Construction of a Black Poetic Self in Four Narratives
1. a narrative Between memory, muscle and fat is a poetics out of a black, pleather satchel full of photos. A few shots are of my father, teaching tennis to a group of men in Guam, most of them white. Everyone is wearing white. And there is Leland Doane, who is all chest hair and […]
“Pourmoreformore Pomofunk Dunk, Dun Paramour” Or Duriel E Harris’ Bootybone Scattergram Scatty Pas De Quarte In One Act
Originally published in the Fall/Winter 2001 issue of Fence, as part of The Black Took Collective’s Call for Dissonance.
Poetic Statement 1-10
1. On the knees sucking a pestle. [Gripped in particular horrors: the stinked history of other inappropriate drills— being a girl.] Becomes revolving locale, cataclysmic obsession, a time-warp nightmare. In motel rooms: a ditty, a slim filth; asking questions such as when does one become whole, gentle whore? [Unfillable state.] 2. Which language rankles? Unsettling […]
Black Took Collective’s Call for Dissonance
FOUNDED: 1999 LOCATION: CAVE CANEM RETREAT FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN POETS, ESOPUS, NY At Cave Canem each year, a suite of black poets are invited to a castle to write poems. One night in 1999, we who have become Black Took called the other fellows down into the dungeon to begin to create an alternative sphere […]
Your Duck is My Duck
Way back—oh, not all that long ago, actually, just a couple of years, but back before I’d gotten a glimpse of the gears and levers and pulleys that dredge the future up from the earth’s core to its surface—I was going to a lot of parties. And at one of these parties there was a […]
the companion
They called the child the companion. We will raise him as we would have ourselves, they agreed, but they were young, and stayed up late at night preparing the nursery and sharing their worries. What if the companion is ugly? I will grow thin and wrinkled, said the mother. I will not shave, the father […]
from DEEPSTEP COME SHINING
Oncet after a heavy rain he come back at daybreak threw down a few dollars and cents alongside a set of pretty glass eyes into a little dish on the dresser flopped crosswise on the bed and slept I started to write I feel lost here and I’m […]
The point of the leak is to imagine the flood: Hilary Plum in conversation with Caren Beilin
Hilary and I have spoken before. With each new book that appears, I diligently come forward as her friend and colleague, as a fellow writer in the fun as fuck trenches of indie publishing, which feels like ascendant exile, sometimes like a lot of rubble, but to me where anything good could happen. It’s often […]
Our Audubon
You and I both must know that birds are the blessing disseminated. I only knew you eight years ago. But I found you again in the bookstore here. I touched your book like a mirror pureed into pages—it was the you I remember, the you of our brief friendship. I touched the corners and numbers. […]
from FOUR PERSONAL ADDRESSES
1. One square meter of prison.