Scott Woods

TO THE HIGH SCHOOL THUG THAT BROKE INTO HIS ENGLISH TEACHER’S CAR

What you know about Nina Simone
could do laps on a pencil tip,
so I’m struggling to understand
why you would steal that CD.

That you skipped the vodka in the glove compartment
but took my reading glasses is equally perplexing.

It’s not my fault you can’t handle grammar,
but it may be my fault it never took.
Allow me the honor of tutelage now:
Name the verb in the following sentence:

Nina Simone sings.

Not knowing what kind of grades you get in math,
let me point out that you have a 50/50 shot here.

What will you make of the ugly woman who sings
so sweetly from the bottom of her stories
that she becomes beautiful?
That you long for her entreating loneliness in the night
and wonder why girls today can’t do it like that anymore?

How will you explain the mourning tripping out
of your poster-covered bedroom and into the hallway,
making your momma wonder who got into her momma’s records?

Nina Simone knows who you are and why you took that,
why the record called to you when fear struck your senses.

Nina Simone sings and I know you don’t understand yet
the ramifications of what you’ve done,
how getting kicked out of your English class doesn’t make it okay,

I know you couldn’t possibly have conceived
that there are people in this world
who can show you their love in three notes.

You had no idea that some people need songs like that,
songs that reach through time and pull your heart down like
fire alarms and run through the hallways of your soul,
banging on the doors,
trying to get the demons to walk out civilly,
in a straight line just outside your mouth,
falling into a vodka double-shot you can’t lift on your own.

I want to imagine you just like that:
sitting in your bedroom,
staring out a window cracked from your previous shenanigans,
headphones to your skull,
scanning liner notes in my reading glasses,
Nina Simone singing long and hard into the night,
after a moment of trifling anger,
to see a beautiful thing and imagine it could save your life,
sometimes,
like it does mine,
every time the moon hangs there like its harvest time,
pregnant with mankind’s wishes,
heavy with the sorrow of thieves.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

Patricia Smith

52

Baffled by stark ache and symptom, I get in my bed
beside the bearded charmer who is yet in my bed.

As graying denies and dims me, I vaguely recall
the line of whimpering whiners I’ve let in my bed—

every one of them goofy with love, dazzled by curve
and color, until I screeched, “Oh, just get in my bed!”

The could-be queens, pimpled wordsmiths, thugs and mama’s boys,
porcine professors, all casting their nets in my bed.

Valiantly, they strained to woo with verse, acrobatics.
One fool dared a pirouette, on a bet, in my bed!

(We dated for months.) But like the rest, he finally
did things I would much rather forget. In my bed!

So, all that leads to this. Me, a slow, half-century
woman, turning toward he who conjures sweat in my bed.

“Patricia,” he whispers, stroking me young, unnaming
the men. Then my husband turns the world wet in my bed.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

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L. Lamar Wilson

DREAMBOYS

My nephew waltzes beside his father,
The man who was the boy who made Faggot!
A reason not to flinch. His neck a merry-

Go-round, our boy rears back, waves
His pointer in my face, jabs his other fist
Into his hip & wails: Watch yo’ mouth!

Watch yo’ mouth, Miss Effie White! ’Cause I
Don’t take no mess from no second-rate diva
Who can’t sustain! In my brother’s eyes, I see

The pain of remembering when I crooned—Don’t
Tell me not to live. Just sit & putter. Life’s candy
& the sun’s a ball of butter—& made him grimace.

I scan the wall of plaques in Mama’s den,
The remnants of home runs & aces that gave
Him hope then, all dusty now. Teeth clenched,

He smiles at his dreamboy & nods in disbelief.
Harrumphs. Lashes flittering, he offers me
The only penance he can: a sheepish grin.

We applaud & feign heartened laughter.
My nephew sees beyond the veil shrouding
His father’s eyes. Realizes this isn’t

How brown boys win favor. Searches
My eyes for answers. Mirrors
A sadness no song can shake.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

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Marcus Wicker

SELF DIALOGUE READING ETHERIDGE KNIGHT

Where’s your voice at, Marcus?
Really. When you die, will they find a notebook filled with one long poem
Tucked beneath a fluffy little pillow? Will it start: Eh yo, fuck the sonnet.
Fuck everything you’ve ever written that don’t sound like a chain gang
Clanking shackles against a railroad track. Fuck words that don’t feel
Like pick-a-switch-welts. No, fuck that—like the bone up under them welts.
Fuck lines that don’t look like family tree stumps & every poem
That don’t taste like a bullet proof vest: like using the word “nigga”
As every motherfucking part of speech. Are you a poet or black man first?
Is there a difference? You wonder who would have the nerve to ask
Etheridge. Who would need to. & are the answers the belly of this poem.
You hope this poem is a cracked prison cell, & not a fluffy little pillow.
Still, they are the same sad thing. You know they are the same.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

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Ian Williams

HERO

                                                        The hero wins
because that’s what heroes do when you spend
the money to buy the DVD of a movie you already
know the ending to, not because you’ve seen it before
but because you heard from a colleague in HR
that it’ll make you feel real good after,
it was the best thing she’s seen lately, and that’s
with her being married and every morning pushing spoons
into the faces of her two children
                                                            so you watch it
knowing the only thing that will make you feel good
this evening is seeing a bare-chested man wail on another
in a ring and another in a street and another in a ring
in slow mo and the dff dff sounds of the gloves striking
bodies in movies, which don’t sound like bodies for real,
not that you’d admit to knowing that,
                                                                and the hero
doesn’t even look like heroes in the real world
which are not the heroes in grade four essays either
but this one time—stay with me—you dropped by a woman’s place
and you were sitting at her kitchen table and she asked you
if you wanted anything to drink and she opened the fridge
and you saw through the crack between her body
and the door only a pitcher of water on the wire shelf
in the yellow light—you want to call her a hero
because she’s surviving with her mouth shut
or yourself because you’re so affected must mean
you’re noble. Go ahead. But there are other words
for you two.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

Martha Modena Vertreace-Doody

DRIVING UNDER THE FULL WOLF MOON

The car grows colder with each no-turn-over
the engine gives to your key—
                                              this—and snow
scatters like rags across the parking lot kept bright all day
with our headlights.
                               A hook-and-ladder wails
down Woodlawn Avenue chasing fire which waits for the end

to come one way or another.
                               Wind chill factor. Eggnog lattes.
Some nights I lie next to you
as you sleep, your eyelids flutter like butterflies
over zinnias in our summer garden.
But in January, the Wolf Moon,
                                             the Snow Moon, lurks

behind the honey locust, his gold
                              melting on us between thin slats

of the half-open blinds.
Rain darkens the firs where we wait for a jump—drizzle
late afternoon into the evening,
                              then wet snow. Wind
in the Christmas lights still hanging off the church roof—

the days beyond winter solstice
last longer. You wonder why rain
                                              does not clean our car,
just redefines the dirt streaks. I tell you about salt, oil, wax—
the whole nine yards of ways
                              we invent to kill each other.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

Patricia Smith

AIN’T GONNA PLAY SUN CITY
                    Sun City Resort, Bophuthatswana,
                    South Africa 1994

Slash on the horizon, shameless throne
of skin and gimme, the behemoth
relentlessly winks and rises from
Bophuthatswana’s dull copper dust.
In its wake, roads burp sudden shanties,
grimy boys mournfully consider
the blur of traffic. Roadside vendors
hawk sugarcane, sticks of dried kudu.
Billboards bellow their gilt deceptions:
You’re just steps away from your fortune!
Win up to 25,000 rand!
Bullet monorails blitz the border
of this drooping Vegas, where neon,
damned insistent upon perkiness,
blazes at noon. The privileged pale
gape and gamble, grin into the sleek
eeriness of patent-polished shoes.
They stumble into sticky theaters
to sweat out the formidable plot
of Tongue Love, gobble greasy whitefish
and hacked white potatoes, hoard their chips—
all part of the gold organized fun.
Black folks, bused in at dawn from the camps,
bustle about in much-bleached cotton,
sweep stench from faux Oriental carpets,
hawk tokens and convince the revelers
they are having the time of their lives.

Her skin aflame in the merriment,
Ruth fights sleep in her booth. Stooped peddler
of scratch-and-scratch-and scratch one more time,
she is circled by tossed-off tickets,
cups of dying ice, losers’ spittle.
Chemical hair rides high on her head.

Hey, look out! It’s the bogus earthquake!
The ground shakes, crevices sputter steam,
columns of flame climb toward their deadline.
Miles from the Sun, a family runs
from their pock-roofed shack. Chills sculpt their awe
as the computerized inferno
erupts in its measured orange rumba.
The grandmother runs for her battered
bucket, draws water by the false light,
tilts up her face, shivers, praises God.
She knows not to question miracles.
Listen. Her rotting teeth click like dice.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

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Lynne Thompson

OVERHEARD AT STARBUCKS: A BLACK HAT SAYING

you can’t be sure, can you—am I Father Time, the ghost of North by Northwest or your sister in drag? Even though your wallet’s been blessed by the Church of Luck be a Lady, no one will tell you and your heart is in your throat because I’m so beguiling/so confusing/so sad-white-poverty train on a Sunday afternoon when you’ve just dropped in for a decaf latte with cocoa shavings and to tickle the ATM. Don’t you wish your Father was here? Of course, He couldn’t help you—He doesn’t know the damned from piss-soup either! Can’t be sure, huh? Suppose I hack off my dreads? Wouldn’t matter—I’m your new job or your ole man with a new job or your lost pappy finally come home and you know you’ve always liked the nickel slots! Betcha, by golly, wow! Don’t know, do you, you saucy wench—but you pays your lira and you takes your chances and what’s the worst: that I’m a door knob—a seedy waterfront? Like you ain’t been there before! C’mon, seize my paw for a good time, pretty lady, because just what does saying oh Christ mean?

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

Lolita Stewart-White

CIVIL RIGHTS COLD CASE #62 (OR THE YELLOW DRESS)

Mattie Green, a domestic worker and mother of five
was killed in 1960 when a dynamite blast ripped
through her home. Her murder was never solved.

Your favorite yellow dress is what you wore the night
before you died. The one with the hand-stitched,
blood-red roses, passed on to you by Miss Cora Lee,
the well-to-do white lady who you did days work
for until she took sick and passed. Sunday evening
you slipped into its cool fabric, after a hard day
of shelling peas, cooking greens, and baking biscuits
for the five miniature versions of yourself. Daddy raved.
Said, “You put your foot in that meal, girl.”
You threw your head back and laughed out loud.
Spun around in the dress that complimented your dusty
red skin. None of us knowing then that it is what we
would bury you in.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

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Mary McLaughlin Slechta

THE HOUR OF OUR BELIEF

I want to know who cried for the toy I found out back this afternoon.
Was it the same child who ate a sandwich made from the bread
out of the plastic bag I found last week? So difficult to date plastic.
The toy gas pump promises five cents a gallon.
That would make a dollar’s worth about a tank.
Maybe 1960. Maybe a politician now. Small world.
Someone who keeps voting for war to save our way of life.
The Onondagas want the land returned to their stewardship.
They want the lake cleaned properly.
They want everything back the way it was
before that odious Simon LeMoyne grabbed all the salt
for his three-minute egg. Before his flock fouled the water.
I want everything put back. The toy put back in the boy’s pocket
and the boy’s father back on a ship beside his parents.
I want the ship setting a reverse course for the shores of Europe.
Before they arrive I want Hitler back in his mother’s womb
and the reset stone in her garden wall
back in the path of her thin-soled slipper.
The passengers will insist on sandwiches, I suppose,
lovely little sandwiches wrapped in paper.
If they trim the bread, let them leave the crusts behind
to feed the birds a lavish supper. Then let the birds go back
to eating whatever it is they did before McDonald’s.
I’ll go back too, a circuitous route by wagon first,
returning my skillet to the forge, my rolling pin to the forest,
discharging my nose and hair like a Halloween mask,
my skin like a suit of mail: a withered champion,
at last, more onion and potato than flesh and bone,
ascending the bow of a ship from the cool dry cellar of my soul.
Oh, amazing grace! To cross the dangerous shoals
where the bones sing home all the ships at sea.
Let the women swallow back air they churned to storm.
Let them refill the lungs of children
they pull from waves and wrest their husbands
from the teeth of sharks. In the restored calm,
let memory whet my tongue
for the anchor of my mother’s food.
On shore, my father waits.
His hands are empty with missing me.
Let the glint at his feet in the sand
be only the sun, chasing the tail
of a golden worm.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets