Friday, April 25, 2014

Poem of the Week: Lauren K. Alleyne

Lauren K. Alleyne
 

Grace Before Meals


Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts
which we are going to receive from thy bounty
through Christ, our Lord. Amen



As a child, I'd refuse to eat my veggies,
pushing them round and round my plate
until my mother's glare unclamped my jaw
and I choked down every last leaf.
Think, she'd say, of the starving children.
Ethiopia was big then--the television
haunting us with its images of thin limbs
and distended bellies, flies ringing
the faces of people too tired to brush them off.
How I'd wished I could slip the greens,
those healthy abominations, into the screen--
imagined the surprise of some little boy
when he saw my hand reaching down
from his sky passing the carrots and okra
like manna. In today's news, another riot
--in Haiti this time. Bands of people storm
Port-au-Prince, fearless with hunger
while peacekeeping troops place their guns
and bodies between the mob and the giant
containers of food stockpiled in the city.
I'm on my way to Wegmans; it's Monday
night and the parking lot is almost empty.
I pull my cart from the long train, discard
the one with the squeaky wheel. It's eerie
wandering alone in the fluorescent glow
to Bon Jovi, and the night manager's pen
clicking in time against his clipboard.
I walk right past the sprinkled produce,
wheel through the isles of fresh and frozen
meat, blocks of cheese waiting to be cut,
the twenty different types of cereal
high fiber/all natural/calcium enriched,
and for a second, it is a bad dream--
I'm in a labyrinth I must eat my way out of,
the ghosts of all the world's hungry
up in the bleachers watching, bony hands
under their chins, and the flies, again, the flies.
I roam the shelves, read their bright tags,
pick up or leave the cans and jars, the boxes
that read a complete meal in 10 minutes--
stock up to satisfy next week's hunger.
At checkout, the sleepy cashier offers paper or plastic,
piles bag after bag, and I pay with nothing
more than my name.
 

-Lauren K. Alleyne  

Used by permission.
From Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014)

Lauren K. Alleyne is the Poet-in-Residence and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dubuque. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry appear in a number of anthologies and journals, including Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Her debut collection of poems, Difficult Fruit, was recently published by Peepal Tree Press.
 
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If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive. 

Friday, April 18, 2014

Poem of the Week: Pablo Miguel Martínez






















azul / lejos


the math of dance
the math of breath
counting 4 / 4
with / on us / you
heartbeat’s meter
Lully’s baton
the up the down


peninsular thought
etched by the briny vastness
no easy sailing ’round it
I pray for         strong gusts
                        full masts
Voyages in English
the textbook’s name
part France   part isle
neither mine
I stand in the crow’s nest
searching for the far
blue of language
my anguished cartography


our pleas to Heaven
a newborn gazelle wobbling
swiftness soon enough


 —Pablo Miguel Martínez

Used by permission.


Pablo Miguel Martínez's collection of poems, Brazos, Carry Me (Kórima Press), received the 2013 PEN Southwest Book Award for Poetry. Martínez's work has appeared in journals, newspapers, and anthologies, including Americas Review, Best Gay Poetry 2008, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, El Paso Times, Gay and Lesbian Review, North American Review, San Antonio Express-News, and This Assignment Is So Gay. Martínez has been a recipient of the Robert L.B. Tobin Award for Artistic Excellence, the Oscar Wilde Award, and the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize. His literary work has received support from the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation and the Artist Foundation of San Antonio. Martínez is a Co-Founder of CantoMundo, a national retreat-workshop for Latina/o poets. He teaches English at the University of Louisville.

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If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.  

Friday, April 11, 2014

Poem of the Week: Elizabeth Acevedo

Liz Acevedo
 

The Therapist Says to Talk Through Your Door in Case You're Listening 


Rob, my heart is a peeled clementine and I don't wince
anymore when you stick your thumb in the hollow middle,
pull apart. You don't even swallow these pieces
just set them underneath your bed (next to the safe box
Papi pried open because he was afraid you'd bought a gun.
It was actually a bundle of never posted letters to Obama
asking him for the money owed to you for having penned
The Sixth Sense and A Beautiful Mind), and as this scent
of rotting citrus blossoms in the room we shared as children
--I can hear you murmur, your laugh echoing my scraping
at the wood of your door. Rob, I am splintered, drawn blood.
We both know how to slip medicine into milk, how to gift
each other with our backs. The hundred kinds of get out
someone can backhand against a name, take them all, palmed,
opened, don't be afraid that I'll ever try to walk through this door,
because the surface against my cheek is the only comfort you've shown
me in years. Rob, you always said clementines were too sweet.
Fold, shrivel, leave nothing behind but molded skin.

-Elizabeth Acevedo

Used by permission.


Elizabeth Acevedo was born and raised in New York City. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Maryland. Acevedo has been published or has work forthcoming in The Acentos Review, The Ostrich Review, and Callaloo. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a member of the 2013 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. She lives and works in Washington, DC as a teaching artist for Split This Rock.

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Friday, April 4, 2014

April Sunday Kind of Love: Elizabeth Acevedo & Pablo Miguel Martínez

Sunday Kind of Love
presents:

Elizabeth Acevedo
&
   Pablo Miguel Martínez 
  
Liz Acevedo
Pablo Miguel Martinez  
Sunday April 20, 2014

5-7pm

Busboys & Poets

2021 14th St. NW

Washington, DC 20009


Hosted by
Sarah Browning & Katy Richey
$5 online or at the door

As always, open mic follows!
Co-Sponsored by
Busboys and Poets &


Elizabeth Acevedo was born and raised in New York City. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Maryland. Acevedo has been published or has work forthcoming in The Acentos Review, The Ostrich Review, and Callaloo. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a member of the 2013 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. She lives and works in Washington, DC, as a teaching artist for Split This Rock.

Pablo Miguel Martínez's collection of poems, Brazos, Carry Me (Kórima Press), received the 2013 PEN Southwest Book Award for Poetry. Martínez's work has appeared in journals, newspapers, and anthologies, including Americas Review, Best Gay Poetry 2008, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, El Paso Times, Gay and Lesbian Review, North American Review, San Antonio Express-News, and This Assignment Is So Gay. Martínez has been a recipient of the Robert L.B. Tobin Award for Artistic Excellence, the Oscar Wilde Award, and the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize. His literary work has received support from the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation and the Artist Foundation of San Antonio. Martínez is a Co-Founder of CantoMundo, a national retreat-workshop for Latina/o poets. He teaches English at the University of Louisville.

Poem of the Week: Venus Thrash


Venus Thrash


Abortion in the Garden of Eden 


Deep in the heart of the Garden of Eden,
past the Euphrates & Tigris riverbanks,
the marsh grass, reed beds, bulrushes,  
the rough-leafed black mulberry's
sweet purple fruit, the sour pomegranate's
brief bloom, the pistachio, split open to green
tart flesh, the date palm's intoxicating wine,
its meaty drupe, twilight's first meal, breaking
fast for Ramadan, its fanned leaves laid across
the Way of Suffering at the soles of Jesus' feet;
past the olive's anointing oil, burnt offering
in holy temples, the opulent branches crowning
victors of wars, the remnants sealed 3000 years
in Tutankhamen's tomb; past citric lime's aromatic
pulp, the fig's feminine flower, the pubescent
apricot, akin to the peach, its erogenous nectar,
healing stone; past clusters of grapes, violently
lush, mellowing on overcrowded vines, sugary
cinnamon artlessly hewn from the bark
of evergreens; past Aphrodite's succulent
quince, bewitching to Atalanta,whose sworn
virginity to Artemis was felled by the tempting
pome; past stiff-necked tulips, night-blooming
jasmines, blood-stained hyacinths, deep-rooted
camel thorns, willows in the rivers' midst,
the Tree of Life vowing immortality; past the Tree
of Knowledge of Good & Evil, damning
womankind, stands a wild row of herbal shrubs
eclipsing shady corners of a disillusioned
paradise; bastard hellebore, brewed by witches
to summon forth demons, or blood, cures hysterics,
women screaming, running naked through the streets;
common rue, Herb-of-Grace, constricts the womb;
birthwort for snakebite, seeds, contraceptive,
tea leaves purge the embryo; bitter waters,
fed to a pregnant wife, testing infidelity,
branded adulteress, disavowed if she miscarries--
that if Eve had not eaten the fateful apple,
she never would have known--
what knuckleheads Cain & Abel,
how demanding raising civilization
can be, how the curse of painful labor proves
God's vengeance is exacting, how envy
drives the hearts of men to murder.

 

-Venus Thrash 

Used by permission.
From The Fateful Apple
(Hawkins Publishing Group, 2014).


Venus Thrash has had poetry published in Gargoyle, Beltway Quarterly, Torch, and the Arkansas Review, and in the anthologies Spaces Between Us: An HIV/AIDS Anthology, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade, and Haunted Voices, Haunting Places: An Anthology of Writers of the Old and New South. She has read at the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Schomburg Center for African American Research, and The Library of Congress. She is a professor of fiction and poetry, and a mother. Thrash was a featured poet at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2012, and just released her first book, The Fateful Apple, in 2014.
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If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.