEAR YOU YET.. www.margepiercy.com

Copyright 2014 Marge Piercy

hagolem@c4.net
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CHOICES, A.K.A ADVICE TO THE ABUSER & POEM – NABILA LOVELACE

on April 24 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

You decided,

to open up your hand and
decorate my cheek with fire. A
swift movement across the
face.

Your mistake:

i. not killing me,
ii. striking with bloomed digits as
if for fashion, or pimp instruction,
iii. not loving yourself enough to
value your life.

I come from a tribe of not so nice nice
women. Us women with islands on our
hips are everything but balanced.

My grandmother sharpened her
tongue, before splitting the longitude
of a man, seatbelt style, with only
her mouth on the lords day.

Be afraid. Me and my girls are an
unrelenting pack. Don’t open your
palm to the mosaic of roses; rake
a body made of thorns unless
you intend to burn the whole garden.

A word of advice,
when you start a battle with a
person who calls living surviving
a meridian spanned war.
If you intend to strike, kill—
or keep your damn hands
away.

CHOICES: A response to the video “Leave Whores Alone! This video is only for men! Women, watch at your own risk!” by Manhood U

Many men love whores…a woman cannot be a whore without your support.

My womanhood and I have separated,
now owned by the male estate.
Climbed out in search of unused
holy and, knee-dropped to the
male whore Gods,

pressed her lips together

whispered for
redemption at
the gates—

got a farce forgiveness.
Glory be to the man who said

…Men are dogs, and
dogs do not lay down with
cats or bears, but bitches so
women have bitch tendencies.

You, and the ones like you,
are who I make Molotov of mouth,
slingshot of skin for,
a gutter bank of your laptop.

Whore: Uncle,
backyard entrance of my body
billowed breath on nape of neck
fell in love with girl—
no trace of women’s red.

Whore: my Aunts house,
shiver under husbands bludgeoned
hands. Slurred stance made
retired holiday of her joy, made
broken window of her body.

Whore: me whispering my name in
a sweat lined room to tell my limbs,
this is what it feels like to say YES.
It is not the cold blitzing under your nightie for warmth,
not the prayer finally skidding across the wrist
This is free.
It is my skin disguised as flight, buffer-less,
voice melting out to silk.

Whore: telling my niece’s beautiful
that it need not hide, never run
from the jackals clenched jaw—
salivating snare. Tell her,
you are so much free,
you do not owe the half ribbed;
the ones who will call you whore
after gouged holes in your
screams, stories and “stop”s!

There is a whole planet for us—
women with the wild eyes &
the legs that spread under
roof, sky, holy yes.
This is how I praise dance,
how I tell myself:

When ALL the boys tried to write
their names on you,
through guilt,
through knife
through walk in rain in same clothes,
through pin-down,
through gripped-arm,
through penetration.
You got up
& walked
& said
This is mine, mine, mine.

Nabila Lovelace is a born and raised Queens native, as well as a first generation American. Her parents hail from Trinidad and Tobago and Nigeria. She is a recent graduate of Emory University, and a winner of the 2013 Poets & Writers Amy Award. Currently she is living in Nanjing, China as a participant of the 2013-2014 AYC program. In her spare time she likes to eat Chocolate Chip cookies, and drink milkshakes.
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PERSEPHONE COMES BACK – Sara Backer

on April 23 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

The winter wasn’t that long, really–
forty years, you say? Forget it.
Move on to spring.

We’ve grown with these boulders
since they were pebbles pushing the earth,
gaining substance to challenge the sun.

Plastic palms sweat in fear of our return.
Cloth fern leaves curl and brown.
Wax roses melt, crying themselves into candles.

We’ll tunnel up by the Queen Anne cherry tree.
I promise you won’t be bored. Hang on
to those hard pits!

Demeter’s door slammed in our face
is a gift. We can be our own gods, now.
We have this one season.

Sara Backer’s poems have been published in over 100 journals, most recently in Wolf Willow Journal, Mobius: A Journal of Social Change, Turtle Island Quarterly, and The Rialto. More are forthcoming in Arc Poetry, Crab Creek Review, Gargoyle, and Carve. This year, she won prizes in the Gemini Poetry Open contest and Avalon Literary Review. For links to her writing online, visit my web site at www.sarabacker.com.
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DETROIT II – Caitlin Johnson

on April 23 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Like this city, she has been everything: best and worst,
lost and found, powerful and destitute.

Cut her open at the wrist and see what steel bleeds from
her. She will rise again.

Caitlin Johnson is the Managing Editor of CAIRN: The St. Andrews Review. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Lesley University. Her work has appeared in All Things Girl, Black Mirror Magazine, Charlotte Viewpoint, Fortunates, Pembroke Magazine, Vagina: The Zine, and What the Fiction, among other outlets. She blogs at cateismilesaway.blogspot.com.
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Stamp Collecting During Harsh Winter Months – Alysson Parker

on April 23 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

So I survived then, didn’t I? In those harsh winter months?
I took up stamp collecting. Thinking. Traveling. Why? In harsh winter,

months following weather of convertibles and zoology, she didn’t say,
“Why don’t you major in psychology?” No, in harsh winter months

she also never said, “Let’s go to the gym, shoot some hoops.” Her inimitable
handwriting in loops and insults, and we fought, always, in harsh winter.

Months left me floundering and flailing, desperately seeking love until
my mother began ailing, the internal cancers peaking: finally, in harsh

winter months prevailed. She bellowed and snapped, but I found
my territory and dreamed, then created a map in harsh winter months

filled with foreign stamps, chewed pencils, surrounded by tattered
books. The fiction and poetry of seasons, of icy harsh winter

months when I made bread and cakes, burnt offerings, learning to cook,
slathering poetry like butter. How else to survive harsh winter months?

I still wear the face of ordinary, make soufflés, collect my postage,
and mail myself, A. Parker, to distant countries with harsh winter months.

Alysson B. Parker is a writer by passion but a secondary school teacher, freelance editor, and journalist by financial necessity. She has published work with Driftwood Press, The Binnacle, Northern New England Review, Ophelia Street, Scars, Kota, Deep South (New Zealand), A Room of Her Own, ExPat Lit, and other miscellaneous publications. A regular contributor to EnPointe magazine, she has lived in many different countries and a variety of funky situations, but right now she and her family – plus two cats and a mutt who should be paying rent – live north of Boston.
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Murphy’s Berry Farm – Pia Taavila-Borsheim

on April 22 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

for Julia Garland Murphy, my great-grandmother

When my forbears homesteaded northwest Detroit
to grow bushels of berries on brambles in fields,
grand wagon wheels rutted dirt avenues down
to the farmers’ booth market and riverside docks.

They had sailed in from Ireland, from Tralee and Cork
from Dublin, Clondalkin, the rough countryside,
to dig in long rows of Michigan peat
to bear hail storms and blight, typhoid and drought

till the lathery blossoms ruffled their dreams.
In black and white snapshots crackled in frames,
a fierce old lady in feathers and furs
lifts her chin to stare down all doubters.

In another view, in a cotton white apron,
she pulls on the reins of two fine drafthorses,
leads them out from the backyard barns
while lilacs crowd the house and clothesline.

One last picture holds the next generations
minus my mother, away then at school.
Her mother and her mother’s mother stand
with their menfolk, their children, their aunts—

My birthdate and I lie thirty years thence.
Not yet was I meant to walk acres of stumps,
not yet meant to find the farrier’s tools
nor to wander the furrows of straw dust and root.

Pia Taavila-Borsheim’s recent work has appeared in Threepenny Review, Wordgathering, 32 Poems, Measure, storySouth, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Bear River Review and The Southern Review, among others. Her collected poems, Moon on the Meadow, was published by Gallaudet University Press in 2008; a chapbook, Two Winters, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2011. Other poems have just appeared in such anthologies as The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish-American Poetry, and Deaf Lit Extravaganza, while forthcoming journals include Fjords Review, Blue Lyra Review and Boneback Mountain Review.
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DEAR MOTHER – Merit O’Hare

on April 22 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

The fledglings, how do they do it? And the new-furred rabbits,
emerging from the nest? Something amiss
is what the air, electric, must warn the starlings;

the rabbits, they leave at twilight
and live, at first, among the foxgloves, seeking surrogates
in the cold white blossoms, becoming accustomed that way

to solitude. A week after I stood in the middle of a field
in Central Park, watching the sky darken with the rain
that would make it lush again

and listening to my father on the phone, three states away,
as he told me chemotherapy for six months, radiation for four

and a week after I took a taxi home, watching side streets
split off from Broadway like lifelines I couldn’t follow,

already imagining knots of hair clogging the drain,
filling your hands, excessive and precious, relinquished
like a beggar’s last gold coin—

I stepped into the scalding stream of water in the shower
and emerged after an hour, no longer sobbing, no longer
raising my hands in supplication.

I began to eat again: pomegranate seeds
one at a time, two almonds, one grape tomato.

I took one step forward and paused—
pressing my forehead against the window, exhausted—
then another. Secretly, turning my face away

in shame, I sank into the far corner of the room.
Touching for the first time the silk folds
of the curtain, the white petals of flowers in a vase,

I practiced being born again into the world,
this time without you.

Merit O’Hare’s work has appeared in The Portland Review, The Potomac Review and Mad Poets Review, as well as on Sirius Radio and at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City in a reading that featured poets such as Mark Strand and Edward Hirsch. A recent graduate, she was the recipient of Dickinson College’s Academy of American Poets Prize in 2009, 2010 and 2011, and has twice been invited to read at an international poetry festival at the college featuring poets from Italy, Germany, Israel, Russia, and Spain.

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To His Ex Wife, Jan 1 – Janet Butler

on April 22 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

This first day of a new year clouds blues skies
visible through the melt of smog, a light drift of noxious air
smelling of burnt things.

We walk the streets, quiet with the serenity
of a Sunday morning, our private skies obscured
by a shadow, left, we know, condemned to death

in life. Law demanded a guillotine stroke,
her heart a bruised fruit coming to rest
against the blade of midnight.

I notice pale green sprouts pushing up
against black earth, their translucent blades glowing,
a promise of spring.

Janet Butler lives in Alameda with Fulmi, a lovely Spaniel mix she rescued while living in central Italy. “Searching for Eden” was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2012, “Upheaval” was one of three winning selections in Red Ochre Lit’s 2012 Chapbook Contest. She recently placed, for the fourth year, in the Berkeley Poets annual poetry contest. She is moderator of the monthly Lit Night at Julie’s Coffee & Tea Garden in Alameda and is a member of the Frank Bette Center for the Arts, where she will teach a poetry course and Italian language class this spring.
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Caterpillars – Christopher Suda

on April 21 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

The vein caterpillars up,
sucks it down through a glass

straw, then we vanish. Its bliss,
by the mean of memory can not

be resurrected, only performed.
Perhaps no different from death

since itself, too is unimaginable. Others pick
and choose but I can’t.

Angels visit through the doors, observe
the war, (discuss the next) then move

on by foot—wingless as always. While
leaving, one articulates ‘effort’. Farther

wins out each stretch. The photograph is said
to depict a sturdy image of time—So will I

Christopher Suda’s poetry has been published in blazeVOX, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Aura Literary Review, Poetry Super Highway, The Wayfarer, Danse Macabre, Drunk Monkeys, and other literary journals. Christopher is currently a twenty-four year old undergraduate at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is a musician involved in three current music projects: Philos Moore (singer-songwriter) In Snow (Instrumental), and Loveislight (Experimental Hip-Hop).
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DECEMBER, NEW DELHI & Poem – Rachel Eliza Griffiths

on April 14 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

When metaphors slide the scalp
back to its abyss of bone. When the simile
proves like more human than is.
When you heard the metal rod striking
bone. Yes, it is bone. The palate halved.
The tongue is bough, gallow, thread.
Do you look away from the two-legged words
within the bus? Do you see a man’s fear
gripping the wheel, turning the machine
into an elegy going back on its own words?
The long road jerks into devastation
high as jungle palms & plane trees.
When the parrots disappear & nothing,
not even air, will beat death into the men
who breathe it. When they force her
friend to watch, making him beg
with a woman’s voice. I am begging
you. When the scenery, it is the world
cut out from flesh, moves inside
the body. When the men are inside
the body, they do not see their mothers,
sisters, daughters standing
in the withered stairwell.
Later, those mothers will beg the world
to spare their sons from execution.
Their sobs tear the jet hair
from their own stained scalps.
It was no dream. The men lifted themselves
like torches through her
screams. When they come
to believe they are more ether
than bruise. I am begging you.
When the woman they have eaten
carries the likeness of the universe
in her belly they have smeared
with meat. When the wheel turns
away from the paved country,
the angels strain like mosquitoes
on the windshield. The opal shadows
of insects buzz in the skull.
When only God may look
at the blur within &
know there is nothing fast enough
beyond those windows,
nothing dead enough out there
to forgive. (2012)

WAVES, WHILE SLEEPING

Carry me waking across the world
where, in Nice, strawberries ripen
in a wooden cart. The morning yawns
azure beyond the fruit sellers.
The Mediterranean beckons
to fishermen & stones.
Pleasure bursts into froth,
white & cold enough to drink.
I’ll go everywhere. Why not? Kyoto,
Rome, Paris, Port-Au-Prince.
Back in Brooklyn, a woman murmurs
in her bed while I feast. What we taste
in sleep we carry back to our bodies,
lingering in the hunger the world
gives us. Each day like an eyelid,
a mouth still & open, wanting
oranges, earth, & strong coffee.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and visual artist. Her forthcoming collection, Lighting the Shadow, will be published by Four Way Books in 2015. Currently, Griffiths teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn. Please visit: www.rachelelizagriffiths.com.
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THERE WILL COME A TIME [& II] — Patricia Smith

on March 16 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

when you walk up exactly six chipped and
weathered stone stairs to rap gently on a door.
You count the number of stairs in your throat.
You count them with the dry click of your shoes.
At first, you simply brush the door with the back
of your fingers, thinking I have just walked up
six stone stairs. On the other side of that door
is a woman whose only son, just hours before,
lay face down in snow shower, kinged by a halo
of blood. There will come the time when you set
your face in the straight line you are paid for
and you will ask the woman to bellow her son’s
snipped bio while her unkempt nails, blaring
red, leave half-moons in your forearm. You fix
your eyes on the cotton of her housedress,
ironed raw, standing stiffly away from her body.
Her exploded afro is frozen in the terror of half-
sleep, and its stunned tangle you can really see
the moment when someone came to tell her
that the sure clockwork of her boy had stopped.
You study a tiny bleeding pimple on her chin,
the gorgeous pattern of her voice on your arm,
anything to stop the plummet into those eyes.
You ask simple questions of one-syllable words:
How old was he?
Was in good in school?
When was the last time you saw him?
Was he good at sports?
and was digs like a hungry, rusty-bubbled blade
into her answers. Her words are less than hollow,
and your pen glides across the paper, forgetting
the past tense, capital letters, the past tense.
Someone has built a hasty altar to her boy, with his
picture, a Red Sox cap with a sweat-ringed rim,
a display of school papers with Cs or Bs scrawled
in red across the top. You stare at the picture of him
not being dead. A hint of mustache shadows his lip.
He was a good boy, she keeps saying, still digging
the truth into your arm, and you just bet he was,
but he is also a dead boy who just had his hours
blown out of whack by a bullet, and that is the only
reason you are here in this tiny apartment at the top
of six stone stairs, suffering the smell of last night’s
thick-peppered chicken soaking in cool oil and asking
your questions and scribbling her answers and handing
a safety pin to the childless mother whose bare breast
has just poked through past the missing button of that
housedress. It is your job to put everyone who reads
this story into this cluttered room, to script a heartbeat
for a boy who just a few hours before was sprayed like
roses on the back of winter. As you get up to leave,
the woman claws at you and begs you not to leave her
alone with her drooping tribute and the sickening smell
of remembered food. You know what to do. You have
practiced the pulling away. You know it won’t be long
before she forgets you, the reporter with the flat eyes
who gave her a pin for the gaping hole in her housedress.
She won’t know how deftly you lied as you stood, your
hand on the doorknob, saying you were sorry, so sorry,
all the while thinking what a good story, what a good
story, what a goddamn good story, and wondering what
your lead will be–the altar, the begging woman, the bared
breast, or those six stairs leading to and away from it all.

THERE WILL COME ANOTHER TIME

You will pull out your pen and notebook, lock onto his eyes,
and you will say “raped” and he will flinch, a slap traveling
through his chest, and you vow to surround his wife’s name
with less explosion, but not before managing to uttter “raped”
again. He begins to hate you the way a man with whiskey
mismanaging his fingers despises daybreak. They found her

by a dumpster, folded triple, her denims shredded shadow,
skin scarred with push. Bad, borderless jazz was loud in her
face. The bag, a thin blue fluttering from Hildalgo’s, spilled
a lettuce head, aspirin, Tampax, coconut water and blood.
Watching TV, gaping at hoarders and mummified rats wedged
beneath warm Frigidaires, she had complained of a blooming

glow in her stomach and head. And the man who had brought
her gingerly to climax that morning remembered his Okay.
Be careful. You both know that she will die. Already, behind
some heavy silver door, his spine is being pulled up through
her throat. You drop your notebook and fill your arms with
a dead woman’s husband. His snot and weep steam on your

bare shoulders as you push hard against him, open your mouth
on his slick neck, shift and shift, coax the slow traitorous uncurl
of his cock. There will come another time, when grief will rave
through his hours like a blue lyric. But today’s lesson is one of
renegade landscape–every step a woman takes can go wrong.

Patricia’s work is featured in the 2011 editions of both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. Her contribution to the anthology Staten Island Noir, which she also edited, won a Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America and is upcoming in Best American Mystery Stories 2013. Other honors include the National Poetry Series, two Pushcart Prizes and coveted MacDowell and Yaddo fellowships. In 2012, she was featured on the cover of the 100th anniversary issue of Poetry. Her groundbreaking book Blood Dazzler — which chronicles the human, emotional and physical toll exacted by Hurricane Katrina — was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and one of NPR’s Top Books of 2008. The book was the basis for a thrilling dance/theater collaboration, which sold out its performances at NYC’s Harlem Stage. Other books include Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns, Big Talk, and Life According to Motown, just released in a 20th anniversary edition. She also penned the history book Africans in America and the award-winning children’s book Janna and the Kings. She has won four National Poetry Slam individual champions.
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MIMIC & POEM – Valentina Cano

on March 12 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Like a walkway,
she’d turn beneath his feet,
angles becoming those of his body.
Her voice looked to his vowels
for molds in which to pour herself.
She waited, cooling,
for every part of him to be hers.
A word
and
its echo.

CORNER HOUSE

The house sits at the edge
of a street that can’t feel
the wind anymore.
Its doors and walls have been
scratched clear of effervescence,
clinging only to the rusted solitude
of metal and stones.
The house balances on a moonlit patch
that turns to glass on clear nights.
Doing nothing but stare at silent,
buried stars.

Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time either writing or reading. Her works have appeared in Exercise Bowler, Blinking Cursor, Theory Train, Cartier Street Press, Berg Gasse 19, Precious Metals, A Handful of Dust, The Scarlet Sound, The Adroit Journal, Perceptions Literary Magazine, Welcome to Wherever, The Corner Club Press, Death Rattle, Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Generations Literary Journal, A Narrow Fellow, Super Poetry Highway, Stream Press, Stone Telling, Popshot, Golden Sparrow Literary Review, Rem Magazine, Structo, The 22 Magazine, The Black Fox Literary Magazine, Niteblade, Tuck Magazine, Ontologica, Congruent Spaces Magazine, Pipe Dream, Decades Review, Anatomy, Lowestof Chronicle, Muddy River Poetry Review, Lady Ink Magazine, Spark Anthology, Awaken Consciousness Magazine, Vine Leaves Literary Magazine, Avalon Literary Review, Caduceus,White Masquerade Anthology and Perhaps I’m Wrong About the World. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Web and the Pushcart Prize. Her debut novel, The Rose Master, will be published in 2014. You can find her here: http://carabosseslibrary.blogspot.com
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ACCENTS & Poem – Denice Frohman

on March 11 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

my mom holds her accent like a shotgun,
with two good hands.
her tongue, all brass knuckle
slipping in between her lips
her hips, all laughter and wind clap.

she speaks a sanchocho of spanish and english,
pushing up and against one another,
in rapid fire

there is no telling my mama to be “quiet,”
she don’t know “quiet.”

her voice is one size better fit all
and you best not tell her to hush,
she waited too many years for her voice to arrive
to be told it needed house keeping.

English sits in her mouth remixed
so “strawberry” becomes “eh-strawbeddy”
and “cookie” becomes “eh-cookie”
and kitchen, key chain, and chicken all sound the same.

my mama doesn’t say “yes”
she says, “ah ha”
and suddenly the sky in her mouth becomes Hector Lavoe song.

her tongue can’t lay itself down flat enough
for the English language,
it got too much hip
too much bone
too much conga
too much cuatro
to two step
got too many piano keys
in between her teeth,
it got too much clave
too much hand clap
got too much salsa to sit still
it be an anxious child wanting to
make Play-Doh out of concrete
English be too neat for
her kind of wonderful.
her words spill in conversation
between women whose hands are all they got
sometimes our hands are all we got
and accents remind us that we are still
bomba, still plena

say “wepa”
and a stranger becomes your hermano,
say “dale”
and a crowd becomes a family reunion.

my mama’s tongue is a telegram from her mother
decorated with the coqui’s of el campo

so even though her lips can barely
stretch themselves around english,
her accent is a stubborn compass
always pointing her
towards home.

WEAPONS

At entrance of a West Philadelphia high school,
an officer with a gun perched on each waist,
asks me if I have any weapons.
I hold up my book.
He doesn’t find that funny.
Tells me to empty pockets,
walk through metal detector.
8:03am.

I wait for 2 students to pass through first.
Already I wonder what they have learned.

I am escorted to an auditorium,
where there are 130 Black and Latino students.
We talk about hip-hop,
they think poetry is what old white people do.
I tell them my favorite poem is “Ms. Fat Booty”
because I like the storytelling.
They giggle as if they are still kids.

One girl shouts, “Rack City, bitch!”
And the whole room explodes in unison,
their bodies bouncing
as if they were sitting on trampolines.

I ask them if they have dreams.
11 students raise their hands,
barely above their shoulders
as if they were sitting in History class
unsure of the right answer.

A student named, Luciano, in the first row
is waiting for me to tell him what page to turn to.

Another student, in the 8th row
studies my face, trying to decide if this is a trick question.

There is no right answer, I say
but they are too comfortable
with the right to remain silent.

I ask them do you have a family member in prison,
122 students mechanically raise both of their hands,
as if a string, tied around their wrists,
was yanked for them.

Their hands remain up this time.
And I can see all of them, perfectly.

I heard the newly built prison a few miles away
bought their test scores as wallpaper.

The principal is staring at me.
in anticipation of what I have to say next.

He is afraid they will leave with weapons.
I am afraid
they will not know the ones
that already exist.

All rights reserved to Denice Frohman, may not be transcribed, performed, copied without written consent from author. Copyright © 2012 Denice Frohman.

DENICE FROHMAN is an award-winning poet, lyricist, and educator, whose work explores the intersections of race gender, sexuality, and the “in-betweeness” that exists in us all. She is the 2013 Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, 2013 Hispanic Choice Award and 2012 Leeway Transformation Award recipient. Her work has been fatured in the Huffington Post, Upworthy, Buzzfeed, The Apiary and more. Her poem “Dear Straight People” went viral and has over 700,000 views on Youtube. She has performed and taught poetry across the country and internationally, and is the Program Director at The Philly Youth Poetry Movement. She is currently touring as one half of the spoken word duo, Sister Outsider. Her debut CD, Feels Like Home, is available now. www.denicefrohman.com
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