their high school principal
told me I couldn’t teach
poetry with profanity
so I asked my students,
“Raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Holocaust.”
in unison, their arms rose up like poisonous gas
then straightened out like an SS infantry
“Okay. Please put your hands down.
Now raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Rwandan genocide.”
blank stares mixed with curious ignorance
a quivering hand out of the crowd
half-way raised, like a lone survivor
struggling to stand up in Kigali
“Luz, are you sure about that?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”“Carlos—what’s genocide?”
they won’t let you hear the truth at school
if that person says “fuck”
can’t even talk about “fuck”
even though a third of your senior class
is pregnant.I can’t teach an 18-year-old girl in a public school
how to use a condom that will save her life
and that of the orphan she will be forced
to give to the foster care system—
“Carlos, how many 13-year-olds do you know that are HIV-positive?”“Honestly, none. But I do visit a shelter every Monday and talk with
six 12-year-old girls with diagnosed AIDS.”
while 4th graders three blocks away give little boys blowjobs during recess
I met an 11-year-old gang member in the Bronx who carries
a semi-automatic weapon to study hall so he can make it home
and you want me to censor my language“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
your books leave out Emmett Till and Medgar Evers
call themselves “World History” and don’t mention
King Leopold or diamond mines
call themselves “Politics in the Modern World”
and don’t mention Apartheid“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
you wonder why children hide in adult bodies
lie under light-color-eyed contact lenses
learn to fetishize the size of their asses
and simultaneously hate their lips
my students thought Che Guevara was a rapper
from East Harlem
still think my Mumia t-shirt is of Bob Marley
how can literacy not include Phyllis Wheatley?
schools were built in the shadows of ghosts
filtered through incest and grinding teeth
molded under veils of extravagant ritual“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
“Roselyn, how old was she? Cuántos años tuvo tu madre cuando se murió?”
“My mother had 32 years when she died. Ella era bellísima.”
…what’s genocide?
they’ve moved from sterilizing “Boriqua” women
injecting indigenous sisters with Hepatitis B,
now they just kill mothers with silent poison
stain their loyalty and love into veins and suffocate them…what’s genocide?
Ridwan’s father hung himself
in the box because he thought his son
was ashamed of him…what’s genocide?
Maureen’s mother gave her
skin lightening cream
the day before she started the 6th grade…what’s genocide?
she carves straight lines into her
beautiful brown thighs so she can remember
what it feels like to heal…what’s genocide?
…what’s genocide?“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
“Luz, this…
this right here…is genocide.”
- Carlos Andrés Gómez
Halina Poswiatowska, “Untitled”
these words have always existed
in the open smile of a sunflower
in the dark wing of a crow
and also
in the frame of a door left ajar
even when there was no door
they existed
in the branches of a simple tree
and you want me
to have them to myself
to be
the crow’s wing the birch and the summer
you want me to buzz
as beehives do when open to sunshine
fool
i do not own these words
i borrow them
from the wind from the bees and from the sun(via fuckyeahpolishpoets; submitted by panzerschreck)
(Source: twice22.org)
I freeze in the ozone
ice-fishing pits of my mind
searching for recollections that are scarcely there.
Floating on the fleshy in-seam
of the paint-bucket blowholes
of beluga whales
passing by the pinwheels
of times and places and
insignificant details long since forgotten.
Sitting on the stump of
stubborn human-inhibition
surveying the deviation from my path.
Stroking the three heads of Cerberus
who loiters in front of the “no exit” sign,
trying to coax him into granting my passage.
Turned away from the gates of Ivory
for shaking them violently
and trying to jimmy the lock.
Where have my face-less fruits gone
on this wet and windy day while I
wander through a cerebral constellation?
Marin Sorescu, “The Sea Shell”
I have hidden inside a sea shell
but forgotten in which.
Now daily I dive,
filtering the sea through my fingers,
to find myself.
Sometimes I think
a giant fish has swallowed me.
Looking for it everywhere I want to make sure
it will get me completely.
The sea-bed attracts me, and
I’m repelled by millions
of sea shells that all look alike.
Help, I am one of them.
If only I knew, which.
How often I’ve gone straight up
to one of them, saying: That’s me.
Only, when I prised it open
it was empty.(via lydianea)
These moves we make
To do and un-
Do each other
Must be lovely
From a distance.
Such a music,
Such a twilight,
A surfacing,
A sense of style.
No end to it.
The white hotels
We check into
Keep standing. They
Survive each blond
Who comes and goes.
Cities go on.
The lights go on
In cities. Cars
Go to the sea.
The sea goes on.
What’s left of us
Lasts in what is
Least us: in cars,
In the twilight
Of white cities,
In our houses,
In our closets—
Clothes we put on
In the hope of
Taking them off.
— Joe Boulton, Adult Situations (via grammatolatry)
Coppery light hesitates
again in the small-leaved
Japanese plum. Summer
and sunset, the peace
of the writing desk
and the habitual peace
of writing, these things
form an order I only
belong to in the idleness
of attention. Last light
rims the blue mountain
and I almost glimpse
what I was born to,
not so much in the sunlight
or the plum tree
as in the pulse
that forms these lines."
— Robert Hass, “Measure” (via leopoldgursky)
about chances, moments when their lives
might have swerved off
for the smallest reason.
What if
I hadn’t phoned, he says, that morning?
What if you’d been out,
as you were when I tried three times
the night before?
Then she tells him a secret.
She’d been there all evening, and she knew
he was the one calling, which was why
she hadn’t answered.
Because she felt—
because she was certain—her life would change
if she picked up the phone, said hello,
said, I was just thinking
of you.
I was afraid,
she tells him. And in the morning
I also knew it was you, but I just
answered the phone
the way anyone
answers a phone when it starts to ring,
not thinking you have a choice."
— “Marriage,” Lawrence Raab (via grammatolatry)
(Source: rosiee, via grammatolatry)
On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica
She stood before him wearing only pantries
and he groped for her Volvo under the gauze.
She had saved her public hair, and his cook
went hard as a fist. They fell to the bad.
He shoveled his duck into her posse
and all her worm juices spilled out.
Still, his enormous election raged on.
Her beasts heaved as he sacked them,
and his own nibbles went stuff as well.
She put her tong in his rear and talked ditty.
Oh, it was all that he could do not to comb.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
Mark Strand
Sens-Plastique
“Take me
Naked,”
The flower said
to the sun,
“Before
Night
Closes
My thighs.”
Malcolm de Chazal
