Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

 “The year before, I’d been so anxious to do research in the Old South Collections. The archives had fascinated me. Made me happy for the first time in my socially awkward life. But there was a catch when you did research on slavery: you couldn’t only focus on the parts you wanted. You had to wade through everything, in order to get to the documents you needed. You had to look at the slave auctions and whippings. The casual cruelty that indicated the white men who’d owned Black folks didn’t consider them human beings. When I began doing research in the Pinchard family papers, I wasn’t reading about strangers anymore. These were my own ancestors, Black and white. Samuel Pinchard was the great-grandfather of Uncle Root and Dear Pearl.” 

*****

“No matter how low, everyone wants somebody to look down upon. Jeremiah didn’t own one acre to his name, and land was what white men throughout the history of this nation had killed and employed deceit to get. Land occupied a space in white pride, and a white man without land was no better than the Black man he had enslaved or the Indian he had stolen from, through murder and connivance and a lack of sympathy. White men had laughed at the anguish of the displaced Creeks: sooner or later, every conqueror laughs at his victim. That’s what makes victory sweet, and more than that, justified.” 

―The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

Mary Ruefle

Vow of Extinction

 From this day forward all plants

except the lemon tree
will be banished from my poems

From this day forward I am wedded to the sky

All clouds shall be banished
and my memory of them vanish
like memory itself

Not even a lime shall sneak in

Animals shall exit my poems
including those that cross the sky
in herds or as stragglers

Without plants, without animals
people cannot survive in my poems
so they too shall be sent,
those with shoes and those without
in a long line leaving

Leaving myself under the lemon tree
wedded to the sky
that is light then dark then light

Candles are forbidden

I will feel the terrible weight of twilight
as it falls over the land like a despondent minx,
words I might formerly have used for a squirrel

From this cretinous proposition
I shall write my poems
and try to reach those
who no longer exist

They are not in this poem or any other

From this day forward
I eat lemons in my park

Their complete similarity to me
can now be distinguished

To speak of my promise,
my offering to the sky,
puts a sprig in my mouth

Would this not then be my entry into society?

Mary Ruefle

 

Mary Ruefle

Broken Spoke

You grow old.
You love everybody.
You forgive everyone.
You think: we are all leaves
dragged along by the wind.
Then comes a splendid spotted
yellow one—ah, distinction!
And in that moment
you are dragged under.

Jane Miller

SEPARATION

Well my Cadillac now that the hog herding has begun

big ones spray-gunned

is this the permission we long for

not in prose or stone but in action?

electric-prodded out of the pen backed into the bloody aisle

pigs chew pigs' tails

whack the metal feeders charge the gate

so it's beauty in the end we were after or serenity?

slapped on the rump shoved at the truck

who shall not ever again find anchorage

never feared July never feared June

every one with an inconsolable mother. . .

My ballast

I've scratched a key along the side of a white Camaro

in hog heaven the place one finds

community possible desirable

.

my legendary embankment

I will never get over you

Jane Miller

 

Jade River

I can walk to it from this rented house.
I have swum across it.
Anyone can borrow a boat and fish there.
Just today, a pudgy old man fell in.
Broke the surface with his backside, trolling for carp. A bare ass like a bald head

disappeared out of its floating shorts.
His rolling belly below a shrunk shirt,
how cool it must have felt,
after the shock. Nearly naked like Buddha and absent awhile. He surfaced and did not look around,

except for his skiff. Still there,
lucky for him. He spoke to himself while he rubbed his face like a little boy. From this I infer everything about life because of course
life is a simple matter of failure.
Simply part of a flow,
I know now. Until it happens to me. Then I forget, thinking it important. Attracted by a fleeting glance of a fairy in a chandelier the size of France,
no, of China, one is not really sure existed. But for a minute.
Then I am bereft again.
As to the river, I understand
jade is a famous Feng Shui mineral. Confucius wrote that it is like virtue

and its brightness represents heaven.
You see the mass-produced gem shaped
into turtles, dragons and fish too,
when you are in your home country.
Because you are loud and young
in a lithe body with a splashing energy
of a puppy, a stray,
I never thought I could love you.
I sought peace at seventy.
A jade river inside me. Green. Slow.
Long life, I said to friends,
and inside said, Poetry, over.
Money, spent. Parents, buried. Brother,
lost. Childless. And my beloved disappears
inventing day and night in her studio.
As busy as a bee, as the fake poets used to say.
Now they say, busy as a walrus hanging
upside down in the stately tree of death, to be creative and funny, because of the tragic world.
Must you stand on a bare branch, and why
should I care? None of it matters
a hoot, as is said in imitation
of the great owl, rarely seen
but more important than ever.
More important, rarely seen, great owl,
some things I would never say
before, because they sound
imitative, common. Except now
I get perfectly what is “important.”
What is “bare” and “more.”
One never knows which words
get one imprisoned
tortured and murdered

so every one is exemplary
and depends on whomever designates their meaning.
The words skinned alive.
The words sexual freedom.
It’s the same in America and China, the world over. I wake

with a dread of you in a jail
for ten subversions or a hundred
against an emperor or mother.
I blow by every somnambulist
in the dream and fly to you.
Why can’t you simply
fear and admire,
rather than wander as smoke,
smoking, rolling bourbon around
your mouth, sucking men’s nipples
and more in the ether streets
of your country, only recently a child.
As Rimbaud would say, so much the worse for the wood that discovers it’s a violin. One of your many instruments,
no doubt, another gift I don’t know about. If your poems survive the age,
if the earth survives us,
may mercy find you
in the mouth of a river
in the lap of an emperor
made of palladium leaf,
steel pins, walnut ink,
and thousands of green glass marbles.
You were born to mutilate the old rules. The rest is heroic and belongs to you.

Jane Miller

Joan Houlihan

Stark, North of Gainsboro

His body follows its shrunken pattern
and specification: he is placed in the final chair; 
he is clapped with heat along the landscape 
of his skin. Each carpal of his wrist 
quickly cracks to tinder-sticks. 

All that we can do, is done:
the strapping and jolting, the ceremonial 
drubbing; even mummery and finger-play 
behind his volted head. We hose him 
as we would a tree, wrinkled and run deep 

with char. The body, pinned and porous, shivers, 
briefly sways, as if a damaged wall is lightly pushed.
Empty-handed and incarnate, he is taken like a pet
and carried with his head cupped from behind.
Look on him. He is always ours, and cold. 

 

Joan Houlihan

 

A crush of oily plant and treated white

A crush of oily plant and treated white, wrapt and reached by root, sky-touched and still, a bud in leaf: make of me a body. Oil me, hand and foot, bind me tight and scented green: this is my dressing, done. Ay lived and spoke to what ay was. No matter if you answer. On hand and foot an oil and scent. Across my forehead fingers sweep a clay. Remember what ay was and am. Kind horse, lie down beside.

Notes:
The Us is a formally fractured poetic sequence spoken by a chronically nomadic people. A member of the group (Ay) dramatizes the coming to self-consciousness of an individual in the group.

Brenda Hillman

Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways

—i pull the hate

on a rope ladder to the resting zone…
               H
                   H
                       H
    pull the A on down.
A
     A
          A
           Put that sick A to bed. Get well, A. Pinched
           fire. Bring the T down now
                                                         
                                                                  T
                                                                        T
                                                                              T
    Roman cross before the Christian thing.
Bump bump. Put that T to bed. Put
         that Garamond T
to bed before we kill someone with it. Such as:
    Whack-whack. Weapon contractors in Virginia.
Whack. Get well T. Won’t kill with you.
            Now. Being
         able to breathe for the E,
breathe into the prongs. Slide on its back.
                                                          
   Put the E to bed. Get well, E.
Weird shapes around campfires
         below the mind.
Tiny fires with hurt earth spirits
         as in Aeschylus. Resting letters now
           so they can live—

Brenda Hillman

 Arroyo

 

A child looks down the ditch that is childhood
and wonders how long it goes on:
weeds walking out of the loved desolation,
mica winking in the killer sun.
All morning, she had dragged
her horseshoe magnet through the sand,
collecting iron,
wondered how the grains choose sides
like love and hatred in the diagram
and where would they have gone
had she not caught them.
She knows there’s a warm, triangular sea,
like the huge adult future somewhere.
The lizard scurries in the bramble.
The doll is soft, propped up beside the jar.

The child walks under the forbidden bridge,
stands beneath the rushing cars
studying dirty words on concrete:
curses, intersecting hearts
with smudged darts piercing the initials.
She stands in awe
before the faceless couple,
etched in a coffin of chalk,
having sex forever.
She sits so still and thinks
death must be like this,
among your favorite colors,
the world above you, roaring,
all distinctions gone.

Now she sees the dry ditch
as it is:
the glint of litter,
chrome of the abandoned fender,
how all things unloved, rushed, pushed out
to the great sea against their will survive,
and sees behind the broken feldspar
the expert shabbiness of daily life.
The child knows what the hawk knows-
the night-sweep with the yellow eyes-
or the dog that drinks the nothing beside her:
within pure joy exists
a kind of hollow,
the inverse of a river, the negative water.

Brenda Hillman

Triple Moments of Light and Industry

 During our protest at the refineries, our friend R tells us there are bugs in the oil in the earth-colored vats at Valero & Shell, tiny slave bacteria changing sulfides, ammonia, hydrocarbons & phenol into levels of toxin the mixture can tolerate, & then we consider how early tired stars gave way to carbon molecules a short time after the start of time & now carbon makes its way in all life as the present tense makes its way in poetry, the sludge in the vats where the hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria break things down to unending necessities

                            of     which Dante writes
 
                                  of           the middle of hell
                                                 
                           light     where no light is—

 

R says his friend who tends the bugs for the company feels tenderly toward his mini-sludge-eaters, they are his animals, he takes their temperature & stirs them & so on. We pause to think of it. Such small creatures. At the beginning of life the cells were anaerobic, ocean vents of fire, archaea, then they loved air. In the axis of time there are triple moments when you look back, forward or in. As a child you were asked to perform more than you could manage. Your need was not symmetrical. It is impossible to repay the laborers who work so hard. R describes his friend’s work as devotional. The bacteria do not experience hurt or the void but their service is uneven & that is why i protest.

Brenda Hillman

 

Sediments of Santa Monica

A left margin watches the sea floor approach
 
It takes 30 million years 
It is the first lover
 
More saints     for Augustine's mother

A girl in red shorts shakes Kafka's
The Trial free of some sand
 
A left margin watches the watcher from Dover
 
After the twentieth century     these cliffs
Looked like ribbons on braids or dreads
 
A dream had come right over 
With a sort of severe leakage
 
Ah love let us be true to one another
 
Went down to the ferris wheel
God's Rolodex
 
There were neon spikes around everyone 
Like the Virgin's spikes 

Old punk's mohawk     Evidence of inner fire 

Rode throwing words off     Red current     Light swearing 

Ah love The century 
Had become a little drippy at the end
 
We're still growing but the stitches hurt     Let us be 

True to one another for the world
 
Easy on the myths now 
Make it up     Sleep well

Brenda Hilliman

Little Furnace

—Once more the poem woke me up, 
the dark poem. I was ready for it; 
he was sleeping, 

and across the cabin, the small furnace 
lit and re-lit itself—the flame a yellow 
"tongue" again, the metal benignly 
hard again; 

and a thousand insects outside called 
and made me nothing; 
moonlight streamed inside as if it had been . . . 

I looked around, I thought of the lower wisdom, 
spirit held by matter: 
Mary, white as a sand dollar, 

and Christ, his sticky halo tilted— 
oh, to get behind it! 
The world had been created to comprehend itself 

as matter: table, the torn 
veils of spiders . . . Even consciousness— 
missing my love— 

was matter, the metal box of a furnace. 
As the obligated flame, so burned my life . . . 

What is the meaning of this suffering I asked 
and the voice—not Christ but between us— 
said you are the meaning. 

No no, I replied, That 
is the shape, what is the meaning. 
You are the meaning, it said— 

Brenda Hilliman

Girl Sleuth

A brenda is missing—where is she? 
Summon the seeds & weeds, the desert whooshes. Phone the finch 
with the crowded beak; a little pretenda 
is learning to read 
in the afternoon near the cactus caves. Near oleander & pulpy 
caves with the click-click of the wren & the shkrrrr of the thrasher, 
a skinny pretenda is learning 
to read till the missing brenda 
is found. Drip of syllables like olives near the saguaro. 
Nancy Drew will find the secret in raincoats & wednesdays 
& sticks. Nancy whose spine is yellow 
or blue will find the brenda in 1962, 

Nancy who has no mother, 
who takes suggestions from her father & ignores them. 

Gleam goes the wren ignoring the thorn. They cannot tell the difference. 
Click of the smart dog's nails on linoleum. 
Nancy bends over the clues, 
of brenda's locket & dress. Word by word 
between syllables a clue. Where has the summer gone, the autumn— 
are they missing too? Maybe Nancy 
will parse the secret & read the book report on Nancy Drew: 
"neat pretty sly cute." Syllable by syllable 
& still no brenda! Nancy 
puts her hand to her forehead; is the missing 
girl in the iron bird? is the clue to the girl in the locket?

Brenda Hilliman

Saguaro 

Often visitors there, saddened 
by lack of trees, go out 
to a promontory. 

Then, backed by the banded 
sunset, the trail 
of the Conquistadores, 

the father puts on the camera, 
the leather albatross, 
and has the children 

imitate saguaros. One 
at a time they stand there smiling, 
fingers up like the tines of a fork 

while the stately saguaro 
goes on being entered 
by wrens, diseases, and sunlight. 

The mother sits on a rock, 
arms folded 
across her breasts. To her 

the cactus looks scared, 
its needles 
like hair in cartoons. 

With its arms in preacher 
or waltz position, 
it gives the impression 

of great effort 
in every direction, 
like the mother. 

Thousands of these gray-green 
cacti cross the valley: 
nature repeating itself, 

children repeating nature, 
father repeating children 
and mother watching. 

Later, the children think 
the cactus was moral, 
had something to teach them, 

some survival technique 
or just regular beauty. 
But what else could it do? 

The only protection 
against death 
was to love solitude. 

Tracy K. Smith

 

Ash

Strange house we must keep and fill.

House that eats and pleads and kills.

House on legs. House on fire. House infested

With desire. Haunted house. Lonely house.

House of trick and suck and shrug.

Give-it-to-me house. I-need-you-baby house.

House whose rooms are pooled with blood.

House with hands. House of guilt. House

That other houses built. House of lies

And pride and bone. House afraid to be alone.

House like an engine that churns and stalls.

House with skin and hair for walls.

House the seasons singe and douse.

House that believes it is not a house.

Lisa Robertson

Which brings about a beautiful idea –

in history there is always someone
and there is what someone has made:
a polder
of half-scale kitchen chairs and used file folders
and research as pleasure. This slight revolt 
distributes itself froth-like over the 
social surface, and it is large enough
to hold everything. It is the liberation 
of matter. What does that look like? I want
to know too, but I think it’s not 
optical.

I dream of escaping running into the cornfield.
Inside the cornfield I find tiny battered civilizations.
They give me something to do.

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.