Your name has become muscle memory for me. The atavistic tendencies of time travel. Sweet billowing hills laying rampant like a red carpet. A fiefdom of marginalized tumors, swollen rivers, and cauliflower ears. Gently spoken vertigo, an ally of sensory vistas.
Black tar is redundant, white guilt is redundant, pharaohs only speak of architectural intestines, of facetious apologies nestled among the emerald sarcophagi. Bow to splendid tones, stop fantasy, remit pleasantry.
Heart rests in fragile atmospheres, builds fatal reckonings from the sting of being born.
Gregory McGreevey lives and write poetry in Baltimore, Maryland. His work has previously been featured in West Trade Review, The Finger Literary Journal, and Straylight Literary Magazine.
Image by Rushen – {unidentified} cicada (emerging) – Khao Yai National Park, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79233028
And her babies have starved, wailing in their nest.
But, blameless,
the Cooper’s Hawk has not starved,
nor her plump babies.
I love the mother bluebird,
and I love her frantic infant birds,
and I love the stately Cooper’s Hawk,
and I love her sated babies.
Hawks are not humans.
But it is the sedimentary sadness of our story
that I carry such tenderness for them all.
I cannot stop,
just as the birds cannot stop
being birds.
Christine M. Du Bois is an anthropologist of immigration, race relations, and food cultures. She has published three non-fiction books, Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media (LFB Scholarly, 2004), The World of Soy (University of IL Press,2008), and The Story of Soy (Reaktion Press, 2018). She lives in a hotbed of election happenings, near Philadelphia, where apparently bad things happen. This is her first foray into poetry.
I wouldn’t say I have a brown thumb. Fresh green weeds spring up where I garden, infiltrating the flowering natives.
I cultivate a wild look, but when does the cultivation end and weedy wildness begin? What is art? what is dishevelment?
All gardening means tending living things with tiny minds of their own, selecting them, herding them, eliminating undesirables, bringing order to wild, green beating hearts.
Writing poems is a kind of gardening, from the soil of the spirit. What does one control? Are weeds gifts from the wild? from the oversoul?
To garden, one must get down in the dirt. Never be afraid to prune, as an old girlfriend, of sorts, told me. She pulled out men as abruptly as I yank dandelions the instant I spot their lovely, golden heads.
In the main garden bed, I scrape out, dig out, wrench out weeds, weeds, weeds, weeds. Gnarly little interlopers with fluffy white flowering balls, viny running weeds, encircling, boisterous, broad-leafed things, puny patches of innocent clovers.
As one wise gardener said, a weed is just a plant that has not found a champion.
No matter how I prune and pull the soil of my soul I’ve lost control of my garden, my unruly thoughts, dreams, wild words.
Ungrateful little weeds peek out, smile, say, “don’t hurt us, we are gifts of nature who made us all.”
Ethan Goffman’s first volume of poetry, Words for Things Left Unsaid, is just out from Kelsay Books. His poems have appeared in Ariel Chart, BlazeVox, Bradlaugh’s Finger, Burgeon, The Loch Raven Review,Mad Swirl, MadnessMuse,Ramingo’s Blog,Setu, and elsewhere. Ethan is co-founder of It Takes a Community, a Montgomery College initiative bringing poetry to students and local residents. He is also founder and producer of the Poetry & Planet podcast on EarthTalk.org.
Image by mieoli – uitstaande melde (Atriplex patula), CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3020781
I find this double mindedness debilitating And I am hating the outcomes that I see
I want to flee from reality Because of the way the world treats me
You see I want better.
Seeking my significance in others Is not what the lover of my soul had in mind
He wants me to find the divine love And he gives me enough to snuff out
Any enemy So I would not have to plea
For anyone to validate me I want better.
I deserve way more than mediocre And I’m tired of being broker
Than any two cent share On the stock exchange
I want to proclaim prosperity Not to brag on myself
But to declare your wealth So others may know about
Your greatness. I want better.
I’m mad at me For allowing the tragedy of people-pleasing
Because of teasing Lord, you have my best interest at heart and
You want to impart the wisdom of what is coming I just have to quiet my spirit
So I can hear it. I want better.
I want the best but sometimes I settle for less Because silently I felt I was cursed
To be the worst But in the midst of low self esteem
I still believed in me And with the vision
Although others may not agree You said
To wait on me, Because it will tarry.
I want better. I plan to see the promised land
But even as the quicksand Tries to suck me up
Lord you fill my cup And when I want to doubt God
You work it out And when life seems barren
You are still caring And you are daring me to trust you
And that is what I must do if I want better.
Hope
My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness This hope is all I have when I feel that all hope is gone I have to remember where my hope is built
I hope so I can encourage someone who does not know Christ I hope so in darkness someone can see the light I hope because I cannot put my trust in man I hope in Christ because He knows my plans I hope because I know I have an expected end I hope in Christ because my broken heart He mends I hope so I can make it through the day And I hope because there is a debt I can not repay
God so loved the world that a blessed hope was given – Christ was born, He was crucified, and now He’s risen!
Whenever someone tries to steal my joy I hope I remember I’m Abba’s baby boy And I hope whenever I’m down and I’m feeling weak I hope in my secret place His face I seek
I need to hope – My faith is the substance of things hoped for The evidence is not seen The reason I place my hope in Christ is He’s my everything
I hope so I can give hope to others I hope so I can speak life to my sisters and brothers The life of Christ is the blessed hope and why I live So if Christ is hope and He brings life He is who I give
Jeffrey Banks, poetically known as “Big Homey” received his Masters in Divinity at Howard University. A regular fixture in poetry series in the DMV area, he’s had opportunity to perform with major entertainment figures, and is the recipient of artist grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. A finalist in the DC Poet Project he’s also a poet educator and a fundraising and events consultant to non-profits. He’s taken opportunities to bring his artist activism as an advocate against homelessness and in 2019 his poetry was featured in the National Association for Poetry Therapy anthology.
Image by Davidvraju – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80047190
Since my sins are so much greater and heaven has no room for me – could you loan me your transgressions?
See my sexual prowess is so detestable that I need to prove to the almighty that I’m worthy of a straight man’s blessing
Christian – let me borrow your passive aggression, so I can somehow learn the lesson that Jesus loves you but you will burn… in the name of the Lord
Let me borrow your discord, Christian!
Let me borrow your discord, Christian!
Let me borrow your discord, Christian – how can you use your Bible as a double edged sword and think both of those testaments will only pierce me?
Or is Judgment reserved only for those heterosexuals of you who sin so beautifully?
Could you loan me your audacity?
Your ability, your nerve, and the capacity to love and hate all in the same breath?
See my plea is simply to be sure, happy, and wanted, as myself
So I feel that somebody owes me some confidence
Because after hearing all the reasons why I’m not worthy of his mercy I have no certainty except in the fact that I’ve been robbed of all of it
Christ paid it all but he didn’t factor in the cost of me?
Somebody, please! My soul is said to burn eternally
Let me borrow your inequities and pretend to be better
See my sexuality somehow severed my ties to the savior so could you do me a favor:
Touch your neighbor and ask him can he grace me with a bit of his graces since Jesus couldn’t afford me and heaven struck homos from its budget but adjusted it just to make room for you – the virtuous and perfect insufficiency
But I wouldn’t mind seeing those streets of glory
Would you mind holding on to my purgatory just for a second so I can peek at your promise?
See I’m so honest that I’d give your paradise back to you
Even though you’re so willing to snatch mine away from me
You’re that same thief in John 10:10 who comes to kill and destroy – but somehow you’ve still carved out life abundantly
You are so high above me
Even with your gluttonous way of fucking me
Your fornication and adultery
Your lies from the pulpit
And your sodomy in secrecy
Preacher
Let me borrow your teachings
As you pray for my delivery
Not to your God
But still on your knees
Can I borrow the lies that excrete between your teeth so I can misuse forgiveness and its power
So that I won’t cower at the idea of being forsaken
I know this is blatant and selfish of me to ask but since you sin
So much better than me
Can I borrow your iniquities?
Where’s my manners
And excuse my urgencies
As I can see
That you clearly are not done with them yet
Criminally Black
The preface of my purgatory bore me black and stacked all the odds against me
No jury to await an impending judgment
Because my complexion already rendered me guilty
Sentenced to death by legalized hate crimes
Metaphorical lynchings of those criminally black in white America
The land of the free ain’t so free for a black man in white America
Concentration camps didn’t begin in Germany
They took their blueprint from white America trying to cancel out this black album and
Without a reasonable doubt they now use our penal system
Systematic injustices
To implement our slavery
And as successors to our lineage
We’re all guilty as American gangsters
And they have unfinished business with the dynasty
Black people:
America promises nothing
40 acres and a mule
And we’ve yet to receive
Nothing
Have Medgar Evers and Rodney King taught us nothing?
Emmett Till’s murderers got away scot-free
Time served was absolutely nothing
But yet Michael Vick does a two-year stint
Because in comparison to a pit
Black life is worth
Absolutely nothing
We are the hunted
Endangered species in this wild jungle we call our home
But we’re not even welcome here
We’re not even wanted but
If my skin were lighter maybe I’d understand why Dorothy clicked her heels
And said
There’s no place like home
Dethrone the idea that we’re on equal playing fields
No this is a slaughter
But it’s somehow legal
To take the life of skin darker
So we can’t exactly call them robbers
They’re monsters of this
Judicial gang called America
And being black is the treason
Killing niggaz back to back it’s open season
When being black is a crime
Punishments are acts of
Stand your ground murders
Or enslavements by extensive stints of jail time
So if you ever find yourself seventeen with Arizona Tea
A tall being in a hoodie with skittles
Just don’t be black
Because history has taught us
It’s that which makes us
Criminal
Kevin Wiggins is the 2019 winner of the DC Poet Project, an open-to-all poetry competition created by the non-profit Day Eight to surface extraordinary poets. Wiggins was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland and performs as The Mysfit – a spoken word artist, storyteller, and playwright. His work stares adversity in the face and is unapologetic for the Black LGBTQ community with intensity, rage, compassion, and love. His debut collection of poetry, Port of Exit, is available for purchase on Amazon here. Amy Woolard wrote about Port of Exit, “These poems, and this poet, are a gospel.”
