things still aren't quite flowing...

so here's an old love poem i ran across in my google docs. the person this is about is long out of my life and my heart, but it's one of the few poems i've written that i can read without wincing (not quite true, but still).

missing

missing you

missing you is like a phantom limb,
the spot in my chest where my love for you resided

aches on rainy days
wakes me up on muggy nights
catches me in the middle of sentences and meetings, unawares.

missing you is like my toothache
it comes and goes
a dull pain i'm not sure how to get rid of

i know it will go away
i know.
i just wish there were a way to replay
the sweet beginnings,
the before instead of the after,
i wish there were a way to dwell in the sweet nights
and the early mornings,
the light instead of the dark.

the future won't return you to me, i know.
so dwelling on the past, which held such promise, will have to be enough.

a history poem

this is not nearly as meaningful/heartfelt as it seems. i was just moved to write because i'm starting to realize how long i've been here, and how many love misadventures i've been through- crazy!

i've been kissed here before

he kissed me tonight
in a place i've been kissed before.
this time
there were no
fireworks.
no tingle in my belly,
no disbelief in the giddy
happiness
imparted.
there was, though,
a bittersweet memory of
you
and the milk-chocolate-sweet
beginning of
us--
that first bright sunny kiss
at astor square.

lauryn

i posted this video a loooong time ago, back at the old blog, because it is one of my absolute favorites. i was reminded of it today via feministing, and i thought i'd share it again. she never gets old. ever.

to finish the posting frenzy, another women's history month poem

loving the carnival. this entry was posted over at women's space:



The Other Woman

The ancient lines
Drawn
The ancient dust
Settles the storm
Arriving

On the eve of the revolution

Blood flows red
Into the gutter.
Sites of ancient women’s power
Buried
In the dirt
In the dust

I want this more
Each day I flounder
With the words left unsaid

I am not
As white as you
I am not
As rich as you

Still I bleed red
In darkness

While you shine
With your golden hair
And your beautiful words

And I hate you

But really, deep-down
You are everything
I wish to be

With your confidence
Your grace

I know
You will be a leader
Women will love you
Women will follow you

While I lie
Here in the background
With the other
Lost and buried
Women

Because my hair
Does not shine gold
My voice
Does not sing sweetly
You are everything
That I am not

And I hate you
Even though
I know I shouldn’t
Even though
I want to love you
Even though

Everything in you screams
‘I am a fucked thing
Just like you
I hate you too
Shut the fuck up shut the fuck up shutthefuckup

SHUT THE FUCK UP’

And everything in me
Screams back
Until
We can not hear each other
We can not hear ourselves

So

I ask you
To join me here
On the eve of the revolution

Round the kitchen table
In the garden
Round the tribal fire
In those ancient sacred sites

Believe that there is a
A place
Where women are free
To love ourselves
And each other

That place
Is in my heart
When I reach out a hand
And call you sister

That place is in you
When you reach back

–by Dani/allecto, who is a 26 year old radical feminist lesbian, a descendant of a First Nations people, an activist, vegetarian, child-care worker; a creative, passionate, alive, inspired woman. She believes that Sisterhood is the most powerful force in the Universe.

some quotes from my ladies

lucille clifton and grace lee boggs on 9.11. these two quotes- one a poem, another an excerpt from a recent speech, stuck out to me in the midst of all the strife around jeremiah wright this week (and last week). as i watch clips on fox and read blog posts around the net, i remember that, in my mind, the most important part of loving someone, or something, i.e. a country, is being willing to take a risk and see their wrongs. there is nothing more painful than recognizing flaws in those you love. that is the state people of color, queer people, differently abled people, poor people and their allies feel every day. we see what's wrong with our country, and many of us love it, the united states of america, enough to struggle to make it better. and that makes us, if anything, more patriotic than those that follow the tide. but that's enough from my humble mouth. read lucille and grace.

4 9/14/01
some of us know
we have never felt safe

all of us americans
weeping

as some of us have wept
before

is it treason to remember

what have we done
to deserve such villainy

nothing we reassure ourselves
nothing

~lucille clifton, from september song, a poem in seven days


"'The revolution to be made in the United States,' Jimmy wrote, nearly 30 years before 9/11, 'will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease and early death...It is obviously going to take a tremendous transformation to prepare the poeple of the United States for these new social goals. But potential revolutionaries can only become true revolutionaries if they take the side of those who believe that humanity can be transformed...'
This means that it is not enough to organize mobilizations calling on Congress and the President to end the war in Iraq. We must also challenge the American people to examine why 9/11 happened and why so many people around the world who, while not supporting the terrorists, understand that they were driven to these acts of anger at the US role in the world, e.g. supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestine, overthrowing or seeking to overthrow democratically-elected governments, and treating whole countries, the world's peoples and Nature only as a resource enabling us to maintain our middle class way of life."

- grace lee boggs, closing plenary for the left forum 2008, full text here


last bit- if you haven't read grace's autobiography, um, what the hell are you waiting for?

the women's history month blog carnival has got me going

it's happening (at least partly) over at what tami said. today's carnival post got me, so i thought i'd share it here. it's by christina springer:

rambles on rage

1.

i hope
the rage turns

into a cherry blossom, so
I can brew

wine from sunset ripened fruit

2.

obama, with great delicacy and care
i put my white liberal friends in the dark

drawer of hurt where i won' t see them
again for 15 years. maybe when you have

more than 152 pieces of passed legislation
to her 20, or mice nibble the experience

of your fluffy words
into a victory confetti.

i'll feel safe. see desperate
lives bouncing "Yes, we can!"

3.

little girl inside
screams
"fair! just

want every
simple thing
fair!" just

hear.

4.

why do faces that I love
hate my salvation?

doves of broken handlers
crack aspiration.

sugar smart smile, divine be
gentle and calm all of me.

rage and rage and rage
'til loved ones can not see

how oozing hapless happy
froth consumes identity.

5.

the equation for soul height +
vision size divided by spin control

seems weighted, specialized.
give me your equation for my destiny?

i'm sad i missed this

on tuesday. did anyone catch it? if so, please tell me how it was...

Harlem Renaissance Revisited
With John Keene, Mendi + Keith Obadake, and Evie Shockley

Tribeca Performing Arts Center
Borough of Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street
New York, New York

Four poetic innovators explore representations of race, sexual identity and class in the revolutionary literature of the Harlem Renaissance poets — including Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Anne Spencer and Richard Bruce Nugent — and later generations of writers inspired by their work.

asian american/african american poetry reading on thurs

co-spo'd by cave canem and the asian american writer's workshop. details after the jump. are you as excited as i am?

Thursday, March 6, 7:30 pm
Third Annual Asian American/African American Poetry Reading
Curated by Tracy K. Smith and Tina Chang
Cosponsored by Cave Canem

The Asian American and African American communities gather for a night of brilliant poetry. Readings by Meena Alexander, Jeffery Renard Allen, Regie Cabico, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, R. Erica Doyle and Bakar Wilson.

Meena Alexander's poetry includes Illiterate Heart, winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk (2004), and Quickly Changing River (2008) all published by TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press. She is the editor of Indian Love Poems (Everyman's Library/ Knopf, 2005) and author of the memoir Fault Lines (Feminist Press 1993/ 2003) She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999), and a novel, Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), which won The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction. Born in Chicago, he holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is currently an Associate Professor of English at The City University of New York and teaches in the graduate writing program at The New School. He is the Founding Director of the Pan African Literary Forum. Allen's book of short stories, Bread and the Land, will be published in 2008. He is presently at work on Talking Talk, a book of interviews and conversations with fiction writers of African descent from around the world, and the novel Song of the Shank, based on the life of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth century African American piano virtuoso and composer who performed under the stage name Blind Tom.

Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam & has appeared on two seasons of HBO's Def Poetry Jam. His work appears in over 30 anthologies including Spoken Word Revolution & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He is the recipient of three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, The Barnes & Nobles Writers for Writers Award, A Larry Neal Prize for Poetry and a 2008 DC Commission for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. He is the artistic director of Sol & Soul, an arts and activist organization & co-sponsor of Split This Rock's Poetry Festival: a celebration of Poetry of Provocation & Witness in Washington, DC March 20-23 2008.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs was born in Won Ju Si, South Korea. Her debut collection of poetry, Paper Pavilion (White Pine Prees 2007), is the winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in 5 AM, Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, MiPOesias, Poetry NZ, among others and have been anthologized in Echoes Upon Echoes (The Asian American Writers' Workshop, 2003) and Language For A New Century (W. W. Norton 2008). She is a fellow at the University of Southern California and founding director of the USC SummerTIME Writing Program. Currently, she lives in New York City.

R. Erica Doyle was born in Brooklyn, NY to Trinidadian parents. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Ms. Magazine, Black Issues Book Review, Blithe House Quarterly, Utne Reader, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire and Sinister Wisdom and has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2001, Voices Rising, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gumbo: Short Fiction by Black Writers, Gathering Ground, Best Black Women's Erotica 2, and Role Call is forthcoming in Bloom, Our Antilles: Queer Writing from the Caribbean and Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets. She is the recipient of various grants and awards, including a Fellowship in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Award in Poetry and a Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction. She received her MFA in Poetry from The New School and works as a teacher and literacy coach at Vanguard High. Her manuscript, proxy, was selected by Claudia Rankine as a finalist for the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

Bakar Wilson's work has appeared in the Vanderbilt Review, the Lumberyard, and three Cave Canem anthologies. He is a native of Tennessee and currently teaches at Medgar Evers College.

@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)

$5 suggested donation

and staceyann chin is no joke

my electable parts

Huckabee
Romney

Clinton
McCain

Obama
Hillary

Mitt
and Mike

The names ring nursery like a rhyme

children's games
singing/rain/talking the same old/same old

are the ideas any different
the bodies/newer/shinier than Bush

everybody looks better than that neanderthal

next to him
I would look good for President

now that Hillary has put a little titty in the politics
I could run

Barack painted me skin and in
not too dark though

we still got troubles
wayyyy down south

the parts of me
Black and female wrestle inside

my body is split
right down the middle

my dyke self supports the world being ruled by a woman
the night/shades of me

wants little black boys to stop aping
hip hop
idols/with nothing to worship but records calling me

bitch
this bitch don't take that from nobody

and certainly not a man
looking to make his dick bigger
or harder

or whatever he thinking

if the lights are low enough
and the woman is fine

she can call me anything/anytime

but back to these elections
these fast talkers promising my black woman self

the world

they will give me
healthcare/mandated/housing/affordable

wonder what they will do
with their Black/female back pressed cruel
against some republican/special interest wall

wonder how tall they would stand then

winner takes all
delegates divvied up from light blue to dark blue

my father is Chinese
living in Jamaica

he proudly told me
he is republican

and I don't know what to do with that knowledge

not that it matters
he will never vote in America

the gulf will feed our arguments
give us something to speak of

when we speak
Obama will come up

he will knock at Hillary
and I will do my best

to act like it ain't nothing but normal

gay and Black
woman and immigrant

ain't nutten normal
about me and my split parts

torn as I am

never have I been this significant
in the United States

Black women walk invisible in supermarket aisles
nothing for my hair in the pharmacy

on your shelf
there is nothing for my mother's skin

and though I am glad you cannot sell me much

I resent
your ignorance

your disappearing of my parts

your constant silencing of me
unless you need me

for some voting block where you can again
divide the women
from the Blacks

the Latinos
from the rest of us

as long as we not rich and white
we can be separated from the pack of what is important

split
tear

sever
break

break my heart with this choice of which part of me

may reflect me from that place of power
which one

chose one
and my first choice was the white blond-dropout
talking all about poverty

but poor people
have never been the subject of any public conversation
unless they steal something

none that I listen to lately
in these times we need

direction
and maybe I should go to a Barack rally
hear him speak without a screen between us

how do you choose
from folks you ain't never seen

either way
parts of me may find themselves

Black
or woman

seated in the white house

history is in the making
people

I say
history is making itself known

and I am just as prone to write it down
tickled
that I am able to watch

and talk politics with my prodigal maybe father
and pontificate
and take a crap on the ideas that seem like shit

for now I am just listening
watching
late night TV in Chicago

and I am just here

watching the ancient dance of men and power
struggling to survive a woman

and a debonair man with my skin

In Chicago/in New York
I am listening America
Let me know when you've finally let me in

http://thedailyvoice.com/mt41/mt-tb.cgi/151

and if poetry isn't your thing...

elizabeth hines, at alternet.

behind

i've had an intensely busy few weeks and i feel behind. like there are emails to be answered, calls to be made, plans to be brainstormed, ideas to be caught on paper.

and it all keeps flying by, without me.

tonight is supposed to be catch-up night- writing back the nice people that wrote me congratulatory emails last week; calling the friends i have communicated with solely through text messaging, facebook, and emails for the last two weeks; fleshing out some/any(!) of the crazy ideas i've had over the last few weeks, scribbled here and there and on this blog; writing and addressing thank you notes to people who have taken time out of their schedules to hear my words.

but all i want to do is sit on the couch, drink some wine and watch pbs.

i need some inspiration. so, to lucille clifton i go:

you come to teach
and to learn

you do not know
anothers lesson

pay attention to
what sits inside yourself
and watches you

you may sometime discover
which when
which which
*

which when, which which. these are the questions i ask. now to pay attention.

1st saturdays, the caribbean, spoken word

saw suheir hammad at the brooklyn museum last night. she was amazing. she makes quite a case for hybrid identities and the power they can impart to one's consciousness. we are all hybrids in a way, i guess, but some people can express the fuck out of the crossroads they are built upon.
leila buck also read a really interesting excerpt from her new play, "in the crossing."
what was really interesting was being there with my two younger sisters and two friends from work. i work at a non-sectarian non-profit that was founded in the name of a rabbi. many/most of the higher-ups at the org are very pro-israel, and more specifically very pro-jew. they bring israel into every conversation possible. now my coworkers don't necessarily have the same outlook, but to be anti-israel and to express your viewpoints in that space would definitely be a nasty trap.
these writers are pretty anti-israel. one is palestinian, one is lebanese. the discomfort on our row was palpable even after the four disruptive little boys a row ahead of us were carted away by their mom.
interesting.

suheir's performance touched me in some incredible way. there's something about poetry that holds on to me and won't let go, something i can't quite define. i think it's the condensation of experiences, feelings and thoughts, all into a few words, you know? like it packs a freaking punch.


this video also includes a bit by black ice. suheir starts around 3:30.

the museum's contemporary caribbean art exhibit was AMAZING. there was so much to think about, packed into these three rooms. i'm going to have to return one day, alone, and do some more quiet thinking.

the other thing that made me happy about first saturdays was that it reminded me of all the connections i've made to this city in the last almost-three years. i ran into four people from different parts of my life there, and they reconnected me to who i am, and who i want to be. i love being connected to people, making friends. time to get out and do more of it.

plans for engagement this winter:

• joining an NYCoRE ItAG group on paulo freire and augusto boals
• joining the planet fitness that is going to open on 125th and lenox--membership will be just $19/month! (it won't break my new year's resolution bank, either :))
• well, that's all i have for now. but i think they're good starts, right? ;)
  

i could accept any blame i understood

...
Reaching for you with my sad words
between sleeping and waking
what is asked for is often destroyed
by the very words that seek it
like dew in an early morning
dissolving the tongue of salt
as well as its thirst
and I call you secret names
of praise and fire
that sound like your birthright
but are not the names of friend
while you hid from me under 100 excuses
lying like tombstones
between your house and mine

I could accept any blame I understood.
Picking over the fresh loneliness
of this too-early morning
I find relics of my history
fossilized into a prison
where I learn how to make love forever
better than how to make friends
where you are encased like a half-stoned peach
in the rigid art of your healing
and in case you have ever tried to reach me
and I could not hear you
these words are in place
of the dead air
still between us.
...
Nothing
is more cruel
than waiting......and hoping
an answer will come.
...
~audre lorde, "sister, morning is a time for miracles"

salt

he is as salt
to her,
a strange sweet
a peculiar money
precious and valuable
only to her tribe,
and she is salt
to him,
something that rubs raw
that leaves a tearful taste
but what he will
strain the ocean for and
what he needs.

~lucille clifton