Poem of the Week: Kamilah Aisha Moon

 

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths     

 

Dressing Down

--to Shirley Q. Liquor, Drag Queen in Blackface

When you're gay in Dixie,

you're a clown of a desperate circus.

Sometimes the only way to be like daddy

is to hate like him--

hope your brothers laugh

instead of shoot,

wrap a confederate skirt around your waist.

You traded glamour for nasty tricks--

dethroning your mammy's image for dollars

that will never cover so much debt,

unraveling years she lost

loving you for a living.

  

-Kamilah Aisha Moon  

Used by permission.

  

Kamilah Aisha Moon's work has been featured in several journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, jubilat, The Awl, Poem-A-Day for the Academy of American Poets, Superstition Review and Gathering Ground. Her poems and prose have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Lambda Literary Prize and the Audre Lorde Publishing Triangle Award. A native of Nashville, TN, currently living in Brooklyn, NY, Moon is the author of She Has a Name (Four Way Books) and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry from the Publishing Triangle.

***   

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

  

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

May Sunday Kind of Love: Kamilah Aisha Moon & Gretchen Primack

Sunday Kind of Love

presents:

Kamilah Aisha Moon
&
   Gretchen Primack  

  

  

Sunday May 18, 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 &

Split This Rock

Kamilah Aisha Moon's work has been featured in several journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, jubilat, The Awl, Poem-A-Day for the Academy of American Poets, Superstition Review and Gathering Ground. Her poems and prose have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Lambda Literary Prize and the Audre Lorde Publishing Triangle Award. A native of Nashville, TN, currently living in Brooklyn, NY, Moon is the author of She Has a Name (Four Way Books) and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry from the Publishing Triangle.

Gretchen Primack is the author of two poetry collections, Kind and Doris' Red Spaces, and a chapbook, The Slow Creaking of Planets. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, FIELD, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. Also an animal advocate, she co-wrote the memoir The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight for Farm Animals (Penguin Avery 2012). 


Kamilah Aisha Moon photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Gretchen Primack photo by Deborah Degraffenreid

Poem of the Week: Kamilah Aisha Moon

Photo by: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Notes on a Mass Stranding      

I.

Huge dashes in the sand, two or three

times a year they swim like words

in a sentence toward the period

of the beach, lured into sunning

themselves like humans do--

forgetting gravity,

smothered in the absence

of waves and high tides.

II.

[Pilot whales beach themselves] when their sonar

becomes scrambled in shallow water

or when a sick member of the pod

heads for shore and others follow

III.

61 of them on top of the South Island

wade into Farewell Spit.

18 needed help with their demises

this time, the sharp mercy

of knives still the slow motion heft

of each ocean heart.

IV.

Yes--even those born pilots,

those who have grown large and graceful

lose their way, found on their sides

season after season.

Is it more natural to care

or not to care?

Terrifying to be reminded a fluke

can fling anything or anyone

out of this world.

V.

Oh, the endings we swim toward

without thinking!

Mysteries of mass wrong turns, sick leaders

and sirens forever sexy                                              

land or sea.

The unequaled rush

and horror of forgetting

ourselves
 

-Kamilah Aisha Moon 

     

Used by permission.

Kamilah Aisha Moon's poetry collection She Has A Name is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Her work has been featured in Harvard Review, jubilat, Sou'wester, Oxford American, Lumina, Callaloo and Villanelles, among other journals and anthologies. A recipient of fellowships to Cave Canem, the Prague Summer Writing Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and The Vermont Studio Center. Moon received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.  

     

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

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

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210