Shopping Cart
    items

      ←

      March 28, 2016EquilibriumTiana Clark

      Took me
      thirty years to say
      I’m glad
      I don’t pass for white.
      Pressed
      those words into the dark
      creases
      in my palm like a fortune:
      a life line
      of futures I wanted to begin.
      Like the way
      the haze of summer heat
      makes
      a drive home different.
      Right now
      even the streetlights
      have a misty
      orb to them. Even
      the cigarette butt
      flicked out
      of the window
      on the highway
      plumes with embers
      skidding
      toward me
      like the tail
      of a backyard
      bottle rocket.
      I wanted my
      hair straighter,
      nose thinner,
      skin lighter.
      I thought this
      is what my white
      boyfriends
      wanted as their hands
      became
      each European request,
      a Russian
      nesting doll I kept
      un-stacking
      until there was only illusion
      of beauty
      split open. Like the Great
      Gatsby cover
      with the disembodied head
      of a crying
      flapper over the neon-scape
      of city. All
      the green beacons we chase
      as thoughts
      of people who don’t love us
      are left back
      drifting on the roads as we
      drive. But
      every muscle knows how
      to get home.
      How the smallest part
      of ourselves
      cannot be divided.
      The last doll
      is still whole in my hands.
      Even the car
      can still purr from energy
      after it’s been
      turned off. What is left
      whispering
      in us, once we have
      stopped trying
      to become the other?
         

       

      from #50 - Winter 2015

      Tiana Clark

      “I was driving home one night in a trance, under a spell of highway hypnosis. NPR was playing in the background, discussing Maureen Corrigan’s book, So We Read On, about the story behind The Great Gatsby. Something about Terry Gross’s intoning voice and the interstate’s passing white lines drummed up the genesis for this poem about identity. Growing up biracial in the South, other kids would often ask, ‘What are you?’ In many ways, I’m still searching in my work to answer that question. Race, spirituality, family, gender—my obsessions converge in my poems, sometimes to subsist, sometimes to subvert. I look for my place between the classic and modern traditions by breaking and creating new forms. I like poems that take risks. I find it infectious, as I start to become more reckless in my work. I write to access that blood-jet pulse—to rake my flaws across the page, sift through my past hoping to find grace, connection, empathy, power, and—most of all—honesty.”

      →

      Related