It’s a simple book
It always calls out to me.
UPRISING
Sixteen years old
from the suburbs, Boston
I’d go into the city shopping
with my cousin and friends
we’d venture into Boston Commons, the Park.
There were hustlers there, I didn’t know then
with a set-up table.
They played some sort of game with shells
hid money under a shell or a plastic cup
moved their hands real quick
made it purposefully look so easy
naïve sixteen years old, I bet
fifty dollars, a lot of money for me then.
They made it look so easy.
You just had to pick the right one.
Of course, it was rigged
I lost
felt dizzy,
sick to my stomach
lost my gaze.
On Tuesday night after the election I felt the same way
heisted in a shell game.
Walking outside on Wednesday, in my neighborhood
a white woman who barely ever speaks was crying
asked, “What do we do?”
I answered earnestly, a teacher, an artist, professor
who always tries, “I don’t know.”
Later, I walked up the street, a white man in an SUV
with the window down drove by.
He wore an expensive business suit
had a big brown cigar
like when babies are born
expensive like in gangsta films
like Goodfellas
or on
The Sopranos after a kill.
He looked happy, smug,
that’s when I realized the Trump Presidency is a hustler’s game
Ballers club
Players only
Pimp paradise
Wives with teased hair and lots of plastic surgery
on the white BET.
They made it all look so easy
like a choice
Who knew
The American Dream was a side hustle for big businessmen
with all their ugly red white blue striped flag merchandising
available at Walmart and Target, I’ll never buy into again
Who knew
Freedom was a marketing idea/consumer product
Hallucinatory drug cooked up in some Rove-ian as in Karl type of
laboratory sweatshop
Maintained by the architects of apartheid
Freedom like air if you’re white and male and rich enough
to keep breathing
Today, I started to cry as I wrote
to my students
knowing that in everything so far, I’ve tried to protect them
and realizing there are places in this world
even my maternal hands can’t reach.
In Poland, the Warsaw ghetto against a Nazi fascist regime
On Southern Plantations, in fields, in Haiti
On shores of Africa
Uprising
The ’60s
The streets
James
Nina
Bayard
Miriam
June
Nikki
Lorraine
Audre
Pat
Malcom
Martin
Betty
Sekou
The Unnamed
Artists
Poets
Teachers
Always
Uprising.
POST-ELECTION
Like trinkets sold at gift shops
near former slave sites
masks carved for tourist consumption
paper promises given to those getting off the boat
from somewhere
those who crossed the desert, dehydrated
raped, throat slit, still
arrived by foot
Like dollar-off coupons at Target
going fast/buy now
Hope and democracy are a poor woman’s
last pennies spent to buy Christmas lights
and ribbon at Rite-Aid
Like children’s drawings with multicolored crayons
displayed in elementary school windows
Are what mothers fight for when their child
is killed in a school shootout by an imbecile
who had easy access to guns
All the shooter wanted was to be like Kanye, a star.
Like Dylan Roof in a courtroom shouting, “It’s not fair,”
hearing the family of victims testify
after he shot nine Black parishioners while their heads
were bowed and they were praying
The cops after took him to Burger King
Like Jeffery Dahmer who ate the flesh and hearts
of young Black boys
He was killed in prison/stuffed in a broom closet
And like the leader of the Rwandan massacre
like a poet once said of an abusive father
I’m glad
So glad
he’s dead
Like candy spun by politicians
dissolving as soon as your tongue reaches to taste it
Hope and democracy are just words
evading Walter Scott
Trayvon Martin
Emmett Till
Mike Brown
Akai Gurley
Gift and Sandra Bland
Hope and democracy are like old Harlequin romance novels/extinct
As my friend says, “There’s no more love,
only drama”
Hope and democracy are slogans
written on cups in souvenir shops on 42nd Street
having nothing to do with our lives
reality.
ROPE-A-DOPE
FOR SANDRA BLAND
I had just begun to relax
celebrate the marriage equality ruling
I had just begun feeling with Obama I was
watching Ali in trouble off the ropes
delivering to his opponents the rope-a-dope
my father’s eyes
excitement
I was just beginning to breathe air
feel exhilarated at images of Joe Biden
and President Obama running
down halls of the White House with rainbow flags
like boys with kites-soaring
I was just beginning to forgive deaths of my brothers
to AIDS
not forget
there should still be tribunals
for them and every woman abused
by the medical system
I had just begun to turn a corner on Mike Brown, Freddie Gray
Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, the massacre at AME
not think of it all everyday
Then the police kill this young Black girl in custody in Texas
claim she committed suicide
I remember we’re a war nation
in war times
I imagine how James, Bayard, Nina felt
seeing a nation turn its dogs, teeth, gas, hoses, bullets,
on children, adults, humans
I can’t stop thinking about Steve Biko
his battered face
they say he hung himself too
the world’s outrage
who will pray now
for us
America.
SILENCE=DEATH
Speaking to my former student at SAIC, a writer and visual artist
They say there’s not one day that passes when at some point
They don’t return to the first reading I gave to the class
on Audre Lorde
The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action and
Poetry is not a Luxury
In a final paper, another student said she was floored
but in the end grateful for the Audre Lorde checklist I handed out
at the start of class
Asking what are the words you do not yet have?
What do you need to say
What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day
and attempt to make your own until you will sicken and die from them,
Still in silence
List them and write a new list tomorrow and the day after
This in mind when I think about the image and words
Silence=Death
Like my students I return to the master teacher Black lesbian warrior
mother cancer survivor and poet Audre Lorde
I return also to the essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
with the instructions for living
Silence will not protect you
In this great dragon called America
that attempts to wipe us out
and it’s machinery that attempts to grind us
into dust
It is better to speak knowing we were never meant to survive
So yesterday when I saw that poster silence equals death in the windows
of the Leslie Lohman Museum
That pink triangle on black paper
from blocks away
It called to me like a beacon
Amidst societal madness/personal struggles and the Trump presidency
to never give up
It reminded me too of a generation of gay and lesbian warriors who are no longer here with us
felled to AIDS and cancer
But on their deathbeds used the mantra to inspire
Silence=Death
I think about when Black gay and Latinx poets Essex
