Dear sky,
where were you
when our homes were being
bombed?
above the ghetto in flames
frantically dance the goddesses
of vengeance & conquest
Toussaint Nate Turner Leila Khaled John Brown Tubman Joseph Garang
(2 name but so many few)
They say the father refused
to be a collaborator. And the mother,
a physician, a specific kind of witness,
had looked at her killers the wrong way.
the professor likes to do magic tricks & i hate him for it. he uses tricks to get out of needing to explain the mechanistic truth behind reactions.
I might turn
twenty
next month
I might not. . .
She has bound herself to listening and has been careful not to speak for her subjects. Even the very act of stealing the camera is part of this redressing.
I await her daily dispatches so I can edit and publish them. I get this homework done quickly, afraid any tardiness would disappoint the teacher.
But for me, the ways in which poems allow a reader to access feeling, I think those are also the ways in which poems are really useful political tools. Because a poem does not allow politics to be disentangled from the material reality of feeling.
If I could,
Dear martyr, I would not leave you here
In a poem, but in my arms
Translation is exile.
I have nothing left to say
but I’ll say it.
Don’t tell them I’m Armenian.
A colleague told me she recommended a book
about the genocide to her student. She was called
into the headmaster’s office the next day.
Turn the movie back on.
Here we are: gathering our dusty, disheveled hair to weave a gray painting that surpasses the work of the greatest artists. It’s not yellow or blue, but entirely gray—blood gleaming in the center