David Trinidad

from An Attempt at Exhausting a Neiborhood in Chatsworth, California

 If you turned right on Superior, past the mystery house on the corner, you’d come upon, after a slight curve, Superior Street Elementary School, which I attended from grades one to six. The playground (which extended to Oso Avenue) protected by a tall chain-link fence. Scattered about the asphalt: baseball diamond, volleyball net, two wooden walls to bounce balls against (that had what looked like doors painted on them, their purpose always unclear), tetherball poles, jungle gym, rings, and, near the kindergarten classrooms, a large sandbox. Must I speak (once again) of the indignities of the playground, how I tried to avoid the aggression of ball-throwing boys by playing hopscotch, jacks, and Chinese jump rope with the girls. Or later, spending lunch hours in the library, reading the blue-bound biographies of famous Americans: Ben Franklin, Betsy Ross, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Dolly Madison, George Washington, Pocahontas, Thomas Jefferson. (I was most intrigued by the women.) Or the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her whole childhood captured in eight matching volumes. The titles alone were beautiful: On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, These Happy Golden Years. Years of art projects: cutting an egg carton in half and painting it green, then adding eyes and two pipe cleaner antennas, and voila, a caterpillar. Or placing bits of tissue paper and yarn between two pieces of wax paper and ironing them, to produce a colorful “stained glass” collage. Years of current events. Of studying maps of the world (each country a different pastel shade, like our houses). And models of the solar system (each planet a hand-painted styrofoam ball). Years of report cards. (In elementary school they were called “progress reports.”) Grades for reading, English, handwriting, spelling, mathematics, geography, history, civics, science, art, music, and physical education. Grades for effort, work habits, and citizenship: “tries to do his best,” “follows directions,” “works cooperatively with other pupils,” “accepts responsibility,” “respects authority.” Years of fire drills. And in case of a nuclear attack, “drop” drills: In the middle of a lesson, the teacher would call out “Drop!” and we’d all huddle under our desks with our hands clasped over the back of our heads. All of my teachers were women: Mrs. Wiggins, Mrs. Field, Mrs. Kasower, Mrs. Bialosky (first name Kay, kind and patient and encouraging, whom I had for half of the first grade, and all of the third and sixth). Mrs. Morton (first name Milicent), my fifth-grade teacher, was the opposite of Mrs. Bialosky. Cold and strict, she had no use for a sensitive boy. My grades dropped that year, and I gained weight. Her best friend, Mrs. Price (first name Jeanine), was equally intimidating. The two of them dressed like immaculate Barbie dolls: white, short-sleeved blouses; sheath skirts with wide belts; spike heels. They wore their dyed hair (Mrs. Price, red; Mrs. Morton, black) in bouffants, like Elizabeth Taylor or Jacqueline Kennedy. It was rumored that Mrs. Price, originally from the South, was married to a “Negro musician.” Mrs. Morton (with Mrs. Price as witness) often took an incorrigible boy in my class (Jimmy) out to the bungalow where textbooks were stored, to thrash him with a yardstick. The only male teacher at the school was Mr. Bartell. His daughter Monica was also in my class. It was from Monica, in tears, that we learned, on November 22, 1963, as we were lining up after lunch, that President Kennedy had been shot. She’d heard it from her father. It’s the only time I remember seeing teachers upset. It was as if the world had stopped. We were sent home early.

Claudia Rankine

 

from Citizen: “You are in the dark, in the car...”

/   

You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.  

You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having.  

Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.  

As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.  

/  

When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term — John Henryism — for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.  

/  

When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you.  

He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say.  

Now there you go, he responds.  

The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stranger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile.  

Claudia Rankine

from Don't Let Me Be Lonely: “Cornel West makes the point...” 

Cornel West makes the point that hope is different from American optimism. After the initial presidential election results come in, I stop watching the news. I want to continue watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I can­not. I lose hope. However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten days later and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism. All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush himself, the same Bush who can't remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in his home state of Texas.

/ 
 

You don't remember because you don't care. Some­times my mother's voice swells and fills my forehead. Mostly I resist the flooding, but in Bush's case I find myself talking to the television screen: You don't know because you don't care.

/
 

Then, like all things impassioned, this voice takes on a life of its own: You don't know because you don't bloody care. Do you?

/
 

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recog­nition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this with­out breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, per­haps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers. I don't know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new ten­dency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which trans­lates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that gov­ern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think.

Ishion Hutchinson

fromThe Anabasis of Godspeed

 1.

Out of a rising bank of fever grass Godspeed emerged wearing

a rubber tree leaf mask. At the beginning of the month the

strength of the battalion stood 31 officers and 1010 other

ranks. He pretended he was Baruch. “Weep not” he shouted.

“Conquer and to conquering” he shouted. “Rejoice” he shouted.

This was near or outside AXUM or ATLANTIS or those

suicide goat cliffs near HECTORS RIVER by Happy Grove

where Horace leapt and became the Great Conjunction.

Then again at Christmas the boy’s hands were high with the

murder of sorrel. At the end of the month the strength of the

battalion stood 23 officers and 921 other ranks.

3.

No. 1391 Pte. J. Fisher “C” boy died pneumonia.

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

The battalion less “B” boy enchained for EL ARISH.

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

No. 134 Pte. A. M. Harper “D” boy died pneumonia.

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

“A” boy proceeded to No. 3 School of Military Aeronautics for

course in aviation. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

No. 6898 Pte. Benn “C” boy died malaria.

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

4.

Ishion Hutchinson

Roof Nightclub

First, above all, I live forever. And
thereafter redecorate paradise
in the majesty of the Roof Nightclub,
DJ Lucifer, at predawn hours
terrifies the floorboards to give way to
Apollyon’s abyss, reflecting scarred light
on the wall. The mirror alive with tremors.

Herons bring news of consolation.
I rebuke them for my brilliance
and enrich uranium in my cove
across Navy Island. The hospital
vanishes in the fog, so I arrange rain
to restore magenta ginger lilies
where my mother walked to born me.
Malignant fireflies at Christmas;
sorrel then sorrow, such is Kingston, there
funky carols seethe asphalt with famine.

Forever ends. Never a moment holds
‘still-here,’ when sand murmurs through my fingers.
I number and chant down stars, ellipsoidal
as fire ants with, “I think I will be
killed once I die!” and again return
the Super Ape, to conquer the Roof Club,
rip off Apollyon’s hell fence; skin him; dance
thundering subatomic dub music,
until my rage yields settled coral.
A million embers of eyes split from coals
to see me loom out the shadows’ sunray
by the turntable wearing a splash crown.

Ishion Hutchinson

Requiem for Aunt May

A calm sign in the trees of May: she's dead, 
not like this dirge staining the air, her name 
recited in the camphor-house where the chalk 
figurine, that haberdashery sphinx reclines, 
riddled by the TV. There no one faces the calendar, 
river-stone talks go under the bridge of condolences, 
and land on the old sofa's shoulder. I, her water-child, 
keep watch over her laminated Savior, nailed 
into the wall, flipping a coin whose head promises 
Daedalus. Someone pries open an album, the cocoon 
postcards wail on the line, pronouncing, Aunt May— 

baker, builder of the yellow stone house, your children 
hatched wings while your face was bent in the oven. 
The mixing bowls, the wooden spoons, the plastic 
bride & groom, knew before the phone alarmed 
the night your passing. So you passed, in a floral dress, 
a shawl softly tied to your head, the house spring-cleaned. 


II 

Enters Daedalus, father, dressed in white, hands 
in pockets, strolling through prayers and smoke 
of the mourning wake. I listen: his limbs 
are pure starch! On the veranda, eyeing 
the gong-tormented sea, seaweeds streak 
his beard, salt rimmed his apologies. I hesitate 
at the labyrinth of father and son, red hurt 
throbbing my ears from my fall on the poppy grounds, 
fog swallowing all that was carried over 
years of saying nothing. Silence, this flame 
held back before erupting, as an oven after heat 
has been sucked from it. I begin in silence 
my life, then and there, as a ghost.

Ishion Hutchinson

SIBELIUS AND MARLEY

History is dismantled music; slant,
bleak on gravel. One amasses silence,
another chastises silence with nettles,
stinging ferns. I oscillate in their jaws.

The whole gut listens. The ear winces
white nights in his talons: sinking mire.
He wails and a comet impales the sky
with the duel wink of a wasp’s burning.

Music dismantles history; the flambeaux
inflame in his eyes with a locust plague,
a rough gauze bolting up his mouth unfolds,
so he lashes the air with ropes and roots

that converge on a dreadful zero,
a Golden Age. Somewhere, an old film.
Dusk solders on a cold, barren coast. There
I am a cenotaph of horns and stones.

Ishion Hutchinson

 

Station

The train station was a cemetery. 
Drunk with spirits, another being entered. 
I fanned gnats from my eyes to see into his face. 
I saw father. I looked and shouted, "Father!" 
He did not budge, after thirteen years, neither snow nor train, 
only a few letters, and twice on a cell 
his hoar frost accent crossed the Atlantic. 
I poked his face, his mask slipped as a moment 
in childhood, a gesture of smoke, pure departure.  

Along freighted crowds the city punished, 
I picked faces in the thick nest of morning's 
hard light, they struck raw and stupid, 
and in the dribble of night commuters, 
phantoms, I have never found him. From the almond 
trees' shadows I have looked, since a virus 
disheartened the palms' blossoms and mother  
shaved her head to a nut, gave me the sheaves 
in her purse so he would remember her. 

I was talking fast of her in one of my Cerberus 
voices but he laughed shaking the scales 
of froth on his coat. The station's cold cracked 
back a hysterical congregation, echo and plunder, 
his eyes flashed little obelisks that chased 
the spirits out, and without them, wavering, 
I saw nothing like me. Stranger, father, cackling 
rat, I stood transfixed at the bottom of the station. 
Who was I? Pure echo in the train's beam 

arriving on its cold nerve of iron. Grave, 
exact, the doors breathed open. Father was nowhere 
when I boarded and looked through the glass 
and plunged cold down the shadow chamber 
many wore many strong disguises and none 
spoke or even looked I was there in the box, 
incandescent, becoming half their hush, 
half still in the man's chiseling snarl, louder 
now he was away and I am departing.

Ishion Hutchinson

Homage:Vallejo

Brailed up from birth, these obdurate, obituary corners

of second life the hospital light ravened solstice

blessed with a caesarean and now we have a republic,

the bread under arm, water-bearer of the sea: Cetus, Christ.

After the blackbird I put on my herringbone jacket,

the feather hummed gargoyles bearing down buildings,

rain scowled down, Vallejo and Vallejo as I hurried

up Eager Street; Thursday, I remember the white stone

in the flask and wild asterisks hissing; Thursdays, falling

at noon, at Cathedral Street, blackbirds falling quietly at Biddle Street.

Ishion Hutchinson

“At nights birds hammered my unborn”

At nights birds hammered my unborn

child’s heart to strength, each strike bringing

bones and spine to glow, her lungs pestled
loud as the sea I was raised a sea anemone

among women who cursed their hearts
out, soured themselves, never-brides,

into veranda shades, talcum and tea moistened
their quivering jaws, prophetic without prophecy.

Anvil-black, gleaming garlic nubs, the pageant arrived with sails unfurled
from Colchis and I rejoiced like a broken

asylum to see burning sand grains, skittering ice;
shekels clapped in my chest, I smashed my head against a lightbulb

and light sprinkled my hair; I rejoiced, a poui
tree hit by the sun in the room, a man, a man.

Srikanth Reddy

fromUnderworld Lit

XXIII

Read each question and circle the least incorrect option. Remain quietly seated when you are done.


1) The entrance to the Mayan underworld is located in  _____________.

      A. An underwater cave system in Bolivia
      B. The dark rift in the Milky Way
      C. A locked vault in the back office of the United Fruit Company
      D. All of the above


2) The sun god Ra journeys toward the third hour of the night on a  _____________.

      A. Funeral boat
      B. Serpent boat
      C. One-eyed boat
      D. Boat towed by jackals


3) The hero’s companion in the Epic of Gilgamesh dies of  _____________.

      A. Vehicle rollover
      B. Friendly fire
      C. Superficial spreading malignant melanoma
      D. Irrelevant question


4) The first large-scale multiple choice assessment was administered by  _____________.

      A. The Hindu god of death
      B. Jacques Derrida
      C. The United States Army
      D. All of the below

Martha Ronk

 

 

 

Why Knowing Is (& Matisse's Woman With A Hat)

Why knowing is a quality out of fashion and no one can decide to 
but slips into it or ends up with a painting one has never 
seen that quality of light before even before having seen it 
in between pages of another book and not remembering who knows 
or recognizing the questionable quality of light on her face 
as she sits for a portrait and isn't allowed to move an inch 
you recognize the red silk flower on her hat 
and can almost place where you have seen that gray descending 
through the light reversing foreground and background 
as the directions escape one as the way you have to 
live with anyone as she gets up finally from her chair 
having written the whole of it in her head as the question 
ignored for the hundredth time as a quality of knowing is 
oddly resuscitated from a decade prior to this.

Dan Beachy-Quick on Martha Rock

 

These poems seek, in humble and honest ways, all that falls back into, or refuses to emerge from, the inexpressible rooted silently inside the givens of our lives—not to break the secret open, but more simply, more wondrously, to admit it’s there. Such poems return us to art’s fundamental courage: to note where facts and knowledge fray into the unknown from which they were first woven, and to ask those questions that end beyond the end of the poem.

Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Of Silence and Song

Martha Ronk

• 
  

 

"Scraps of Indigenous History"

scratched hinterlands and the far-flung    cased behind glass

collected in multiples        piecemeal and over time

stitched with fishing twine          housed in museum vaults

the ongoing       catapulted into waters moving out to

unfinished sentences        songs of smoke       marks on clay

a leg lifted in a dance       no one remembers

land lived on is only for feet         dusty imprints blown away

a headdress      woven      feathered        ribbon-trimmed

beauty seared into skin         tattooed stripes on the chin

scripts of uninformed information          eluded, erased

land forms      left snake-like       telling us in what dialect

anonymous was what      was Wiyot       was imprinted with a map

was dark of face    was blue unborn       was landlocked

was unnamed       was pictured only as the unseen

Martha Ronk

in the sky

in the sky would be as others have recognized an anti-utilitarian move
yet no doubt all humans have posited such—just their sounds and cries
call it up—the gliding sideswoop raptors mostly, but in the twilight
the swallows take to the abundant flying insects as if nothing else
had ever existed, and that swarm near the edge of Peninsula road
is one place to be on this peninsula not so different from any others
these birds no words can get hold of—no adjectives, fonts, metaphors—
how could even an ode praise one of them enough even out of the sky
as an egret lifts one leg then another in slow progress in the shallows,
undulating white against gray (unda/wave), language fails bird
or idea as it moves as if water were an element to be distained

Leonardo envisioned a device to be built of wood, reeds and taffeta: “A small
model can be made of paper with a spring-like metal shaft that after having been
released, after having been twisted, causes the screw to spin up into the air.”

Martha Ronk

  from “A Foreign Substance”

             “Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights,” one of Barbara Guest’s most famous poems, begins where the title begins looking over gardens, night lights, buildings, parking lot trucks. Stanza two begins with an enigmatic pronoun without a clear antecedent:

            Wild gardens overlooked by night lights. Parking

            lot trucks overlooked by night lights. Buildings

            with their escapes overlooked by lights

            They urge me to seek here on the heights

            amid the electrical lighting that self who exists,

            who witnesses light and fears its expunging,

What follows is an ekphrastic rearrangement in which the speaker removes a landscape painting from the wall and replaces it with a scene from “The Tale of Genji,” an episode where Genji recognizes his son. This action rescues the speaker from immobility and allows her to be “mobile like a spirit,” traveling in and out of the story, the picture, the emotional configurations of the episode itself; and it also seems as if the Genji move outside their reality (“their screen dismantled”) into the space of the speaker, “that modern wondering space/flash lights from the wild gardens.”

                    from The Chicago Review, 2007       

Martha Ronk

  

Brassai’s night photos

Photographing Paris at night, Brassai wanted to be raised

to the level of object: the world is richer than I,

the wall speaking to him in graffiti chipped from a childish drawing

of interlocking hearts only seeming symbolic, only seeming impossible. 

On such days reification attracts as the whole city spreads out before you,

metempsychosis not from flesh to flesh, but (from where he stood

his large camera before him) into bridges across the Seine.

Martha Ronk

 She heard sparrows (Virginia Woolf)

Something making a sound never made before, a series

of slurred whistles in increasing tempo common, uncommon,

invented for the sake of geography, birds of the air, the narrow eye ring

a song from a branch of artemisia absinthium

and bathing in indentations, a scattering of wings scattering dust,

the rapidly unforeseen, something not exactly bird-like,

night falling in layers, as the iconic aspect of all things hidden

in paper and feathers, the brushed technique of feathering to absence—

after a time the more they sound like creatures falling

outside the imaginable, rustling, unfolding,

a doubling of moments of having been here before,

a feeling of transparent thickness over-layering,

then the sparrow speaking four or five times prolonged and piercing

in Greek words, from trees in the meadow

beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.