even my maternal hands can’t reach.
In Poland, the Warsaw ghetto against a Nazi fascist regime
On Southern Plantations, in fields, in Haiti
On shores of Africa
Uprising
The ’60s
The streets
James
Nina
Bayard
Miriam
June
Nikki
Lorraine
Audre
Pat
Malcom
Martin
Betty
Sekou
The Unnamed
Artists
Poets
Teachers
Always
Uprising.
POST-ELECTION
Like trinkets sold at gift shops
near former slave sites
masks carved for tourist consumption
paper promises given to those getting off the boat
from somewhere
those who crossed the desert, dehydrated
raped, throat slit, still
arrived by foot
Like dollar-off coupons at Target
going fast/buy now
Hope and democracy are a poor woman’s
last pennies spent to buy Christmas lights
and ribbon at Rite-Aid
Like children’s drawings with multicolored crayons
displayed in elementary school windows
Are what mothers fight for when their child
is killed in a school shootout by an imbecile
who had easy access to guns
All the shooter wanted was to be like Kanye, a star.
Like Dylan Roof in a courtroom shouting, “It’s not fair,”
hearing the family of victims testify
after he shot nine Black parishioners while their heads
were bowed and they were praying
The cops after took him to Burger King
Like Jeffery Dahmer who ate the flesh and hearts
of young Black boys
He was killed in prison/stuffed in a broom closet
And like the leader of the Rwandan massacre
like a poet once said of an abusive father
I’m glad
So glad
he’s dead
Like candy spun by politicians
dissolving as soon as your tongue reaches to taste it
Hope and democracy are just words
evading Walter Scott
Trayvon Martin
Emmett Till
Mike Brown
Akai Gurley
Gift and Sandra Bland
Hope and democracy are like old Harlequin romance novels/extinct
As my friend says, “There’s no more love,
only drama”
Hope and democracy are slogans
written on cups in souvenir shops on 42nd Street
having nothing to do with our lives
reality.
ROPE-A-DOPE
FOR SANDRA BLAND
I had just begun to relax
celebrate the marriage equality ruling
I had just begun feeling with Obama I was
watching Ali in trouble off the ropes
delivering to his opponents the rope-a-dope
my father’s eyes
excitement
I was just beginning to breathe air
feel exhilarated at images of Joe Biden
and President Obama running
down halls of the White House with rainbow flags
like boys with kites-soaring
I was just beginning to forgive deaths of my brothers
to AIDS
not forget
there should still be tribunals
for them and every woman abused
by the medical system
I had just begun to turn a corner on Mike Brown, Freddie Gray
Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, the massacre at AME
not think of it all everyday
Then the police kill this young Black girl in custody in Texas
claim she committed suicide
I remember we’re a war nation
in war times
I imagine how James, Bayard, Nina felt
seeing a nation turn its dogs, teeth, gas, hoses, bullets,
on children, adults, humans
I can’t stop thinking about Steve Biko
his battered face
they say he hung himself too
the world’s outrage
who will pray now
for us
America.
SILENCE=DEATH
Speaking to my former student at SAIC, a writer and visual artist
They say there’s not one day that passes when at some point
They don’t return to the first reading I gave to the class
on Audre Lorde
The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action and
Poetry is not a Luxury
In a final paper, another student said she was floored
but in the end grateful for the Audre Lorde checklist I handed out
at the start of class
Asking what are the words you do not yet have?
What do you need to say
What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day
and attempt to make your own until you will sicken and die from them,
Still in silence
List them and write a new list tomorrow and the day after
This in mind when I think about the image and words
Silence=Death
Like my students I return to the master teacher Black lesbian warrior
mother cancer survivor and poet Audre Lorde
I return also to the essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
with the instructions for living
Silence will not protect you
In this great dragon called America
that attempts to wipe us out
and it’s machinery that attempts to grind us
into dust
It is better to speak knowing we were never meant to survive
So yesterday when I saw that poster silence equals death in the windows
of the Leslie Lohman Museum
That pink triangle on black paper
from blocks away
It called to me like a beacon
Amidst societal madness/personal struggles and the Trump presidency
to never give up
It reminded me too of a generation of gay and lesbian warriors who are no longer here with us
felled to AIDS and cancer
But on their deathbeds used the mantra to inspire
Silence=Death
I think about when Black gay and Latinx poets Essex Hemphill
Donald Woods
Don Reid
Roy Gonsalves
Rory Buchanan
David Frechette
Craig Harris
Alan Williams and Assotto Saint and so many more were still here
How their black hair began to sprout twists and knots go wild and kinky
to signify early Black gay consciousness
I think about when I first met Donald Woods outside of a bookstore
in the West Village called A Different Light and we fell in love
We were all so young Black awkward and gangly but fierce and determined.
Donald was Audre Lorde’s student at Hunter
For all of us Black gay and lesbians struggling to find our way
Lorde was our guru
I think about poetry readings that happened all the time at
the Community Center on 13th Street
We were upstairs while ACT UP met downstairs
There were Black gay and bisexual poets Storme Webber
Cheryl Clarke
Jewelle Gomez
Sapphire
As Black gay people we couldn’t afford to get arrested so we wrote
performed and sang revolution
Like the salons of the Harlem Renaissance
featuring Zora’s Neal Hurston and Langston Hughes
These meetings informed me forever
I also saw plague and cancer decimate my people
People I imagined growing old with artists who knew at that time
they only had moments and seconds to live so they wrote
It was right after his diagnosis I saw Assotto Saint
performing on top of the tables at The Gay and Lesbian Community Center
I will never forget when he stormed the pulpit at Donald Woods’ funeral
I learned what it was like to make work with urgency as Audre said
as though your life depended upon it
to know you couldn’t waste a moment or a second
ever taught me
It was from little boys with baby faces and death sentences who spoke
and forced themselves into the world at all odds I learned
From little and big boys and girls in the face of catastrophe
Raising their fists as Avram did last night
Uttering the mantra
Silence=Death.
FOR DONALD WOODS
On the warm spring day Rory Buchanan died his friend
a beautiful young Black gay man lay down on the ground
outside of the funeral home and let out a gut wrenching scream
He lay down on the ground, rolled back and forth as he cried.
He did what we all felt but didn’t have the courage to do
expressed in his actions battle fatigue, weariness
of a young community that had lost so many of its own
This might have been one month before we lost poet Donald Woods
and members of a Black lesbian and gay community poured into a packed church
hot humid with no outlet
Poet Assotto Saint stood more than 6' 5" in heels, but on that day
he wore a man’s suit and performed an act of exorcism and protest
when he assailed the pulpit took over said Donald Woods did not die
of heart failure, he died of AIDS and he was a proud Black gay man
If you agree with me stand up
And so today Whitney Houston is gone, Etta James, my idol,
the soul train man who shot himself Don Cornelius, Heavy D, Howard Tate, Michael Jackson, Prince, Muhammad Ali
Heath Ledger, Anna Nicole, Amy Winehouse
Nelson Mandela
so many who helped us know who we are and were
but today I don’t want any lavish displays of grief and protest
to do as they did in the Black church when spirit took hold
you could see a weighted 300-pound body fly up and dance
Today I want none of what happened with Rory or Donald
Today I want to breathe breath let go past pain grief
be the girl I was leap up sing dance not care
let my tongue turn blue eating an icy
walk down the street carrying a boom box
singing Stephanie Mills, “I Feel Good All Over”
to feel like I do when snow falls taking that first big gulp
of something new
the way I feel every time I board the plane to Africa or Europe
and I’m racing over images stalls upon stalls
filled with beauty and mystery
to feel with myself the way students express feeling with me
eyes open it affects everything
to feel the way I do walking up the hill to a new school
like a traveling preacher filled up with message
Today I want to release all the things I could
should have said
be the student who said I changed everything
even at home
my teachings made him grow up
become a new and better man.
HOLD TIGHT
On the Orlando shooting:
Let’s be clear, it wasn’t Isis or Islam
that licensed that man to walk into a gay bar
and massacre those white and gay POC
It was America with heinous gun laws that allow any white
or white-skinned man with mental health problems
to purchase weapons of war/machine guns with minimal background check
Meanwhile Black and Brown people can’t
walk through a neighborhood to buy candy, survive a routine traffic stop
without being murdered
No he wasn’t trained in hills of Afghanistan
didn’t learn bomb making techniques from the Taliban
It was here in America he learned apartheid policies
Separate and unequal
Separate schools
Separate bathrooms
Separate
Separate
Separate
that breed a rampant repressed homophobe
It was from demagogues like Trump
that purport building walls and keeping people
out and inciting fear fear fear
It was America and the Bush clan
that proved you could lie and kill and get away with it
that certain populations were disposable
I’ve seen these massacres before
it was when Black and Brown queers were dying rapidly of AIDS
only then the guns were indifference
Guns were in hands of every American
Guns were in hands of politicians
of doctors
in a system that hated queers
I’ve seen it before this killing
in the zig zag scars of women poets who died
of breast cancer
And institutions that still claim their legacy
Like many I’ve searched the hallways for justice
paced up and down
begged to be heard
for simple problems
Gaslighted
Bankrupted
Run around
Only to find out in America
women’s wombs are big business
I’ve seen this killing before
It happens every day
reality shows
teaching us to step on and crush
each other to get ahead
A television that shows someone actually slicing
Khaddafi’s jugular
I’ve left so many places/communities
because of safety concerns
Sekou Sundiata died in the emergency room from a heart attack
Willie Ninja, that beautiful, beautiful dancer went blind
I could go on but my brother Essex Hemphill
is calling to me
telling me/us as he did in the crisis so long ago
telling us to wrap our arms around each other
and hold tight
Hold tight
Gently.
SURVIVOR
Contrary to popular opinion I never liked Diana Nyad
in my mind overrated white woman
ex-Olympic swimmer most recently swam from Cuba to Florida
privileged
thrill seeker
daredevil
doing voluntarily what so many POC
are forced to do while attempting to gain freedom
drowning in boats, falling overboard, terrible accidents,
falling into the jaws of sharks, those waters a meat fest
for predators, slavers.
Sometimes I think about slavery and think if only those waters
could tell the tale
I’ve always wanted to say to those people who go on the reality show
Survivor for kicks
try being an artist and make it your career choice
or how about a single mother or father trying to ra
ise a family
on minimum wage living in an impoverished area
try being someone who comes to America and
doesn’t speak the language whose entire survival rests upon
learning English
arriving in a strange land, on strange soil, estranged from everything
you have ever known
like hitting your head against a glass door, or mirrors
like optical illusions that used to be in the old fun houses
or how about being uninsured and being sick for a number
of years
weathering that storm
or insured but burdened with a costly illness
health plans don’t cover
or like so many of my students who are bullied to the point
they have nowhere to turn and no longer have knowledge
of their own name.
No I never liked Diana Nyad
until one day I caught a clip of her on Ellen
I caught the part where she talked about her friendship
with Superman Christopher Reeve who in real life suffered
paralysis from the neck down.
He looked at her in later years after she’d retired from swimming
said he feared she wasn’t living her own dreams, that
she was an Olympian
And something about her conversations with him motivated her
to try again, to listen.
Maybe through her I saw the frayed ends of my own unlived dreams,
my own fear that caused paralysis
And so by the end of that conversation with Ellen
where Diana talked about returning to her Olympic self
by swimming from Cuba to Florida at age sixty challenging
every notion of what it means to be an athlete, a woman,
and the stereotypes of aging I was crying
by the time she looked into the camera and said
Don’t give up
Never give up your dreams.
CITIZEN
A friend and I were talking after Trump’s election
She remarked in the words of MLK, “There are really two Americas.”
In response, I say, “There are probably seven, eight, nine, ten, twenty Americas, more than we can count.”
I know that during the early ’90s during the early AIDS crisis, I saw another America
As Hilton Als says, when the bodies of dead gay men felled by AIDS
were being tossed out into the streets in garbage bags.
I had many friends who were sick.
I asked one guy, “What took so long with Medicare, why all the red tape?”
He said, “They are just waiting to see if I die first.”
It felt as if someone dropped ice water on me
I was so shocked