Amiri Baraka

"W.W."

Back home the black women are all beautiful,
and the white ones fall back, cutoff from 1000
years stacked booty, and Charles of the Ritz
where jooshladies turn into billy burke in bluegrass
kicks. With wings, and jingly bew-teeful things.
The black women in Newark are fine. Even with all that grease
in their heads. I mean even the ones where the wigs
slide around, and they coming at you 75 degrees off course.
I could talk to them. Bring them around. To something.
Some kind of quick course, on the sidewalk, like Hey baby
why don’t you take that thing off yo’ haid. You look like
Miss Muffet in a runaway ugly machine. I mean. Like that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Francis

“The Base Stealer”

Poised between going on and back, pulled
Both ways taut like a tightrope-walker,
Fingertips pointing the opposites,
Now bouncing tiptoe like a dropped ball
Or a kid skipping rope, come on, come on,
Running a scattering of steps sidewise,
How he teeters, skitter, tingles, teases,
Taunts them, hovers like an ecstatic bird,
He's only flirting, crowd him, crowd him,
Delicate, delicate, delicate, delicate—now!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Annie Farnsworth

"For the Falling Man"

I see you again and again
tumbling out of the sky,
in your slate-grey suit and pressed white shirt.
At first I thought you were debris
from the explosion, maybe gray plaster wall
or fuselage but then I realized
that people were leaping.
I know who you are, I know
there's more to you than just this image
on the news, this ragdoll plummeting—
I know you were someone's lover, husband,
daddy. Last night you read stories
to your children, tucked them in, then curled into sleep
next to your wife. Perhaps there was small
sleepy talk of the future. Then,
before your morning coffee had cooled
you'd come to this; a choice between fire
or falling.
How feeble these words, billowing
in this aftermath, how ineffectual
this utterance of sorrow. We can see plainly
it's hopeless, even as the words trail from our mouths
—but we can't help ourselves—how I wish
we could trade them for something
that could really have caught you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jane Hirshfield

“For What Binds Us”

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Katharyn Machan

“Hazel Tells LaVerne”

Last night
Im cleanin out my
Howard johnsons ladies room
When all of a sudden
Up pops this frog
Musta come from the sewer
Swimming around an tryin ta
Climb up the sida the bowl
So I goes ta flushm down
But sohelpmegod he starts talking
Bout a golden ball
An how I can be a princess
Me a princess
Well my mouth drops
All the way to the floor
An he says
Kiss me just kiss me
Once on the nose
Well I screams
Ya little green pervert
An I hitsm with my mop
An has ta flush
The toilet down three times
Me
A princess