mrs. ida b. wells-barnett amidst
whites marchers, gently kicked
their sister to the curb. but when
the march kicked off, ida got
right into formation, as planned.
the tribune’s photo showed
her present & accounted for.
* * *
one vote can be hard to keep
an eye on :: but several /a
colony of votes/ can’t scuttle
away unnoticed so easily. my
mother, veteran registrar for
our majority black election
district, once found—after
much searching—two bags
of ballots /a litter of votes/
stuffed in a janitorial closet.
* * *
one-mississippi
two-mississippis
* * *
one vote was all fannie lou
hamer wanted. in 1962, when
her constitutional right was
over forty years old, she tried
to register. all she got for her
trouble was literacy tested, poll
taxed, fired, evicted, & shot
at. a year of grassroots activism
nearly planted her mississippi
freedom democratic party
in the national convention.
* * *
one vote per eligible voter
was all stacey abrams needed.
she nearly won the georgia
governor’s race in 2018 :: lost by
50,000 /an unkindness of votes/
to the man whose job was
maintaining the voter rolls.
days later, she rolled out plans
for getting voters a fair fight.
it’s been two years—& counting.
from American Poets
DARIUS SIMPSON What Is There to Do in Akron, Ohio?
complain about the weather. wait five minutes
watch the boys you grew up with outgrow you
bury your cousin. go sledding on the tallest hill you can find
keep a family warm until their son thaws out of prison
ice skate between the skyscrapers downtown
inherit an emergency exit sign from your father
spray paint your best friend’s brother on a t-shirt
daydream your way through a semester-long funeral
watch jeans and sleeves and family portraits unravel
play soccer with the black boys who almost evaporated
with the icicles. kick it outside with the skeletons
from your childhood. go to columbus and pretend
to be a grownup. spend a weekend at kalahari resort
and call it a vacation. go back home. leave. shoot dice
with the dead boys playing dress up. stay long enough
to become a tourist attraction in a city nobody stops in
mount bikes and ride until the sun dribbles
out of the sky’s mouth. wade through the oatmeal july makes
of morning air. swim in a public pool where everyone
is drowning and no one knows how to survive
what happened last month. stop runnin in and out unless
you got somethin’ on the gas bill. seal yourself with cold air
while the trees melt. bet the boy down the street that you’ll have
the best first day fit. come out amid orange leaves lookin’ fresher
than all the food in a 5-mile radius of granny’s house
eat jojos from rizzi’s on sunday after pastor guilt trips you
on your way past the pulpit. dream about a city
where headstones don’t show up to dinner unannounced
where fried chicken isn’t on speed dial and diabetes
isn’t the family heirloom. where grief isn’t so molasses
root for lebron in whatever he’s wearing. become
an athlete as a way out of corner sales. never escape.
start a pickup game that never ends. rake leaves
with a rusted afro pick your older brother left you in his will
let the leaf bags melt into the chimney on the side of the house
play basketball with the ghosts who don’t know what year it is
volunteer at your local funeral home. open a cemetery
across the street from the playground. mow green
cut ties with your grass-seller. survive the summer.
from New Ohio Review
PATRICIA SMITH The Stuff of Astounding: A Golden Shovel for Juneteenth
Unless you spring from a history that is smug and reckless, unless
you’ve vowed yourself blind to a ceaseless light, you see us. We
are a shea-shined toddler writhing through Sunday sermon, we are
the grizzled elder gingerly unfolding his last body. And we are intent
and insistent upon the human in ourselves. We are the doctor on
another day at the edge of reason, coaxing a wrong hope, ripping
open a gasping body to find air. We are five men dripping from the
burly branches of young trees, which is to say that we dare a world
that is both predictable and impossible. What else can we learn from
suicides of the cuffed, the soft targets black backs be? Stuck in its
rhythmic unreel, time keeps including us, even as our aged root
is doggedly plucked and trampled, cursed by ham-fisted spitters in
the throes of a particular fever. See how we push on as enigma, the
free out loud, the audaciously unleashed, how slyly we scan the sky—
all that wet voltage and scatters of furious star—to realize that we
are the recipients of an ancient grace. No, we didn’t begin to live
when, on the 19th June day of that awkward, ordinary spring—with
no joy, in a monotone still flecked with deceit—Seems you and these
others are free. That moment did not begin our breath. Our truths—
the ones we’d been birthed with—had already met reckoning in the
fields as we muttered tangled nouns of home. We reveled in black
from there to now, our rampant hue and nap, the unbridled breath
that resides in the rafters, from then to here, everything we are is
the stuff of astounding. We are a mother who hums snippets of gospel
into the silk curls of her newborn, we are the harried sister on the
elevator to the weekly paycheck mama dreamed for her. We are black
in every way there is—perm and kink, upstart and elder, wide voice,
fervent whisper. We heft our clumsy homemade placards, we will
curl small in the gloom weeping to old blues ballads. We swear not
to be anybody else’s idea of free, lining up precisely, waiting to be
freed again and again. We are breach and bellow, resisting a silent
consent as we claim our much of America, its burden and snarl, the
stink and hallelujah of it, its sicknesses and safe words, all its black
and otherwise. Only those feigning blindness fail to see the body
of work we are, and the work of body we have done. Everything is
what it is because of us. It is misunderstanding to believe that free
fell upon us like a blessing, that it was granted by a signature and
an abruptly opened door. Listen to the thousand ways to say black
out loud. Hear a whole people celebrate their free and fragile lives,
then find your own place inside that song. Make the singing matter.
from The New York Times
MONICA SOK Ode to the Boy Who Jumped Me
You and your friend stood
on the corner of the liquor store
as I left Champa Garden,
takeout in hand, on the phone
with Ashley who said,
That was your tough voice.
I never heard your tough voice before.
I gave you boys a quick nod,
walked E 21st past dark houses.
Before I could reach the lights
on Park, you criss-crossed
your hands around me,
like a friend and I’d hoped
that you were Seng,
the boy I’d kissed on First Friday
in October. He paid for my lunch
at that restaurant, split the leftovers.
But that was a long time ago
and we hadn’t spoken since,
so I dropped to my knees
to loosen myself from your grip,
my back to the ground, I kicked
and screamed but nobody
in the neighborhood heard me,
only Ashley on the other line,
in Birmingham, where they say
How are you? to strangers
not what I said in my tough voice
but what I last texted Seng,
no response. You didn’t get on top,
you hovered. My elbows banged
the sidewalk. I threw
the takeout at you and saw
your face. Young. More scared
of me than I was of you.
Hands on my ankles, I thought
you’d take me or rape me.
Instead you acted like a man
who slipped out of my bed
and promised to call:
You said nothing.
Not even what you wanted.
from Poem-a-Day
ADRIENNE SU Chinese Restaurant Syndrome
The notion that the children, awaiting dumplings,
will never know their grandparents.
The chance that the Peking duck, though crispy
and succulent, is not the artist’s medium.
The likelihood that your hometown stopped existing
before you knew this would be permanent.
Being recognized each time. The possibility
that the place will be robbed, due to location,
its spurning of credit. The years that have passed
since you saw your uncles. The gratitude
with which you clean your house, placeless
and beautiful. The safety of your neighborhood.
The ritual by which friends who share your heritage
fight for the check. The appreciation of friends
who do not, as you explain the pickled cabbage,
the absence of fish from fish-fragrance. The hands
of two women in a corner booth, shelling peas.
Roast pork like your grandmother’s, in vast portions.
The assumption that rice and tea are always free.
Your children growing up, seeking their fortunes.
from Bennington Review
ARTHUR SZE Acequia del Llano
1
The word acequia is derived from the Arabic as-saqiya (water conduit) and refers to an irrigation ditch that transports water from a river to farms and fields, as well as the association of members connected to it.
Blossoming peach trees—
to the west, steel buildings glint
above the mesa.
In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Acequia del Llano is one and a half miles long and begins at Nichols Reservoir dam. At the bottom of the dam, an outlet structure and flow meter control water that runs through a four-inch pipe at up to one hundred-fifty gallons per minute. The water runs along a hillside and eventually drops into the Santa Fe River. Fifteen families and two organizations belong to this ditch association, and the acequia irrigates about thirty acres of gardens and orchards.
In the ditch, water flowing—
now an eagle-feather wind.
2
Yarrow, rabbitbrush, claret cup cactus, one-seed juniper, Douglas fir, and scarlet penstemon are some of the plants in this environment. Endangered and threatened species include the southwestern willow flycatcher, the least tern, the violet-crowned hummingbird, the American marten, and the white-tailed ptarmigan.
Turning my flashlight
behind me, I see a large
buck, three feet away.
Each April, all of the members come, or hire workers who come, to do the annual spring cleaning; this involves walking the length of the ditch, using shovels and clippers to clear branches, silt, and other debris.
Twigs, pine needles, plastic bags
cleared today before moonrise—
3
The ditch association is organized with a mayordomo, ditch manager, who oversees the distribution of water according to each parciante’s (holder of water rights) allotment. The acequia runs at a higher elevation than all of the land held by the parciantes, so the flow of water is gravity fed.
Crisscrossing the ditch,
avoiding cholla,
I snag my hair on branches.
Each year the irrigation season runs from about April 15 to October 15. On Thursdays and Sundays, at 5:30 a.m., I get up and walk about a quarter of a mile uphill to the ditch and drop a metal gate into it. When the water level rises, water goes through screens then down two pipes and runs below to irrigate grass, lilacs, trees, and an orchard.
Across the valley, ten lights
glimmer from hillside houses.
4
One by one, we light
candles on leaves, let them go
flickering downstream.
The Ganges River is 1,569 miles long. The Rio Grande is l,896 miles long; it periodically dries up, but when it runs its full length, it runs from its headwaters in the mountains of southern Colorado into the Gulf of Mexico. Water from the Santa Fe River runs into the Rio Grande. Water from the Acequia del Llano runs into the Santa Fe River. From a length of one hundred paces along the acequia, I draw our allotment of water.
Here, I pull a translucent
cactus spine out of your hand.
from The Kenyon Review
PAUL TRAN Copernicus
Who doesn’t know how
doubt lifts the hem of its nightgown
to reveal another inch of thigh
before the face of faith?
I once didn’t. I once thought I was
my own geometry,
my own geocentric planet
spinning like a ballerina, alone
at the center of the universe, at the command of a god
opening my music box
with his dirty mouth. He said
Let there be light—
And I thought I was the light.
I was a man’s failed imagination.
Now I know what appears
as the motion of Heaven
is just the motion of Earth.
Not stars.
Not whatever I want.
from The New Yorker
PHUONG T. VUONG The Beginning of the Beginning
Who decides where a river starts? When are there enough
sources, current strong and water wide enough for its name?
In Colorado, the Chama begins in smaller creeks and streams,
flows into New Mexico to form the Rio Grande, splitting Texas
and Mexico (who decided?) and moves deeper south. I think
these thoughts by a creek on a beating hot day,
as water rips by in rapids propelled, formed in mountains far above.
The water icy even in this summer heat. People grin
some false bravery, scared to sit in tubes and dip into the tide
to be carried away. I think of drowning. Of who sees water
as fun. Who gets to play in a heatwave. Who trusts
the flow. Migrants floati
ng in the Rio Grande haunt me, so
I think of families tired of waiting, of mercy that never comes,
of taking back Destiny. The rivers must have claimed more
this year. Know no metering but the rush of their mountain
source’s melt. A toddling child follows her father into water’s
pull. Think of gang’s demands, of where those come from. Trickles
of needs meeting form a flow of migrants. Think of where
it begins. Think of the current of history—long, windy, but
traceable and forceful in its early shapes.
from The American Poetry Review
JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS The Dead Just Need to Be Seen. Not Forgiven
That old man in the photo our family never talks about,
known best for tracking runaway slaves; tonight
we drag him from the basement up these loose
wood stairs & set out a plate of salted cabbage & rabbit—
so long since I’ve asked why the empty chair at our table.
With all the warmth a body has to give, we give up on
measuring the darkness between men. Dust & dusk enter
& are wiped from the room. The names we call each other
linger luminous & savage. Still. That tree I used to hang
tires from holds tight its dead centuries. The light
swinging from its branches we call rope-like,
which implies there’s no longer rope. Tonight, we’ll wash
the burnt-out stars from his hair, all the crumbs from his beard.
The misfired bullet of his voice we let burn as it must.
from Southern Indiana Review
L. ASH WILLIAMS Red Wine Spills
I am hovering over this rug
with a hair dryer on high in my hand
I have finally, inevitably, spilled
red wine on this impractically white