poemsfortheresistance-blog - Tumblr blog

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

Magical Negro #80 by Morgan Parker

Here is the bright, young food co-op.

Here is the steeple. Here are the royals

not yet dead. Here are the Niggas With

Amethyst crystals. Shea butter

halos orbit half-shaved heads bowed

for vindication. Our mother patchouli

who art in the apothecary on Flatbush

hallowed be your Dutch wax dress.

Give us this day we light soy candles

for dead brothers. Give us this day we soak

our supremacy wounds.

Give us this day.

Give us fresh juice green

as avocados, and strength

to dismantle Fox news. We are marching

even in our sleep. We are reading

DuBois, getting high off the salt eaters.

Thy kingdom come to yoga. Thy will

be a black feminist Tumblr. Thy will is not

our struggle. Forgive us. We have gathered

to learn to pronounce freedom.

Procession body roll, communion oysters

with prosecco. Roses for our waist beads.

We have moved away from suburbia.

Now we live on Saturn.

We don’t pray anymore

the way our parents taught us.

Instead we stack our arms

with wood and music

hatches from our tongue rings.

Hymns for the dead, hookahs for

the almost-dead. Praise our half-lives.

Our bodies break but we still sage them.

We wrote the good book: instructions

for building new worlds.

Lead us not into white neighborhoods.

Deliver us from microaggressions.

Blessed are we who mourn, we who

are a blood built on a hill of embers.

We no mail-order hipster black wife.

We just trying to text our moms.

We are what we eat, leafy and anointed.

We are who we serve: banquets and bouquets

forever, foreverever, foreverever.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/poetmorganparker/poem-magical-negro-80-brooklyn-by-morgan-parker?utm_term=.bsNamzK32K#.xkgoDgYlMY

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

Unpeopled Eden

by

RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,

We died in your valleys and died on your plains.

We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,

Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

"Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportees)," Woody GuthrieI

       after the immigration raid

Beneath one apple tree the fruit

lies flung like the beads from

a rosary with a broken string.

Another tree stands amused

over the strangeness of a shoe

that pretends to be an apple

in its redness, though it'll never be

an apple with that lace stem

and a pit where a core should be.

The tree at the end of the row

will weep over the pillage

all week. Around its trunk, debris:

straw hats, handkerchief, a basket

going hungry for what's out

of reach. Somewhere in the orchard

a screech goes weaker by the hour.

A radio without paws, it cannot claw

its chords to end its suffering.

But silence comes, eventually,

and the apple trees will rest,

gathering the shadows to their roots

as the flame inside each apple

falls asleep. All the while, finches

perch among the branches—patient

vultures waiting for the fruit to rot.

For a wasp, intoxicated by the sugars,

this is the perfect place to nest.

The colony will thrive inside

decay: the apples softening until

their wrinkled skins begin to sink,

the seeds poking through like teeth.

The trees will sway without the wind

because the ground will boil

with larvae. A bird will feast

until it chokes and ants will march

into the belly through the beak.

II

             after the ride by bus

A strand of hair pretends to be

a crack and sticks to glass. A piece

of thread sits on a seat, pretends

to be a tear. The bus makes believe

no one cried into their hands and smeared

that grief onto its walls. The walls

will keep the fingerprints a secret

until the sheen of oils glows by moon.

Rows of ghosts come forth to sing.

Until that keening rocks the bus

to rest, the fumes intoxicate

the solitary button—single witness

to the shuffling of feet and a final act

of fury: the yanking of a wetback's

shirt. The button popped right off

the flannel, marched in the procession

and then scurried to the side. The lesson:

if wounded, stay behind to die.

The bus breathes out the shapes

turned silhouettes turned scent

of salt and sweat. The steering wheel

unspools, every window shaking loose

the wetness of its glare. And now

a riddle squats over the parking lot:

What creature stands its ground

after evisceration? Roadkill. Clouds

close in to consume the afterbirth.

III

             after the detention in the county jail

A mausoleum also keeps these gems:

precipitation that hardens into diamonds

on the cobweb stems, streams of urine

that shimmer like streaks of gold.

Lights coax out the coat of polish

on the floor and what's solid softens

into water stripped of ripples. Stilled

and empty, a river that has shoved

its pebbles down its throat.

The cell holds out three drops of blood

and will barter them for company,

hungry for the smell of men again. Janitor,

border guard or detainee, it's all the same

musk of armpit, garlic breath, oils

that bubble up from crack to tailbone,

scent of semen from the foreskin,

fungus from the toes. Without takers,

the keyhole constricts in the cold.

IV

             after the deportation plane falls from the sky

A red-tailed hawk breaks through

the smoke and doesn't drop the way

the bodies did when the plane

began to dive and spat pieces of its

cargo out the door. No grace, the twitching

of such a great machine. No beauty to

its blackening inside the pristine

canvas of majestic blue—a streak of rage

made by a torch and not a paintbrush.

The hawk lands on the canyon

and snaps its neck in quick response

to the vulgar cracking on the boulders,

to the shrill of metal puncturing

the canyon, to the burst of flames

that traps a nest of mice within the lair

turned furnace, burning shriek, and hair.

Stunned host of sparrows scatters.

Fume of feathers, pollution in the air.

Poison in the lungs of all that breathes.

A darkness rises. The blue absorbs it

the way it dissipates a swarm after

the crisis of a shattered hive. Heaven

shows its mercy also, swallowing

the groan that spilled out of the hill.

No signs of tragedy by dusk

except a star splayed over rock,

the reek of fumes—a disemboweled god.

V

             after the clean-up along Los Gatos Canyon

What strange flowers grow

in the shadow. Without petals

and with crooked twigs for stems.

The butterflies that pollinated them

were bits of carbon glowing

at the edge. The solitary lone wolf

spider doesn't dare to bite

the scorched caul on the canyon.

It packs its fangs for brighter lands.

The footprints drawn in black

do not match the footprints

in the orchard though they also

bear the weight of the unwanted.

The chain gang called upon to gather

the debris sang the Prison Blues

all afternoon: Inmate, deportee,

in your last attempt to flee

every bone splits into three.

VI

            after the communal burial

Twenty-eight equals one

deportation bus equals one

cell in the detention center, one

plane-load of deportees, one

plunge into the canyon, one

body in the coffin although one

was a woman—sister not alone

anymore among the chaperone

of angels with wings of stone.

Manuel Merino, Julio Barrón,

Severo, Elías, Manuel Calderón,

Francisco, Santiago, Jaime, Martín,

Lupe, Guadalupe, Tomás, Juan Ruiz,

Alberto, Ramón, Apolonio, Ramón,

Luis, Román, Luis, Salvador,

Ignacio Navarro, Jesús, Bernabé,

Rosalío Portillo, María, y José.

Y un Deportado No Identificado.

No papers necessary to cross

the cemetery. The sun floods

the paths between tombs

and everything pushes out

into light. No shame to be

a cherub without a nose.

The wreath will not hide

its decay. Cement displays

its injuries with no regrets.

This is the place to forget

about labor and hardship and pain.

No house left to build, no kitchen

to clean, no chair on a porch, no

children to feed. No longing left

except a wish that will never come

true: Paint us back into the blank

sky's blue. Don't forget us

like we've forgotten all of you.

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

America

by Fatimah Asghar

am I not your baby? brown & not allowed

my own language? my teeth pulled

from mouth, tongue bloated with corn syrup?

america, didn’t you raise me? bomb the country of my fathers

& then tell me to go back to it? didn’t you mold the men

who murder children in schools who spit at my bare arms

& uncovered head? america, wasn’t it you?

who makes & remakes me orphan, who burns

my home, watches me rebuild & burns it down again?

wasn’t it you, who uproots & mangles the addresses

until there are none until all I have are my own

hands & even those you’ve told me not to trust? america

don’t turn your back on me. am I not your baby?

brown & bred to hate every inch of my skin?

didn’t you raise me? didn’t you tell me bootstraps

& then steal my shoes? didn’t you make there no ‘back’

for me to go back to? america, am I not your refugee?

who do I call mother, if not you?

--

For more Fatimah, check out https://fatimahasghar.com/

http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/america

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

To be of Use

by Marge Pierce

The people I love the best

jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

--

Thanks for the suggestion, Julie.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57673

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

I, Too

by Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then. Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed— I, too, am America.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/47558

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

Still I Rise

by Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you? Don’t you take it awful hard ‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I’ve got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/still-i-rise

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

America by Allen Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.  

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I’m sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.  

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

There must be some other way to settle this argument.  

Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.  

Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?  

I’m trying to come to the point.

I refuse to give up my obsession.

America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.

America the plum blossoms are falling.

I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.

America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.  

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.  

When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.  

My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.

You should have seen me reading Marx.

My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.

I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

I’m addressing you.

Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?  

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.  

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.  

It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.

I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.

I’d better consider my national resources.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.

I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.

America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

America free Tom Mooney

America save the Spanish Loyalists

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

America I am the Scottsboro boys.

America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.

America you don’t really want to go to war.

America its them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.  

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.

Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.

That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.  

America this is quite serious.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.  

America is this correct?

I’d better get right down to the job.

It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Berkeley, January 17, 1956

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49305

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

“Sharing the stage with Sarah Kay & Clint Smith, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib performs "Some I love who are Dead". Hanif is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the editor of Again I Wait For This To Pull Apart, an anthology of poems relating to music, released by Freezeray Press in 2015. His first full length collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, is forthcoming in 2016 from Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, an interviewer at Union Station Magazine, and a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine.”

Find more Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib at http://www.abdurraqib.com/

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

Description for Police  BY SAM SAX

what did the suspect look like?

the sound a shadow makes breathing tallow & spume back

into its heaving barnacled body, deranged gospel of milk-teeth,

a votive candle extinguished in a flat glass of cola.

what was the suspect’s gender?

something like a brick buried in the walls of a library.

or maybe just the word – brick – buried in books: demolished

tower scattered amidst babel, a building hidden in a building.

what was the suspect’s race?

a beam of light

throws up its hands

& is skinned alive.

did the suspect have a weapon?

thank god we no longer carve the shape of our dead

general’s faces into mountains. thank god we’ve bred

wolves into dogs into dolls

thank god we’ve deformed wheat germ & corn

into new edible organism. don’t forget all the good

that can be done with a scythe.

what was the suspect wearing?

cotton, trapped in a bottle of rubbing alcohol, or caught on a length of chain fence,

or woven into the fabric of a bulk-pack of white t’s from the grocery. gets dirty

easy but for that one night, you’ve never seen anything cleaner in your life

what did the suspect say?

if you look at any animate object

under a microscope, you’ll see

it’s made of smaller screaming parts.

if you smash the microscope, take the blood

it makes of your hands & bathe your eyes. tell me

what you see, how simple & red the light.

From linebreak.org. For more Sam Sax, check out https://www.samsax.com/

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

Mahogany Browne is always powerful. Find more at https://mobrowne.com

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

Field Trip to the Museum of Human History by Franny Choi

Everyone had been talking about the new exhibit, recently unearthed artifacts from a time

no living hands remember. What twelve year old doesn’t love a good scary story? Doesn’t thrill

at rumors of her own darkness whispering from the canyon? We shuffled in the dim light

and gaped at the secrets buried in clay, reborn as warning signs:

a “nightstick,” so called for its use in extinguishing the lights in one’s eyes.

A machine used for scanning fingerprints like cattle ears, grain shipments. We shuddered,

shoved our fingers in our pockets, acted tough. Pretended not to listen as the guide said,

Ancient American society was built on competition and maintained through domination and control.

In place of modern-day accountability practices, the institution known as “police” kept order

using intimidation, punishment, and force. We pressed our noses to the glass,

strained to imagine strangers running into our homes, pointing guns in our faces because we’d hoarded

too much of the wrong kind of property. Jadera asked something about redistribution

and the guide spoke of safes, evidence rooms, more profit. Marian asked about raiding the rich,

and the guide said, In America, there were no greater protections from police than wealth and whiteness.

Finally, Zaki asked what we were all wondering: But what if you didn’t want to?

and the walls snickered and said, steel, padlock, stripsearch, hardstop.

Dry-mouthed, we came upon a contraption of chain and bolt, an ancient torture instrument

the guide called “handcuffs.” We stared at the diagrams and almost felt the cold metal

licking our wrists, almost tasted dirt, almost heard the siren and slammed door,

the cold-blooded click of the cocked-back pistol, and our palms were slick with some old recognition,

as if in some forgotten dream we did live this way, in submission, in fear, assuming positions

of power were earned, or at least carved in steel, that they couldn’t be torn down like musty curtains,

an old house cleared of its dust and obsolete artifacts. We threw open the doors to the museum,

shedding its nightmares on the marble steps, and bounded into the sun, toward the school buses

or toward home, or the forests, or the fields, or wherever our good legs could roam

...

Check out Franny Choi at http://frannychoi.com/

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/poetry/poet-franny-choi-pictures-a-world-without-police/

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

Populist Manifesto No. 1 - Poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed-up too long in your closed worlds. Come down, come down from your Russian Hills and Telegraph Hills, your Beacon Hills and your Chapel Hills, your Mount Analogues and Montparnasses, down from your foothills and mountains, out of your teepees and domes. The trees are still falling and we’ll to the woods no more. No time now for sitting in them As man burns down his own house to roast his pig No more chanting Hare Krishna while Rome burns. San Francisco’s burning, Mayakovsky’s Moscow’s burning the fossil-fuels of life. Night & the Horse approaches eating light, heat & power, and the clouds have trousers. No time now for the artist to hide above, beyond, behind the scenes, indifferent, paring his fingernails, refining himself out of existence. No time now for our little literary games, no time now for our paranoias & hypochondrias, no time now for fear & loathing, time now only for light & love. We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings. Poetry isn’t a secret society, It isn’t a temple either. Secret words & chants won’t do any longer. The hour of oming is over, the time of keening come, a time for keening & rejoicing over the coming end of industrial civilization which is bad for earth & Man. Time now to face outward in the full lotus position with eyes wide open, Time now to open your mouths with a new open speech, time now to communicate with all sentient beings, All you ‘Poets of the Cities’ hung in museums including myself, All you poet’s poets writing poetry about poetry, All you poetry workshop poets in the boondock heart of America, All you housebroken Ezra Pounds, All you far-out freaked-out cut-up poets, All you pre-stressed Concrete poets, All you cunnilingual poets, All you pay-toilet poets groaning with graffiti, All you A-train swingers who never swing on birches, All you masters of the sawmill haiku in the Siberias of America, All you eyeless unrealists, All you self-occulting supersurrealists, All you bedroom visionaries and closet agitpropagators, All you Groucho Marxist poets and leisure-class Comrades who lie around all day and talk about the workingclass proletariat, All you Catholic anarchists of poetry, All you Black Mountaineers of poetry, All you Boston Brahims and Bolinas bucolics, All you den mothers of poetry, All you zen brothers of poetry, All you suicide lovers of poetry, All you hairy professors of poesie, All you poetry reviewers drinking the blood of the poet, All you Poetry Police - Where are Whitman’s wild children, where the great voices speaking out with a sense of sweetness and sublimity, where the great’new vision, the great world-view, the high prophetic song of the immense earth and all that sings in it And our relations to it - Poets, descend to the street of the world once more And open your minds & eyes with the old visual delight, Clear your throat and speak up, Poetry is dead, long live poetry with terrible eyes and buffalo strength. Don’t wait for the Revolution or it’ll happen without you, Stop mumbling and speak out with a new wide-open poetry with a new commonsensual ‘public surface’ with other subjective levels or other subversive levels, a tuning fork in the inner ear to strike below the surface. Of your own sweet Self still sing yet utter ‘the word en-masse - Poetry the common carrier for the transportation of the public to higher places than other wheels can carry it. Poetry still falls from the skies into our streets still open. They haven’t put up the barricades, yet, the streets still alive with faces, lovely men & women still walking there, still lovely creatures everywhere, in the eyes of all the secret of all still buried there, Whitman’s wild children still sleeping there, Awake and walk in the open air.

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/populist-manifesto-no-1/

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpBUenMIe8U)

Check out Andrea Gibson at http://www.andreagibson.org/

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFczuA3Fs_g)

Subscribe to Button! New video daily: http://bit.ly/buttonpoetry Check out Aziza's book: http://bit.ly/azizabarnesbook Performing during the Button Poetry/YesYes Books showcase at AWP 2016 in Los Angeles.

Check out Aziza Barnes at https://twitter.com/azizabarnes?lang=en

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGCXJqn6DRg)

“Lauren Zuniga was our amazing feature on the 19th of November at the Vancouver Poetry Slam. This is her poem Confessions of an Uneducated Queer. You can find her book "The Smell of Good Mud" here - http://amzn.to/2aGLuHl”

Check out more Lauren Zuniga at http://www.laurenzuniga.com/

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

Self-Portrait With No Flag by Safia Elhillo

[poemsfortheresistance-blog]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSp4v294xog)

Subscribe to Button! New video daily: http://bit.ly/buttonpoetry If you loved this poem, check out Suzi Q. Smith: http://bit.ly/1qPafqf Danez Smith, performing during prelims at Rustbelt 2014.

You can find more Danez Smith at http://www.danezsmithpoet.com/