Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird, That cannot fly. — Langston Hughes, from “Dreams,” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. (Vintage; 1st Vintage classics ed edition, October 31, 1995) Originally published November 15th 1994.
Yes, and the body has memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness-all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among,… Continue reading Claudia Rankin
When Your Small Form Tumbled into Me I lay sprawled like a big-game rug across the bed: Belly down, legs wishbone-wide. It was winter. Workaday. Your father swung his feet to the floor. The kids upstairs dragged something back and forth On shrieking wheels. I was empty, blown-through By whatever swells, swirling, and then breaks… Continue reading Tracy K. Smith
Do not remember me as disaster nor as the keeper of secrets I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars watching you move slowly out of my bed saying we cannot waste time only ourselves. — Audre Lorde, from “Movement Song,” The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton and Company Inc. 1997)
We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky. — Walter Mosley, Blue Light. (Aspect November 1, 1999) Originally published 1998.
Look what we do to one another, As if nothing but having Will sustain us. Not The having, but the taking. I want, I want. You, Then me. The struggle To give everything away. —Tracy K. Smith, from “One Man at a Time,” Duende (Graywolf Press 2007)
I’m glum about your sportive flesh in the empire of blab, and the latest guy running his trendy tongue like a tantalizing surge over your molars, how droll. Love by a graveyard is redundant, but the skin is an obstacle course like Miami where we are inescapably consigned: tourists keeping the views new. What as… Continue reading Major Jackson
