In 2011, Binghamton, a small industrial town in upstate New York (formerly where IBM was headquartered), was hit by a flood that ravaged the quasi-rural area. Among the casualties of the flood were MacArthur Elementary School and MacArthur Park. These photographs were taken for archival purposes by N. Henry, a social scientist and cartographer at Binghamton University. The tops of a children’s swing set and jungle gym and the rooftops of the elementary school are visible; the reflections of sky and treetops visible in the flood waters give an odd, uncanny sense of brightness, of natural calm and beauty even in a disaster that fiscally devastated most of the quasi-rural area. For me, they cross the blurry boundary between archive and art / journalism and something more transformative. If humans are the part of nature that goes against nature’s grain, it might also be said that nature is an aspect of humanity and human existence with which we cannot ultimately argue. I see that in these photos.

 

 

Photo Credits: N. Henry, 2011.

Requited: Poetry as a Truth-Telling Mechanism

The effectiveness of Kristina Marie Darling’s book Requited lies in its ability to remind readers that it is human nature to crave to be what we are not. To crave what we don’t have. Darling treats poetry as a truth-telling mechanism. This is a book that is aware of itself, its truths, and how it wants to tell them. The self-referential nature of this text urges the truth to make itself known. It enables the use of poetry as a truth-telling device, and reminds the reader of fundamental truths.

The book is the chronicle of a couple’s relationship, and their eventual parting. We begin the story in a garden, which might be a nod toward to the Garden of Eden, and what it symbolizes for us: a clean slate; new beginnings; fresh starts. Gardens and forests are so richly associated in Western literature with emotional truths, and the unfettered psyche. This trope was a clever one to utilize for the story of a romantic relationship because this draw that humans have toward the new, the fresh, the undiscovered, is what makes new relationships so intoxicating, but it is also what makes the end of relationships so difficult, because in breaking up with someone we acknowledge that a part of our innocence has been irrevocably lost.

The couple’s travels through these landscapes seems to mirror the shifting of their own minds and bodies. I was especially moved by the image of the deer that the couple encounters at the beginning of the book:

“Near the road, an injured deer has been left to die. Its dark brown eyes seem to wonder why we’ve left the roses behind.”

Like the Garden of Eden, deer also have connections with innocence and purity, but the image of the deer accomplishes things that the garden does not. The deer is a much more starting and emotionally relevant image because the deer is a living, breathing entity in a way that the garden is not. The deer looking at the couple so plaintively— essentially asking them why they are leaving the garden—enforces the emotional magnitude of the situation: the couple’s separation, and the resulting loss of their innocence and purity.

The passage about the girl’s lips turning blue is similarly jarring and powerful:

“How many dead flowers would it take to cover a field. You’re beginning to miss the girls in another city, their parade of torn dresses. A disheveled skirt retains an odd charm. In shop windows, mannequins still cling to bouquets. Their starched petals. My cold blue lips.”

The girl here is becoming a part of the landscape she is moving away from. This might be an allusion to the feeling that we are leaving a part of ourselves behind when we leave a relationship, and our desire to hold on to what we are losing. When we enter into relationships with people our identities shift, merge, and blur with the identity of the other person.

The emotional center of the book—the passage which I think anchors the entire text is found a bit later in the book:

“While I sleep, you’re documenting failure. An experience gives rise to ‘narrative.’ A heroine counting ‘unfaithful stars.’ Why can so many things be mistaken for metaphor. Above us, the room is heaving its small oceans. Somehow you imagine an elegant universe.”

The self-referential quality in this book manifests through the litany of literary devices and tropes the narrator mentions here– the poem is reminding us that we are reading a poem, by talking about various aspects of poetry. Reading this, we see that poetry serves as a way to document and memorialize failure. Maybe metaphor is a way for us to make ourselves into something we are not.

The erasure that closes the book—which is, essentially, the first section of the book with sections expertly whited out—seems essential to the narrative of the couple. It allows the book to come full circle, and is a way for the couple to dialog with one another—maybe in real time, or in each individual mind. Or maybe the epilogue is a reimagining of the past. A way to re-do what we have done, to right wrongs, to reevaluate and revisit or lives. Darling’s work reminds us that poetry gives us permission to do this—reinvent our lives.

Press: BlazeVOX, 2014
Page length: 41 pages
Price: $12.00

 

Lisa M. Cole is the author of the poetry collections Heart Full of Tinders and Dreams of the Living, and is a contributor to Wood Becomes Bone: A Mental Health Awareness Series, all three titles forthcoming from ELJ publications. Lisa has also written six chapbooks, most recently Negotiating with Objects (Sundress Publications) and The Bodyscape and Living in a Lonely House (Dancing Girl Press). She was a recipient of the Lois Nelson Award in Creative Non-Fiction in 2005 and a runner-up in SLAB’s Elizabeth R. Curry poetry contest earlier this year. Lisa teaches writing workshops in Tucson Arizona’s prisons as well as in various places within Tucson’s vibrant literary communities, including the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Casa Libre En La Solona. You can read her book reviews at http://moonglows-reviews.blogspot.com/. Find her on Facebook in both personal and professional capacities at https://www.facebook.com/lisa.cole.poet and https://www.facebook.com/lisa.marie.cole

Political Punch is officially over! Or, at least, this first installment of it is. It was both surprising and gratifying that people responded to it as they did — it went on three times longer than I had intended it to, and it generated enough interest that I could probably have kept it going for at least another three weeks, were I not beginning to feel hopelessly overextended.

Though it’s definitely time for me to step away from this project, and focus my time & energy on other responsibilities for a while, I wanted to take a minute to offer my deep and happy thanks to everyone who participated in this series — by contributing work to it, reading it, talking about it, helping promote it on the internets, or quietly enjoying it through individual visits to the Infoxicated Corner over the past three weeks. It was a very fulfilling experience, on my end, to publish so many poems that represent different political viewpoints and varied life experiences. I look forward to returning to this series again, likely in September of 2015. I also look forward to the book that will be growing out of Political Punch: an anthology of political poetry, co-edited by Erin Elizabeth Smith and myself, due out from Sundress Publications in 2016. More information will be forthcoming later this autumn, so I encourage all y’all to please stay tuned.

I’ve decided, in closing, to share a own political poem of my own here. I know there’s a stigma around self-publishing, but this isn’t giving myself a CV publication bullet point (the poem appeared in Western Humanities Review five years ago); I really just wanted to share it with y’all. It’s a meditation on America’s complicated relationship to guns, and my own.

Thanks again, so much, for reading and enjoying this series.

 

For Maddy Lerner, Age 6, Accidentally Killed At An Outdoor Firing Range In Upstate New York

Dear Madison, I was told of your death
over dinner. You were, they said, struck

by hot brass from your mother’s new
AR-15 with custom scope. A tiny girl

at the table behind ours hit
the lights and the television

glowed in the dim like
when Miss Grassi turned

off the movie of Medea, and there
was a wispy, blue-lidded anchor

saying Columbine, school pictures
across the screen. Bryan Andrews

was handing me a piece
of gum. He paused, snorted,

said, They look like dorks.
Maddy, when I was your age,

Andy Boyle brought bullets
to show & tell. He got detention

and a beating. The waitress brought
our bangers & mash. My first

trip to London, Clive told us that four
weeks after the preschool episode

in Scotland, all of the handheld kind
were banned. One woman

from New Jersey volunteered, That would
never work where I’m from,

and Clive said, Of course not,
you all think you’re cowboys.

That fall, my friends and I left
daisy wreaths on the armory steps.

When he heard, my ROTC
boyfriend said, It’s the year 2000

and there won’t be
any more wars. If this

is what you think of me,
forget it. Gas is expensive,

and left me in the rainy lot.
The next morning he filled

my locker with flowers.
Maddy, I’m scared

to ask how they feel
in the meat of you: the shells

fell warm against
my hand & I saved

the target to hang in my fire
escape window that won’t lock.

When they asked over dessert
how the first shot felt, I thought

of you & said, I’d never held
a gun before today. The souvenir

shell in my purse, I said,
It was great, which felt like

saying, I’m brave. Like saying, I have
nothing to do with this.

 

On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their willingness and ability to pack a political punch.

I invite my fellow TheThe Editor, Lisa A. Flowers, to submit this excerpt from her long poem, “Emere’s Tobacconist,” which chronicles the trauma of a mother after the violent assault and murder of her young daughter (part I was published last month, and can be read below). Details of the mother’s grief and her daughter’s trauma are suppressed, as a coping mechanism, and inevitably arise elsewhere, transcribed by the mother-speaker’s psyche onto the daily surfaces of her removed reality. For Flowers, the political heart of this poem lies in her attitudes regarding the American prison system. Earlier this month, Political Punch ran a poem by a prison abolitionist; Flowers’s voice and the mother-speaker she creates both weigh in at the opposite end of the spectrum. This poem expresses outrage at the incidence of American parole boards re-releasing violent offenders who harm not only innocent children, but the parents and loved ones they leave behind. It’s rather popular in academia right now to support the cause of prison abolition; I wanted this series offer more than one viewpoint on the issue. While other poems speak to the fact that our prison system victimizes those it incarcerates, this speaks to the fact that other victims are created by a failure to properly contain sadistic, violent tendencies.

 

(Read “Emere’s Tobacconist”: Part I here)

Excerpt from “Emere’s Tobacconist”

II
In the weeks following her death,
When my mind was not fit to live in
I stayed in a small hotel
On the outskirts of my consciousness
As a baby resides in its own bliss
While its mind is being constructed.

But when I tried to use the facilities
There was no running water.
When I turned the taps

They simply ran
With everything I had run from.
In my dream, we went to the petting zoo
In the garden of reincarnation.
“Look,”
I whispered excitedly.
“If you’re very still,
Your next life will come up
And eat out of your hand.”
Slowly, eyes bright, a little kitty had approached her.

Four months later
She was reborn.
I took her home.
For sixteen years
She climbed trees,
And played
In sunlight, and gardens, and the comfort of home.

III

A week later

Down crept a spider

She had been incarnated into.

It came up to the outside windowsill

And stared at me, busy at its loom

As the storm

That would blow its handiwork away was coming up the coast.

We sat quietly together

 

‘Til I turned my back on its web and boarded up my window.

It was no different from any other winter.

 

I doubt I could have endured much longer,

My face propped up on wooden tent pegs,

Every once in awhile a gust of despair blowing it in

My womb a parachute

My child had used to jump from me and out into the world

A chute which,

 

As if I had stayed a virgin,

Never opened.

 

IV

She was playing outside, in the front yard.

I was looking out, idly, as I stood at the sink, doing dishes.

 

Then, suddenly

There was a feeling

 

As if there had been someone in the house

Only a moment ago-

Who had left traces of a perfume I couldn’t place.

 

All at once I identified the scent-

 

Flowers of paradise

That cannot grow on earth.

I looked to the open door.

 

My little daughter was standing there, holding a bouquet of them.

 

That was the source of it.

I screamed once.

V

LOCAL GIRL’S BODY FOUND

It was my upbringing, impinged upon my sense of survival.

If I live in the memory of the living alone

And not in my own recollection,

There’s no reason to believe

I know how, finally,

I did die.

I simply came to a wall, and stopped.

It had never been there at all: my destiny.

I had been there.

It was as if I had been walking on air for 11 years,

When, like Wile E. Coyote

I suddenly thought to look down.

 

Like a dream, my head swung sleepily,

In a gentle arch,

Between two white fences.

 

The hare from an illustrated storybook of my early childhood

Bounded by, and spoke to me in a friendly way.

Baby animals came.

They were all soft, and welcomed me into their homes…

 

Little huts, dugouts beneath the earth-

But never dark or lonely, and lit by warm

Fires on the hearth, and smelling pleasantly of soup and cabbage.

 

Mother rabbit had breasts enough

To feed every child who had ever died.

“Poor little baby,” she said.

“Orphaned by life. Come warm yourself”

While my body was decomposing up the Chesapeake Bay,

 

My soul played on the floor with her children-

Dolls, marbles, Connect Four,

And was sent off to bed

With milk and kisses, and tucked in well.

As they were finding my body, and calling my parents,

I sat at the breakfast table with my new family ,

Eating Cream of Wheat,

Watching the snow fall outside the window.

During my burial

A mourner’s cry of horror escaped

And came streaking down, like a frantic bat trapped in sunlight,

Plowing into

The little tin roof of our cottage

And Papa Rabbit came out, with his pipe,

And firmly but gently retrieved it.

They fall like that, sometimes,

 

And get lost.

We let them go.

We’re kind; we open the door

And release them back into life

Some, blown out like dandelion seeds

Go to a far heaven of Northerners

Ruled by different gods

Where they’re taken into a lodge,

Where they stay for a long time.

Until one steps outside and sets his foot out in the snow

And when the others see how it makes a print

They know they have to return to the world.

Whereupon a spread white expanse appears in the tundra,

Indistinguishable as the prints of the last animal that crossed it.

 

 

Lisa A. Flowers is a poet, critic, vocalist, the founding editor of , and the author of diatomhero: religious poems. Her work has appeared in The Cortland Review, elimae, Tarpaulin Sky, The Collagist, Entropy, and other magazines and online journals. She is a for Luna Luna Magazine. Raised in Los Angeles and Portland, OR, she now resides in Colorado. Visit her .

On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their willingness and ability to pack a political punch.

This excerpt from “Post-Identity,” by Carmen Giménez Smith explores the politics of writing, battering the reader with a series of questions that feel at once important to responsible creativity and like an exercise in commodifying the act of writing itself: “can you talk about/ your research into the unsolvable/ how would you/ write to a diverse audience/is a reader a client/ did customers occur to you/ as an outcome” this consciousness interrogates us, rather ruthlessly — almost striking the impersonal, evaluative tone of a job interview — and then seamlessly arrives at a crucial question that none of us can ever evade (most especially when attempting to engage with any sort of political issue through art): “Have you made anything good with your outrage?”

 

Excerpt from “Post-Identity”

II.

What is your     provenance    where did you suffer     what is your affiliation
how are you acquainted with industry             what will you bring to our guild
what are the qualities of a good serf      what is your mission in life
and could you sell me this instance       what is the last pornography that engaged you
can you talk about       your research into the unsolvable          how would you
write to a diverse audience       is a reader a client        did customers occur to you
as an outcome            what are three positive strains in you    does discontent
drive you into the market          does blunder drive you into the capital
when can you start with selective memorial        is this firm what you had planned
was this a natal force     are  you  an  open  boomtown       or a crafted urn
or what animal rules the roost                   does that animal work as aphorism
pure revelation                 or dispatch from the front lines of       aesthetic warring
Have you made anything good with your outrage             built an endless war into it
or is it merely an illusion                      an all purpose-effort against absolutes
will an underclass’s hunger     qualify for your attention
or will you have to track down              that legitimacy for yourself
can I guarantee you have a chronicle of the moment or is it fraught
with the 70s      therefore fraught with the density of narrative
is that the hitch             aesthetically      thus ethically does it seem insurmountable
the desire for such validation    or could you break free and record      be recorder

 

 

Carmen Giménez Smith recently edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing.

On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their willingness and ability to pack a political punch.

Today’s poem, Mark Irwin’s “West Point,” is drawn from his time as a cadet; its complicated, nuanced relationship to the American military industrial complex sets it apart from most poems on the subject. It locates, understands, and honors the beauty in ritual and the costume of uniform, the honor in strength and courage, and the innocence of young people who choose to live out ideals of defending their home country. It seems to me a rare kind of political poem that casts the people who make up the military in a natural, even somewhat beautiful, light – and simultaneously acknowledges the futile, deep, irreparable wounds that humans have continued (and, history suggests, will continue) to inflict upon one other through the atrocities of war.

 

 

West Point

What makes the green grass grow
round that granite fortress above the Hudson
where cadets march, passing in review, flashing
sabers over the plain’s grass so green
round those barracks haunted by ghosts,
the boys the marching men remembering a kiss. What makes
the wind oh so many flags and rifles touched
by cotton gloves, rifles and flags so clean
over that plain where grey cadets
march over the green, their buttons and brass
buckles flashing. What makes each grave a city without wind
floating on the green grass forever?

 

 

 

Mark Irwin’s seventh collection of poetry, Large White House Speaking, just appeared from New Issues in spring of 2013, and his American Urn: New & Selected Poems (1987- 2013) will be published in the fall of 2014. Recognition for his work includes The Nation / Discovery Award, two Colorado Book Awards, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, NEA, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He teaches in the Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California and he lives in Los Angeles and Colorado.

On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their willingness and ability to pack a political punch.

This beautiful lyric poem by Kristin LaTour is ekphrastic, written after a photograph was posted by a Syrian friend of hers on Instagram, depicting a man recovering a child casualty from a bombed building. It struck me as anti-war in the vein of Randall Jarrell. The stillness is palpable.

 

Aleppo, 2013

Cue the rain, the first notes of the aria already echoing.
He is at a loss; his lungs are papery cocoons bursting.
We try to understand if he is pushing away or beckoning
as we lean closer, watching the notes fly like moths
from the cave of his mouth, their wings soaked, battered.

He is motioning at the escarpment, the floors exposed
like limestone cliffs carved by a river, rooms stacked
like stages: a living room’s yellow paint, a freshly made bed,
a kitchen table. The rubble becomes dusted with moths.
He sings as he lifts chunks of stone, moves them aside.

He bends, takes into his arms a limp child’s body.
We wonder how he keeps singing as he carries her.
How slack and white she is, like wet moth wings.

 

 

‘s debut full-length collection, What Will Keep Me Alive, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2015. LaTour is the author of three chapbooks: Agoraphobia, from Dancing Girl Press (2013), Blood (Naked Mannequin Press 2009) and Town Limits (Pudding House Press 2007). Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Massachusetts Review, Fifth Wednesday, Cider Press Review, Escape into Life and Atticus Review. Her work appears in the anthology Obsession: Sestinas in the 21st Century. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program, she teaches at Joliet Jr. College and lives in Aurora, IL, with her writer husband, a lovebird, and two dogitos.

On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their willingness and ability to pack a political punch.

This collaborative piece, “Unheeled,” by recording duo The Quiet Onez (Ahi Baraka and Ekere Tallie) is an audio poem that gave me chills. It deals with issues of abuse and domestic violence, and also interrogates the “pain is beauty” myth with which our society indoctrinates little girls, who grow up to take pride in their ability to wear/endure things that physically damage, even devastate, their bodies. This piece quotes a few sentences from a 2014 interview that pop star Rihanna gave to Vogue, in which she discusses her love of clothes and shoes, sharing an anecdote about a pair of heels that, after she performed a concert in them, rendered her unable to stand.

Photo Credit: TSE 2013

s first book of poetry Karma’s Footsteps was published in 2011 (flipped eye publishing). She is the poetry editor of the literary magazine African Voices. Her work and creative life the subject of the short film I Leave My Colors Everywhere. Tallie has read her work and lectured at universities and colleges across the US. She is widely published in anthologies and journals including North American Review, WSQ, Specter Magazine, Mosaic, Bomb, Crab Orchard Review, Drumvoices Revue, Role Call. Tallie earned an MFA from Mills College and has taught at Medgar Evers College and York College in New York City. She is one half of the recording duo The Quiet Onez.

ahi baraka music shaman son of poets amiri and amina baraka spoken word producer in the tradition of amiri baraka gil scott-heron the last poets to the first ancestor who put musik to word born and raised in newark new jersey musical influences range from gordon parks isaac hayes to dj premier and the 45 king….

On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their willingness and ability to pack a political punch.

This poem, “Blue Libation,” by Ekere Tallie, reminds us of the dignity involved in admitting pain and sadness, including with regards to issues that are frequently considered political. I think the impulse to use rage as a vehicle for expressing agency is coded into human DNA, and it isn’t difficult to see why political poems are so filled with righteous, necessary anger. But my own opinion is that even the most transformative sense of fury is not, by itself, enough. Political issues are born of human experience. The strength and grace that would allow a person to be vulnerable and open while talking about a horrifying history (one that continues to resonate through a frequently dissatisfying present) are surely also unifying forces that bring human beings together across political divides.

 

Blue Libation

I lit the candle of poem
in Mississippi & in the silence
of a blue morning, libation
rolled down my cheeks.

It was the cotton sheets.
I wondered my great-great grandparents’
hands & lives
bent over small, tough
clouds. I slept
in the softness of my hotel
room, wrapped in a whisper
of my history.

 

‘s first book of poetry Karma’s Footsteps was published in 2011 (flipped eye publishing). She is the poetry editor of the literary magazine African Voices. Her work and creative life the subject of the short film I Leave My Colors Everywhere. Tallie has read her work and lectured at universities and colleges across the US. She is widely published in anthologies and journals, including North American Review, WSQ, Specter Magazine, Mosaic, Bomb, Crab Orchard Review, Drumvoices Revue, and Role Call. Tallie earned an MFA from Mills College and has taught at Medgar Evers College and York College in New York City. She is one half of the recording duo The Quiet Onez.

On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their willingness and ability to pack a political punch.

This piece, “Unchecked Savagery,” by Glenn Shaheen, is in fact the titular piece from a collection of his flash fiction. However, since my first reading of it two years ago, it recurs to me again & again as a prose poem (I’ve always had the blessing/curse of blurring genre lines reflexively in my brain). I wanted to include it here because I think it offers a special combination of voice, aesthetic approach, and subject matter that adds even greater dimension to this Political Punch series (which has already been greatly blessed by an influx of voices, aesthetic approaches, and subject matter). This poem critically assesses American creation and maintenance of the Arab Other; it scrutinizes our relationship not only to that concept, but the way in which that concept becomes an insidiously titillating form of group entertainment, fumbling for the blurred genre lines between a newscast and an episode of 24 and a serious, incapacitating illness that prevents any real understanding or communication.

 

The leaves don’t actually return to the tree. Those are new leaves. The ones that died are still dead.

Unchecked Savagery

A man, an Arab man, has taken the tallest building in the
downtown corridor hostage. The whole building. He shot a
couple of people who were getting cookies from the Subway on
the first floor. What he doesn’t know, because the FBI has cleverly
detonated an EMP disabling all communication devices
in the building is that one man with extensive Navy SEAL
training has been deposited on the top floor of the building,
and is slowly working his way down. The news crews keep us
updated with colorful graphics and thumping brass rhythms.
The news is certain of his motives. Religion, or vengeance for a
small parcel of land, or jealousy, an attack against us because
we possess the most good anybody could imagine. We fill in
the gaps in the story. When I was sixteen I went downstairs
to rest. I became sick. I couldn’t move for a week. If I stood
up, I would pass out and wake fifteen minutes later. Reason
to feathers. Or was it even a week? The bottom fell out. It
was only motion and breath for some number of days. There
are only fragments left. When I called to my mother for help,
she couldn’t hear. It was as if I were in a box in a field. When I
asked for food, she brought water. When I asked for water, she
brought me a towel and a magazine. The Navy SEAL makes
it to the floor with the hostages and terrorist. We have a
live news beed. The door opens. There are two naked bloody
legs, and the feed is cut suddenly. We pray the body is not of
the terrorist. Yes, we want him dead, but on our terms, and
only after he has paid in blood and sear. A storm alert at the
bottom of the screen warns us that there could tonight be hail.

 

Glenn Shaheen is the author of the poetry collection Predatory (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), and the flash fiction chapbook Unchecked Savagery (Ricochet Editions, 2013). Individual pieces have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

 

 

 

On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their willingness and ability to pack a political punch.

Erin Belieu’s poem, “How We Count in the South,” continue threads of  conversation regarding the American legacy of race-based violence (see also: Yolanda J. Franklin’s poem from earlier this week). It also expresses critical frustration with the certain brand of ideological intolerance that permeates many aspects of American Southern culture, attempting to disguise itself as pious Christianity. I think, though, that part of what makes it so compellingly political is its undercurrent of regional tensions. While regionalism is surely a political issue in the States today, I don’t think we discuss it (or even publicly acknowledge it) as often as we might. (Raised in both the North and the South, I have found myself repeatedly exposed to incorrect, prejudicial Northern attitudes that Southerners are a monolithic class of people: ignorant and uneducated, embarrassingly obsessed with an unrecoverable past and blind to all its evils; I have, likewise, listened to ill-founded charges of Yankee snobbery, elitism, and the odd notion that Northern Americans uniquely blend affluence & access with decadence & immoral excess.) When Belieu writes about Civil War battle reenactments – a tradition fed at least in part, in some areas, by tourist dollars from Northern vacationers – and follows it immediately with, “Oh sure. It gets to us./ Story is, up north, people shit/ crushed pineapple and rest stop/ whores make change with paper/ money,” it seems hard to believe that this poem is only an indictment of problematic Southern politics.

 

How We Count In The South

Add one
tonight, when the barred owl
calls her tent revival, the cortege
trailing a mosquito truck’s
deodorant breeze.
Plus two, the night
before, where they inject one more
black man up the road in Georgia.
The Supreme Court tweets his final
opinion.
Which leads to three:
Dear Jesus, The Reason
For Each Season, of course we’re
exhausted by our souls’ litigation;
the old ones still milling at the polling
place, the recently deceased sweating
their subpoenas in feckless hands.
Required to appear,
we wait. We nurse ourselves and take
a number. We lean against the sneeze
guard at the country buffet until our
ankles swell.
Please. Don’t tell us
history. Nobody hearts a cemetery
like we do,
where re-enactors bite
their bullets between headstones,
and ancient belles in neck-high silk
prepare for the previously fought
war. Every day is a day before.
Though we do hear
the news. Oh sure. It gets to us.
Story is, up north, people shit
crushed pineapple and rest stop
whores make change with paper
money. Story is
inscribed, fixed as
the roulette wheels clacking inside
casinos, where party boats freak
like viscous bath toys in this
electric gulf.
Certainly, we’ve learned
our numbers. We build a church for
anyone who owns a pair of knees.
But still, the old disease is catching,
so pray with us–
Unplug the power, Lord.
Illuminate the devils. Degrease
the righteous man’s eye.

 

 

Erin Belieu is the author of four poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including her forthcoming Slant Six, due in November 2014.

On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their willingness and ability to pack a political punch.

These two poems by the lovely Native American poet Susan Deercloud, who is eloquent and funny even in her sorrow and her rage, speak for themselves, in a cultural climate where we have a national football team called the Redskins, educators routinely disparage the tradition of oral literacy as ineffectual, and American twentysomethings of Western European ethnic descent think nothing of wearing feathered headdresses to concerts as a fashion statement.

 

Shoot

High noon at the community college. As usual,
the Dean was starring in her cowgirl-and-Injun movie,
a WASP looming seven feet tall, big-boned L.A. import –
what upper middle class white feminists aspired to
in Gloria Steinem 1970’s. She had heard rumors
about a poet hired to teach comp-lit for a semester,
complaints that this Mohawk played poetry on CDs
in the writers’ voices. The Dean swaggered into
the classroom, boomed she had come to observe.
The Indian, short, quiet, shocked, peered up
at the Dean encased in black suede cowgirl skirt,
fringed vest, boots shooting out spurs. She jangled
from turquoise and silver, bragged to the poet wearing
beads strung softly by her own hands on lonely nights –
“From Sedona, jewelry made by Native Americans,”
as if the savage needed to know she paid big bucks
for rings and necklaces made by Navahos. The Dean
spread cannon-thick legs at the front of the room,
made conspicuous notes. The students looked unhappy,
the poet went through the ridiculous motions. She was
back there – the little girl schoolmarms ordered to walk
“single file” in Catskill hometown. She was the teen
graded low for saying U.S. heroes were villains because
they massacred Indians. She was the sister already hip
about sisterhood, the real one of her blood sister, mother,
grandmother, aunts, great aunts, Indian girlfriends. The Dean
bullied, “I know your people believe in oral tradition
but you exist in our system now. No playing poetry on CDs.
Students have to read that stuff on the page. They forget
what they hear in ten seconds.” The Mohawk poet recalled
a male cousin laughing, “You mean it was our ancestors
who put that bug up their ass?” when she spoke about
Iroquois influence on white feminists. Yes, Haudenosaunee
felt sad for female settlers, the way their husbands legally
could beat them into obedience. Yes, they got their equality,
and some grew crueler than their men. They, too, could shoot
down Native women they secretly hated for their heart songs.
Poet with hair color of stars listened to Dean “Has It Made”
reeking of dead cow, her dominatrix words unlike poets’ voices
soaring from CD sacred circles. “Ooooo,” the Dean caressed
the Mohawk’s coat. “Polar bear? I simply must pet it.”
Showdown at The Not OK Corral. Damned if she’d let
that cowgirl get an Oscar. Damned if she’d stop spinning poetry
in her own movie where the beautiful Indians always win.

 

 

Kick

(“My grandmother still uses the term White Man.”
– Embarrassed statement by a young “mixed blood” Cherokee man)
May, Chenango State Park … she driving
sidewinder road to Lily Lake, small second lake
few people visited. New York sun flashed
past unfurling leaves, ghost danced across car hood.
At first the lump on asphalt seemed a ghost
of some darker kind, powerful enough to make her
brake. Then she saw what it was, leapt out
to nudge Turtle with one foot. It snapped towards
her, rocked rough penile head back and forth.
She laughed at its ferocity, picked up fallen branch
to poke it to safety. Cadillac squealed up behind
her old Indian car. Man, grey hair bristling
close to skull, strode over to her. He wore golfer’s cap,
white shoes, stared with pink face at her dilemma.
“I’ll get that damned thing off the road,” he kicked
Turtle in its map of shell, kicked harder, knocking
it upside down so flame of orange underside blazed up.
“Stop,” she choked, but he only kicked more when
Turtle bounced back on clawed feet, lunging, snapping.
How dare a mere beast snap at a man owning
a gold chromed Cadillac? He kicked it tumbling down
wooded bank. “There!” Pale eyes ran over her
long flowered skirt, breeze-tangled hair, bra-less breasts.
She gazed away, trying to see if Turtle landed upright.
This intruder playing uninvited “hero” would never know
her people called America Turtle Island. He would scorn
her love of Turtle, her delight in its sacred rage like that
of Indian warriors who defended women like her against
conquerors like him. Turtle rustled through old leaves.
“Thank you,” she breathed, nearly prayed, in soft voice.
“You’re welcome,” the golfer swaggered loudly
to his hard-on of a Cadillac, sped off. She stood
in the exhaust. “Stupid White Man,” she snapped.
It was only then she cried.

 

Susan Deer Cloud is a mixed-lineage mountain Indian from the Catskill Mountains. An alumna of Binghamton University (B.A. & M.A.) and Goddard College (MFA), she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, two New York State Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Chenango County Council for the Arts Individual Artist Grant. Published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, her most recent books are Hunger Moon, Fox Mountain, Braiding Starlight, Car Stealer and The Last Ceremony. Deer Cloud is the editor of ongoing Native anthology I Was Indian (Before Being Indian Was Cool) and the Re-Matriation Chapbook Series of Indigenous Poetry (FootHills Publishing).

 

On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their willingness and ability to pack a political punch.

Today’s poem, by Yolanda J. Franklin, discusses the American South’s ugly legacy of racially-motivated violence and oppression. We carve our homes out of the natural world in the name of civilization, yet the natural world bears silent witness to a saga of human actions that are as uncivilized as they are unnatural. “If Trees Could Talk” suggests that, although certain real-life, contemporary symbols of alleged civility (e.g., a state flag) may celebrate a shameful legacy of hurt and hate, there are other aspects of our world that render a clearer judgment, born of objectivity, longevity, and natural law.

 

If Trees Could Talk

What if trees could talk of origins, talk
of surnames, talk of hand-tied nooses

to a gin fan anchor? Could talk
of killing seasons and each unremark-

able black body fertilized in southern soils,
could a panacea correct history? Blame

it on whoever you like, just survey
and interview the landscape, trouble

the unflinching stench of my eighty-year
old mother’s memory of whispers

and nicknames surrounding her Grand
Bill, a freedman in Wakulla,

undocumented, yet registered to carry
a musket. I want to hear their voices,

a Blitzkrieg of revolutionary petunias
set afire the Confederate flags that hang,

still like Scarlett’s draperies over
Florida and corners the Mississippi

flag in applause of the trouble
that still tends to crop up around here.

 

Yolanda J. Franklin’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in African American Review, Sugar House Review, Crab Orchard Review’s American South Issue, and The Hoot & Howl of the Owl Anthology of Hurston Wright Writers’ Week. Her awards include a 2012 and 2014 Cave Canem fellowship, the 2013 Kingsbury Award, two nominations from FSU for Best New Poets (2013 & 2014). She is the recipient of several writing retreat scholarships, including a summer at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Squaw Valley Community of Writer’s, Postgraduate Writer’s Conference Manuscript Conference at VCFA, the Callaloo Poetry Workshop in Barbados and Colrain’s Poetry Manuscript Workshop. Her collection of poems, Ruined Nylons, was a finalist for the 2013 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Award. She is also a graduate of Lesley University’s MFA Writing Program and is a third-year PhD student at Florida State University.

 

Bestiary

As in all good stories, you walked

into the wolf’s mouth and you were born:

when they found you, you had wrapped

yourself in the hide. You thought, everyone forgets

the skin is the body’s biggest organ. You thought,

one heart can house another. And so you stood

in a body, and you called the body yours:

no one remembered your family. No one

had heard of your town. You walked

into the wolf’s mouth and you were lost:

as in all good stories, they claimed

you for their own.

Morphine

That birds have bones

in their tongues—that they press

 

your hair in their beaks—that they carry

 

you home in pieces—your body

 

boneless as hair—that birds press

 

your bones in their beaks—that bodiless

 

hair lines a nest—that birds truss

 

their nest with your bones—that every

 

beak widens a wound—that birds

 

dive in, dive deep—that every wound

 

swallows a bird—that birds

 

dive straight to the bone—

 

that tendons are slender

 

as hair—that birds

 

tear muscle, tap bone—

 

that your bones ring hollow

 

as beaks—that birds carry

 

you home in pieces—

On the Physiology of the Heart

 Recall the thin-skinned organ and visit the menagerie it houses: elephant, loon, flora, hound. A clamor in the atrium: the animals have hollowed out new passageways among their enclosures. You know the structure, the folded and enfolded tunnels, has weakened. When you release the animals, they know they should go, but tremble and remain. Collapse is imminent. You threaten to whip the ones that stay, but yoked to nothing their bodies assume helpless forms, and you can’t bring yourself to raise the switch. Instead, you kiss the heads of the animals one by one. The heart collapses into river, into whitewater. You open all the locks.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Susannah Nevison is the author of one full-length collection of poetry, Teratology, forthcoming from Persea Books in 2015, and is the recipient of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. In 2013, she received the American Literary Review poetry prize and an Academy of American Poets / Larry Levis prize for her work. Her poems, criticism, and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Ninth Letter, American Literary Review, Southern Indiana Review, diode, Cider Press Review, JERRY Magazine, The Rumpus and elsewhere. She holds a B.A. from the University of Southern California and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where she also teaches creative writing.

This portable altar to Vodou lwa Erzuli (also sometimes spelled Ezili or Erzulie) Freda was hand-crafted by Mambo (Priestess) Julie, as an adaptation of a traditional Vodou altar. In the religion of Haitian Vodou, altars are frequently dedicated to specific lwa (analogous to Catholic saints, these are venerated spirits that serve as intermediaries between God and mortals). Each lwa has specific traditional offerings that correspond to his or her tastes and respective backstory. Erzuli Freda is the lwa most commonly associated with love, beauty, romance, femininity, wealth, and the finer things in life; her altars are frequently decorated with the colors white and pink. She favors offerings such as champagne, lace, and certain perfumes, and her altars frequently reflect this as well. Many initiates will also tell you that Erzulie Freda has a certain type of purity that combines the virginal with the idealistic. Although she craves and appreciates tasteful offerings, she is deeply invested in an ideal concept beauty that is beyond this world.

Usually located in homes and Temples, traditional Vodou altars are relatively large and sedentary by nature. This portable altar reflects a new technique of worship – something durable that can be taken ‘on the go,’ as modern-day practitioners of this religion may live a more mobile, and perhaps more frenetic, lifestyle than their predecessors. The desire to carry physical signifiers of intangible energies or ideas close to our hearts is far from new, but these altars represent an innovative kind of folk art that is at once aesthetically pleasing, concerned with praxis, and manages to capture more esoteric or abstract concepts that ground the viewer (or, in this case, the practitioner).

As Mambo (Priestess) Sallie Ann Glassman, who studied visual art at Columbia University in her youth, writes: “Altars establish a kind of imagistic language. Vodou altars were created by people who were largely illiterate. The pictures, bottles, statues, pakets – all the objects on each altar – were words that came together to express meaning. The language of an altar must be internally coherent. The various images and symbols should not contradict or antagonize one another. [In this way,] an altar should communicate your feelings to Spirit.”

 

 

 

Artist’s statement on the piece: It is hard for me to write about Freda. She is with me, yet she frightens me. It took me a long time to make her altar. Nothing was ever right or good enough as I made it.  I obviously used her colors and set chilled champagne, golden hair tools and an assortment of perfumes bottles on the little inset altar. Those things of beauty and stateliness that she demands….. it’s almost as if she wants all the riches of the world, yet even those leave her feeling unsatisfied.

 

Mambo Julie is a dynamic priestess of the Vodou tradition, an initiate daughter of New Orleans Mambo Sallie Ann Glassman, and granddaughter of the world-famous sequin flagmaker Edgard Jean-Louis, one of Haiti’s most well-known and respected sequin artists. She owns , a small business that specializes in traditional conjure rootwork, located in Missouri.