Charleston

Afaa M. Weaver

In a fountain at the harbour, children wash themselves in water spraying in the heat. They count themselves dark and light. The aircraft carrier sits in the moist nothing of salt water, tons of tons weighing in the soft splash. We count our wishes, to be free, to be at ease, to be in abundance. Above us spirits whirl in a thunderhead.

On steps across from the slave mart, I peel an orange for the slow rip of its flesh in my thumb, the sweet dotting of my nose with its juice. I suck the threads of it, gaze at the wooden doors now closed, at the empty space inside with iron hooks. I can see the white folks' heads checking available cash in front of naked Africans chained, bereaved, and listening to a cruelty yet to be born. I can smell the congregation of odours, humans fresh from slave ships or working in fields, and humans fresh from beds of fine linen, sleeping with fingers in Bibles and prayers.

This is not a petty thing because we have a rental car with an air conditioner, a tape player, and various cushions. We have come far to do this, to gaze out from the banks of this plantation river to the rice fields, to walk in Charleston. I keep the heat from threatening my life, and I wonder if I could have survived slavery to be old, if being old is all there is to live to be. I walk around the slave quarters and hear African languages speaking in magnolias.

The Black Man’s Bit

Leslie Pinckney Hill

O there’s talk from school to pulpit, and the barber’s place is rife, And the shoe shop and the supper table hum, With the tale of Dixie’s black men who have shared the mighty strife For that freedom of the better time to come. Every mother’s eye is brighter, every father’s back is straighter, And our girls are tripping lightly in their pride, And by none except a Teuton, or a slacker, or a traitor, Will the right to their elation be denied.

They said they were too slow, too dull, too this and that to do it, They couldn’t match the method of the Hun, And then to arm a million—why, the land would surely rue it If a million blacks were taught to use a gun. But right won out, and they went in at all detractors smiling; They learned as quick as any how to shoot, They took the prize at loading ships, and riveting and piling, And trained a thousand officers to boot.

And when they went ’twas with a boon no others had been bringing, For whether with a pick or with a gun, They lightened every labour with a wondrous sort of singing, And turned the pall of battle into fun. O the Frenchman was a marvel, and the Yankee was a wonder, And the British line was like a granite wall, But for singing as they leaped away to draw the Kaiser’s thunder, The swarthy sons of Dixie beat them all.

And now that they have helped to break the rattling Hunnish sabre, They’ll trail the Suwanee River back again To Dixie home, and native song, and school and honest labour, To be as men among their fellow men. No special thanks or praise they'll ask, no clapping on the shoulder They did their bit, and won, and all men know it And Dixie will be proud of them, and grown a little older, And wiser, too, will welcome them and show it.

“Integrated School Books” Arpeggio

A. Van Jordan

The Crisis Magazine, June 1967

On the cover, Negro men playing checkers in the park. Some wear hats, while others wear waves in their hair. Either way, they’re all clean and their strategy brims as sharp as their suits. Within these pages, they’re playing chess,

protecting future children, as they wear ties, dress shirts, shined shoes—looking clean and ready for business or for battle. And their plan? No longer will textbooks be used as chess pieces to keep Negro children in check.

Sound familiar? Schools will be pushed to clean bookshelves of the white-washed lessons of their past. The NAACP opens minds like games of chess, and all excuses for hiding a country’s checkered past will be dismissed. Despite segregation’s wear

and tear from school boards, and the fear of their white parents, henchmen, bullies—all just chess pieces, really, but jumping laws like checkers when life is more complex—books remain where the mind cannot hide. Either you come clean

and admit your ignorance, or be a pawn on the chess board of intellect, banning books. They think check- mate! But when I see Crisis in a library archive where we still argue to be seen, I lose patience. Kleenex, please, for Karens clutching their pearls! I pray their

white kids are reading Langston Hughes in a public library: √. But one state over, bookshelves have no Black authors, cleaned out. Our books remain under attack, Kings in a game of chess.

Today's poem, from Pedro Pietri

In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes

Eduardo C Corral

in a Tex-Mex restaurant. His co-workers, unable to utter his name, renamed him Jalapeño.

If I ask for a goldfish, he spits a glob of phlegm into a jar of water. The silver letters

on his black belt spell Sangrón. Once, borracho, at dinner, he said: Jesus wasn’t a snowman.

Arriba Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed into a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States.

Frijolero. Greaser. In Tucson he branded cattle. He slept in a stable. The horse blankets

oddly fragrant: wood smoke, lilac. He’s an illegal. I’m an Illegal-American. Once, in a grove

of saguaro, at dusk, I slept next to him. I woke with his thumb in my mouth. ¿No qué no

tronabas, pistolita? He learned English by listening to the radio. The first four words

he memorized: In God We Trust. The fifth: Percolate. Again and again I borrow his clothes.

He calls me Scarecrow. In Oregon he picked apples. Braeburn. Jonagold. Cameo. Nightly,

to entertain his cuates, around a campfire, he strummed a guitarra, sang corridos. Arriba

Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed into a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States.

Greaser. Beaner. Once, borracho, at breakfast, he said: The heart can only be broken

once, like a window. ¡No mames! His favourite belt buckle: an águila perched on a nopal.

If he laughs out loud, his hands tremble. Bugs Bunny wants to deport him. César Chávez

wants to deport him. When I walk through the desert, I wear his shirt. The gaze of the moon

stitches the buttons of his shirt to my skin. The snake hisses. The snake is torn.

Continental Breakfast

Nkosi Nkululeko

I know we the finest Black folk in this southern, La Quinta Inn, but damn, the White folk won’t stop lookin’ at us funny. The 2% milk-carton faces the backside of a fridge’s glass door; classic Lucky Charms in Styrofoam bowls, which squeak when you bend them. It’s unremarkable here but we’re at least bored together, in line for food . . . news on a monitor propagandizing in one ear, coming out abandoned in the only Other.

When there’s nothing to do, our Blacknesses practices metamorphosis. This du-rag used as coffee sleeve. Bonnet as lampshade. We’d retire in the pagoda with cigarette butts decorating cobblestone like flower stems. I want to outgrow the flammable baggage that we left in the room of our memory. Sometimes, when you forget what I say, I feel better for it. As if, I get to share something with you . . . again, but what was that [thing you said], in our argument about [something I forgot]? We are in the lobby, silent, waiting for the other to disturb our discontent with a pun about crackers.

Amsterdam

Megan Fernandes

Sometimes the mythologies of a city are true— like when I see a blond man bob for red apples in the street selling records side by side with a black cat wound in a cushion, deep in dream. Josh says he does not want to go see Anne Frank, that this kind of tourism depresses him, the one where the demonstration of grief is like a voyeuristic tug at suffering that is not yours to possess. How do you eat after that, he seems sad today. How do you stay alive. When he was young, he visited Auschwitz and told me not to go because it had a gift shop and that made him angry and nobody knows how to grieve in public, how to make public space for loss unless you can make money off of it but really there is something else to his anger, the child abandoned, the residue of a young girl’s life turned into a petting zoo—this he cannot take.

I have become like my mother where I don’t need sleep in a new city anymore, immune to time shifts, I just wander and buy fruit and almonds and a good loaf of bread and today, some fresh juice, skipping museums though I want to go back to see Anne Frank’s house this time, because this time, I am a woman and last time, I was a girl and when you are a girl, all you see is another girl and when you are a woman, all you see is history careening towards a girl who you cannot protect.

In my Amsterdam apartment, I find a ceramic plate with its rim edge folded in five places where a violet petal has been painted at its compression. In it, I pour some olive oil and a little bit of salt and sit on the white couch overlooking the new neon green blooms gathering on a branch outside the large window directly facing an apartment of a bookish couple, the kind who forget they have bodies and think they are better than those who are bodily which is most everyone else in the world but the girl in the couple is lying and misses the small animal inside her crying for her breakfast. What she needs is food, not Yeats. What she needs is your fingers. The apartment has tulips and pink depression glass and cacti of all heights like reptilian skyscrapers.

I am thinking of Harlem in Amsterdam. Sometimes I go there to hide. I go there to eat at a bistro owned by a lady named Fay. Fay is older with light eyes and her whole family works this place and her grandson is behind the bar and he’s just seventeen and a soccer player and this week got into Dartmouth and I ask her if she thinks he’ll be happy, being a black kid at Dartmouth, but Fey is Queen Fey and knows better than to answer questions about race at dinner time especially in front of all these nice people.

In Amsterdam, the cold sunlight of April grows the dandelions in the gutter and when you get to 263 to see Anne Frank’s house (only from the outside) the building is not as tall as you remember and you wonder what the ceilings were like for a young girl and you imagine her face, I imagine her face and think maybe something bad happened to Josh when he was a kid and you see her face in the window, her face lit up in story, her face in love and in fear, and you are in Amsterdam when the American president bombs Syria. You say American president as if you are not an American and as if he is not your president. You promised that he would not make his way into any poem, but here he is bombing Syria and here is he is in your poem and here is her face spreading all over Europe and here is your face, Anne, spreading all over Europe and here is your face, your face, your face.

Mississippi

E Ethelbert Miller

death surrounds itself with the living i watch them take the body from the house i’m a young kid maybe five years old the whole thing makes no sense to me i hear my father say          lord jesus what she go and do this for i watch him walk out the backdoor of the house i watch him walk around the garden kick the dirt stare at the flowers & shake his head  shake his head he shakes his head all night long yazoo jackson vicksburg we must have family in almost every city i spent more time traveling than growing up guess that’s why i’m still shorter than my old man he don’t like to stay in one place much he tell me soon as people get to know your last name seem like they want to call you by your first boy    if someone ask you your name tell them to call you mississippi not sippi or sip but mississippi how many colored folks you know name mississippi none see now you can find a whole lot of folks whose name is canada just like you can find 53 people in any phone book whose name is booker t. washington your mother she was a smart woman gave you a good name not one of them abolitionist names what you look like with a name like john brown or william lloyd garrison that don’t have no class your mother she named you after the river cause of its beauty and mystery just like my mother named me nevada cause she didn’t know where it was

Puerto Rico Obituary

Pedro Pietri

They worked They were always on time They were never late They never spoke back when they were insulted They worked They never took days off that were not on the calendar They never went on strike without permission They worked ten days a week and were only paid for five They worked They worked They worked and they died They died broke They died owing They died never knowing what the front entrance of the first national city bank looks like

Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel All died yesterday today and will die again tomorrow passing their bill collectors on to the next of kin All died waiting for the garden of eden to open up again under a new management All died dreaming about america waking them up in the middle of the night screaming: Mira Mira your name is on the winning lottery ticket for one hundred thousand dollars All died hating the grocery stores that sold them make-believe steak and bullet-proof rice and beans All died waiting dreaming and hating

Dead Puerto Ricans Who never knew they were Puerto Ricans Who never took a coffee break from the ten commandments to KILL KILL KILL the landlords of their cracked skulls and communicate with their latino souls

Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel From the nervous breakdown streets where the mice live like millionaires and the people do not live at all are dead and were never alive

Juan died waiting for his number to hit Miguel died waiting for the welfare check to come and go and come again Milagros died waiting for her ten children to grow up and work so she could quit working Olga died waiting for a five dollar raise Manuel died waiting for his supervisor to drop dead so he could get a promotion

Is a long ride from Spanish Harlem to long island cemetery where they were buried First the train and then the bus and the cold cuts for lunch and the flowers that will be stolen when visiting hours are over Is very expensive Is very expensive But they understand Their parents understood Is a long non-profit ride from Spanish Harlem to long island cemetery

Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel All died yesterday today and will die again tomorrow Dreaming Dreaming about queens Clean-cut lily-white neighbourhood Puerto Ricanless scene Thirty-thousand-dollar home The first spics on the block Proud to belong to a community of gringos who want them lynched Proud to be a long distance away from the sacred phrase: Que Pasa

These dreams These empty dreams from the make-believe bedrooms their parents left them are the after-effects of television programs about the ideal white american family with black maids and latino janitors who are well train— to make everyone and their bill collectors laugh at them and the people they represent

Juan died dreaming about a new car Miguel died dreaming about new anti-poverty programs Milagros died dreaming about a trip to Puerto Rico Olga died dreaming about real jewellery Manuel died dreaming about the irish sweepstakes

They all died like a hero sandwich dies in the garment district at twelve o’clock in the afternoon social security number to ashes union dues to dust

They knew they were born to weep and keep the morticians employed as long as they pledge allegiance to the flag that wants them destroyed They saw their names listed in the telephone directory of destruction They were train to turn the other cheek by newspapers that mis-spelled mispronounced and misunderstood their names and celebrated when death came and stole their final laundry ticket

They were born dead and they died dead Is time to visit sister lopez again the number one healer and fortune card dealer in Spanish Harlem She can communicate with your late relatives for a reasonable fee Good news is guaranteed Rise Table Rise Table death is not dumb and disable— Those who love you want to know the correct number to play Let them know this right away Rise Table Rise Table death is not dumb and disable Now that your problems are over and the world is off your shoulders help those who you left behind find financial peace of mind Rise Table Rise Table death is not dumb and disable If the right number we hit all our problems will split and we will visit your grave on every legal holiday Those who love you want to know the correct number to play let them know this right away We know your spirit is able Death is not dumb and disable RISE TABLE RISE TABLE

Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel All died yesterday today and will die again tomorrow Hating fighting and stealing broken windows from each other Practicing a religion without a roof The old testament The new testament

according to me gospel of the internal revenue the judge and jury and executioner protector and eternal bill collector Second-hand shit for sale learn how to say Como Esta Usted

and you will make a fortune They are dead They are dead and will not return from the dead until they stop neglecting the art of their dialogue— for broken english lessons to impress the mister goldsteins— who keep them employed as lavaplatos porters messenger boys factory workers maids stock clerks shipping clerks assistant mailroom assistant, assistant assistant to the assistant’s assistant assistant lavaplatos and automatic artificial smiling doormen for the lowest wages of the ages and rages when you demand a raise because is against the company policy to promote SPICS SPICS SPICS Juan died hating Miguel because Miguel’s used car was in better running condition than his used car Miguel died hating Milagros because Milagros had a colour television set and he could not afford one yet Milagros died hating Olga because Olga made five dollars more on the same job Olga died hating Manuel because Manuel had hit the numbers more times than she had hit the numbers Manuel died hating all of them Juan Miguel Milagros and Olga because they all spoke broken english more fluently than he did

And now they are together in the main lobby of the void Addicted to silence Off limits to the wind Confine to worm supremacy in long island cemetery This is the groovy hereafter the protestant collection box was talking so loud and proud about

Here lies Juan Here lies Miguel Here lies Milagros Here lies Olga Here lies Manuel who died yesterday today and will die again tomorrow Always broke Always owing Never knowing that they are beautiful people Never knowing the geography of their complexion

PUERTO RICO IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE PUERTORRIQUENOS ARE A BEAUTIFUL RACE If only they had turned off the television and tune into their own imaginations If only they had used the white supremacy bibles for toilet paper purpose and make their latino souls the only religion of their race If only they had return to the definition of the sun after the first mental snowstorm on the summer of their senses If only they had kept their eyes open at the funeral of their fellow employees who came to this country to make a fortune and were buried without underwear

Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel will right now be doing their own thing where beautiful people sing and dance and work together where the wind is a stranger to miserable weather conditions where you do not need a dictionary to communicate with your people Aqui Se Habla Espanol all the time Aqui you salute your flag first Aqui there are no dial soap commercials Aqui everybody smells good Aqui tv dinners do not have a future Aqui the men and women admire desire and never get tired of each other Aqui Que Pasa Power is what’s happening Aqui to be called negrito means to be called LOVE

Amsterdam

Megan Fernandes

Sometimes the mythologies of a city are true— like when I see a blond man bob for red apples in the street selling records side by side with a black cat wound in a cushion, deep in dream. Josh says he does not want to go see Anne Frank, that this kind of tourism depresses him, the one where the demonstration of grief is like a voyeuristic tug at suffering that is not yours to possess. How do you eat after that, he seems sad today. How do you stay alive. When he was young, he visited Auschwitz and told me not to go because it had a gift shop and that made him angry and nobody knows how to grieve in public, how to make public space for loss unless you can make money off of it but really there is something else to his anger, the child abandoned, the residue of a young girl’s life turned into a petting zoo—this he cannot take.

I have become like my mother where I don’t need sleep in a new city anymore, immune to time shifts, I just wander and buy fruit and almonds and a good loaf of bread and today, some fresh juice, skipping museums though I want to go back to see Anne Frank’s house this time, because this time, I am a woman and last time, I was a girl and when you are a girl, all you see is another girl and when you are a woman, all you see is history careening towards a girl who you cannot protect.

In my Amsterdam apartment, I find a ceramic plate with its rim edge folded in five places where a violet petal has been painted at its compression. In it, I pour some olive oil and a little bit of salt and sit on the white couch overlooking the new neon green blooms gathering on a branch outside the large window directly facing an apartment of a bookish couple, the kind who forget they have bodies and think they are better than those who are bodily which is most everyone else in the world but the girl in the couple is lying and misses the small animal inside her crying for her breakfast. What she needs is food, not Yeats. What she needs is your fingers. The apartment has tulips and pink depression glass and cacti of all heights like reptilian skyscrapers.

I am thinking of Harlem in Amsterdam. Sometimes I go there to hide. I go there to eat at a bistro owned by a lady named Fay. Fay is older with light eyes and her whole family works this place and her grandson is behind the bar and he’s just seventeen and a soccer player and this week got into Dartmouth and I ask her if she thinks he’ll be happy, being a black kid at Dartmouth, but Fey is Queen Fey and knows better than to answer questions about race at dinner time especially in front of all these nice people.

In Amsterdam, the cold sunlight of April grows the dandelions in the gutter and when you get to 263 to see Anne Frank’s house (only from the outside) the building is not as tall as you remember and you wonder what the ceilings were like for a young girl and you imagine her face, I imagine her face and think maybe something bad happened to Josh when he was a kid and you see her face in the window, her face lit up in story, her face in love and in fear, and you are in Amsterdam when the American president bombs Syria. You say American president as if you are not an American and as if he is not your president. You promised that he would not make his way into any poem, but here he is bombing Syria and here is he is in your poem and here is her face spreading all over Europe and here is your face, Anne, spreading all over Europe and here is your face, your face, your face.

I, Too

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.

A Photograph Taken in Duluth

Sean Hill

My grandmother says Beg Pardon when she hasn’t heard what you’ve said or is certain you can’t have meant what she heard like I think the moon must have squinted at the dim light of that gas lamppost and the three men that hung from it. What I mean is three men black, in town with the circus, accused of the usual lynch-law crime were chosen from six and dragged from jail one by one by men who’d formed a mob, propped up by thousands of bystanders who didn’t join in with the hoisting of these black men up the lamppost for allegedly violating a white woman but registered approval with fists and feet while they made way for the black men or didn’t stop the hand or foot of the woman or man next to them, so three beaten bodies violently shook, shuddered, sputtered blood on those close by and came to rest.

My grandmother says Hush when she’s heard what you’ve said and doesn’t want to believe it. But I have a photograph— proof of what happened in Duluth. For that I must say Thank you kindly (that’s how my grandmother always says it) to a photographer from just across the bay in Superior, Wisconsin, on hand with the thousands of other souls crowding downtown Duluth that June evening. I know he didn’t take it for me. My grandmother says Have mercy when she’s heard a burdensome truth such as the photograph was quickly made into a postcard that sold quite well in local retail outlets as a memento.

My grandmother didn’t know these men; she wasn’t born yet, but doesn’t need to be shown this photograph to know the crowd of white faces staring into the searchlight. Some lean forward and stretch their necks to make certain they’re in the picture, one smiles while Elias Clayton’s body lies face down at his feet (hung so high they had to cut him down to be in the shot) and Isaac McGhie and Elmer Jackson hang with their necks stretched, heads lolled to the side, faces turned as if they should be the ones bearing the shame or regret. This photo isn’t necessary for my grandmother to know that this happened, and can still happen. And that’s why my grandmother sighs and says Hush.

First posted in May, 2015. Here we are, still. 

Today I forego a poem. 

Instead, here is a Guardian article written about a poet of undeniable talent, and great facility, and about the anti-semitic poetry he published. Just be aware.

Vigilance and Respect.

Ballad of Birmingham

Dudley Randall - on another Birmingham and a terrorist outrage

(On the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963)

“Mother dear, may I go downtown Instead of out to play, And march the streets of Birmingham In a Freedom March today?”

“No, baby, no, you may not go, For the dogs are fierce and wild, And clubs and hoses, guns and jails Aren’t good for a little child.”

“But, mother, I won’t be alone. Other children will go with me, And march the streets of Birmingham To make our country free.”

“No, baby, no, you may not go, For I fear those guns will fire. But you may go to church instead And sing in the children’s choir.”

She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair, And bathed rose petal sweet, And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands, And white shoes on her feet.

The mother smiled to know her child Was in the sacred place, But that smile was the last smile To come upon her face.

For when she heard the explosion, Her eyes grew wet and wild. She raced through the streets of Birmingham Calling for her child.

She clawed through bits of glass and brick, Then lifted out a shoe. “O, here’s the shoe my baby wore, But, baby, where are you?”

The Life of a Digger

Margarita Engle

Henry from the island of Jamaica

Jamaican digging crews have to sleep eighty men to a room, in huge warehouses like the ones where big wooden crates of dynamite are stored.

My hands feel like scorpion claws, clamped on to a hard hard shovel all day, then curled into fists at night.

At dawn, the steaming labor trains deliver us by the thousands, down into that snake pit where we dig until my muscles feel as weak as water and my backbone is like shattered glass.

But only half the day is over.

At lunchtime, we see sunburned American engineers and foremen eating at tables, in shady tents with the flaps left open, so that we have to watch how they sit on nice chairs, looking restful.

We also watch the medium-dark Spanish men, relaxing as they sit on their train tracks, grinning as if they know secrets.

We have no place to sit. Not even a stool. So we stand, plates in hand, uncomfortable and undignified.

Back home, I used to dream of saving enough Panama money to buy a bit of good farmland for Momma and my little brothers and sisters, so that we would all have plenty to eat.

Now all I want is a chair. And food with some spice. And fair treatment. Justice.

Dante Alighieri