PEOPLE'S CHOICE
SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
scurried around a classroom papered with poems.
Even the ceiling, pink and orange quilts of phrase...
they introduced one another, perched on a tiny stage
to read their work, blessed their teacher who
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you —
my friends, my sweet barbarians,
there is that hunger which is not for food —
but an eye at the navel turns the appetite
You charm’d me not with that fair face
Though it was all divine:
To be another’s is the grace,
Source of echo
madman of prophecies
buffering nonsense
in absence of anything
solid as a cloud
flung
from the womb
pale pallid asteroid
belt of nanny goat
From youth I was taught that fresh meant alive
until the moment you buy it My mother
It was clearly understood,
there was no ownership of land,
so clearly does the land, in fact, own me.
My water from the river and my nitrogen,
a buffalo protein.
It is 2005, just before landfall.
Here I am, a labyrinth, and I am a mess.
Twenty-four years agoI tried to kill myselfbut with my usual incompetencedid not manage to.
Sunbeams aren’t something I notice.
Mostly it’s my own breasts, bobbing with effort
like I’m a man writing the story of a woman
and the way her nipples strain politely
I am the Smoke King
I am black!
I am swinging in the sky,
I am wringing worlds awry;
I am the thought of the throbbing mills,
I am the soul of the soul-toil kills,
a heart a heart
a diamond a diamond
a club a club
call it invasion not settlement
call it genocide not colonization
call it theft not establishment
don't call January 26 Australia Day
it was very sad the day we heard that dad would die but it was
also fun because all my friends came over and we went driving
in the blue Toyota that kelly’s sister terry drove
and i was the center of attention
let the colonial borders be seen for the pretensions that they are
i hereby honour what the flow of water teaches us
the beauty of enough, the path of peace to be savoured
won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
One night, fire fell into a reed bed
It burned like love falling onto a soul
As fire’s head warmed to its work
every reed turned into a candle at its own grave
99.
From an original rock painting in Topock, Arizona, now digitized on a
wall-mounted monitor:
Before this city, the Creator pressed his staff
into the earth, and the earth opened—
To Windrim or sycamore
rustle cicada or bark and to Wayne
We were a conflagration asking
to be incarnated into the world.
Mother, superstitious, kept us
apart, two stones of the same
igneous anger.
Everyone saucered tears
1
Men prefer an island
With its beginning ended:
Undertones of waves
Trees overbended.
Men prefer a road
Circling, shell-like
Convex and fossiled
My grandmother puts her feet in the sink
of the bathroom at Sears
to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,
wudu,
The world has become corrupted
from our hearts
to the way our gods love us
as if they know they’re already dying
and they’re determined to drag us down with them
I remember my birth
like it was tomorrow, the unholy sensation
On the night we dug up your father’s body
(for reasons I can no longer remember)
we took turns with the shovel
as we passed a bottle of Whyte & Mackay
A half-hour.
Thirty minutes.
One thousand eight hundred seconds.
They sat.
I am fourteen
and my skin has betrayed me
the boy I cannot live without
still sucks his thumb
in secret
how come my knees are
always so ashy
what if I die
before morning
The night America took off her mask
we slept together poorly. I'd woken up early
that Tuesday, dragged myself to a gymnasium
in Jersey City to cast my vote into the void.
Life is short & I tell this to mis hijas.
Life is short & I show them how to talk
to police without opening the door, how
to leave the social security number blank
What's it like at the centre of the AGO?
Hmm. Imagine being coloured, drawn, and placed
in a wooden frame, another hung woman, positioned
l am
gap tooth black girl
back corner of class
scribbling left-handed
poetry on blank paper
save the school's
curriculum for later
I am
I wear a peineta & pin a mantilla to my hair
I want to be Conchita Piquer warning women
about becoming lemons. The goal: tener alguien
quien me quiera. I want to be my mother singing me
Oh, how she read this. Girl
A view from two sides of Polaris, it is said:
I've dreamt of you so often that you become unreal.
Is there still time to reach this living body and to kiss on its mouth the birth of
the voice so dear to me?
There was busy air there, air
seething through the leaves so,
from farther up, the tree-line shone
like a single scintillating polyhedron.
Still, though ravens and wrens flaked off the top,
What is this this crossing?
In the photo just in front of the train with the crane at the edge of the drop
The young sun’s greeting
On my bed, your letter’s glow
All the sounds that burst from morning
Blackbirds’ brassy calls, jingle of gonoleks
Your smile on the grass, on the radiant dew.
The sun gave our shoulder blades ulu-shaped burns, and the sun gives nothing to our sort
I sleep now, and furiously
Clouds excreted shadows on the shoreline, and there were no clouds
You can't be an NDN person in today's world
and write a nature poem. I swore to myself I would never write a nature
poem. Let's be clear, I hate nature — hate its guts
He wakes up naked and drunk as a bear
on sun-fermented garbage.
Hungover and queasy and riled up by
bees.
Nothing going well today, he moans,
life being short and the craft, ah, long.
somewhere a little girl is reading aloud
in the middle of a dirt road. she smiles
at the sound of her own voice escaping
the spine of a book. she feeds on her hunger
brash talk on sidewalk
brethren to irreverence
short teeth long stories
~
aspirations high
rolling tape decks tweeters six
by nine speakers deep
I was nine and I stood at the top of the street for no reason except to make the descent of the gentle incline toward my house where I lived with everyone and everything in the world, my sisters and my cousins were with me, we had our bookbags…
i can barely speak in my mother tongues stutter
my accent is bad
i hate jalebi
but i like aloo samosa
i'm a bad brown
girl i didn't join the
SAA or the ISA
I come from the land of
Where You From?
My people dispossessed of their stories
and who have died again and again
in a minstrelsy of afterlives, wakes,
the dead who walk, waiting and
Blue-white afternoon. The Bow river churns and smokes
as the city rumbles, economy chokes and bundled homeless
build cardboard homes in the snow. Yes, Walt, this is the new
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
