Poem of the Week: Niki Herd

 

Blessed Be

the black body            found
next door     near the house      where
the blind girl     lived

Blessed be

togetherness     the act of
intercourse or intersection      billy
club      to skull            knife
to gut              hands   noosed
around     a          neck


Blessed be       praise

Blessed be

the length        of a feather        in a church
hat       or the tension    of a chord
held in the throat           of a black girl   belting
out      amazing grace               over     a
body              now gone


Blessed be       the body now gone

Blessed be       the seasons

Blessed be       summer winter spring

Blessed be       place

Blessed be

the black body           found
in an alley      behind       that fashionable street
with those cafes         on its sleeve


Blessed be       time

Blessed be       how the moon cuts itself in half

Blessed be       the body now gone

in the time                  it takes
to place spit     to finger           to take
this page         and turn
 

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Reprinted from The Language of Shedding Skin (Main Street Rag, 2010).
Used with permission.

Photo by Jennie Scott. 

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Niki Herd earned degrees in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona and Antioch University. Nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, she is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has been supported by the Astraea Foundation and the DC Commission on the Arts, and has appeared in several journals and anthologies. Her first collection of poems, The Language of Shedding Skin, was published by Main Street Rag in 2010 as part of the Editor's Select Series. She currently lives in Washington, DC. 

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Our Virtual Open Mic: Poems that Resist Police Brutality and Demand Racial Justice is now closed. These and other Black Lives Matter poems, along with Ferguson Action's list of demands, are to be read in front of the Department of Justice in the Poetry Speaks Volumes action at noon -- today -- in front the department.

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Please feel free to share Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this post, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.  

Poem of the Week: Venus Thrash

 

Gunpowder Lives

          -- for Tim, Kenneth and their mothers

Ever since my next-door neighbor stopped
in front of the stoop, unfolded The Post
to her son's smiling face, I've been obsessed
with the Obits page.  Here, she says,

handing me the paper, pointing to her son,
Kenneth, shot down like a damn dog
two years ago that day. No words soothe
in the presence of her dead son.

Nadine & Mary offer shoulders, a well-smoked
blunt, double shot of Christian Brothers brandy.
She takes a hit, declines the booze, drags her dead
son's damp face up a desolate flight of stairs.

Nadine & Mary beg her not to go up to that sad, 
empty-ass apartment. She ascends & disappears
behind a wall of cinderblocks. Nadine whispers, 
It's time to let him go a little. Yeah, Mary nods,

blowing smoke past my eyes. I say nothing
of my own grief for my dead friend, Tim,
his last photo lying on the back seat of my car,
his sunken eyes asking questions no one ever

answered. I toss heartbreak aside
like the funeral program that's been riding
around with me since Tim died, past Ron's Unisex
Barbershop where I got my first Philly high-top

fade & Tim got his coif retouched & curled,
past Carnegie Library where we both cruised
the men. Between relic rides through the streets
of Washington, a hit on the blunt, a shot of brandy,

snapshot images of Tim & Kenneth strobe
my mind like contractions three minutes apart.
Born on nights celebrated in violence, firecrackers
in their mother's wombs--gunpowder lives

lasting 33 & 18 years--until they lit up the sky
like making risky love & callous gunshot
in the night. I read the Obits as front-page
news, scan the photos of well-trimmed goatees

on boyish faces, examine headstone years
etched in ink, sum up their lives as a lack
of longevity enshrouded in the morning 
edition.

***

Used with permission.

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

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Venus Thrash was a finalist in the 2012 Jean Feldman and 2009 Arktoi Books Poetry Prizes. Her debut collection of poetry, The Fateful Apple (Hawkins Publishing Group), was published in March 2014. Her poetry is published in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Split This Rock, Beltway Quarterly, Torch, Gargoyle, November 3rd Club, and the Arkansas Review. She has been a featured reader at Split This Rock Poetry Conference, the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Virginia Festival of the Book, and The Library of Congress. She teaches creative writing at Trinity Washington University, and is the mom to seven year old son, Daniel. She is completing The Soul of a Man, a short story collection, and a second poetry manuscript, Misanthrope.

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Please feel free to share Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this post, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.  

***

If you plan to submit to our Virtual Open Mic: Poems that Resist Police Brutality and Demand Racial Justice the mic is still hot. Thank you who have, and who yet will share this witness with us. We'll close the call at midnight on January 21, and will deliver all the open mic poems to the Department of Justice on January 23, 2015.

Poem of the Week: Joshua Bennett

 

Theodicy

for Renisha McBride

When yet another one of your kin falls,

you question God’s wingspan, the architecture

of mercy. It is Friday morning, & despair

is the only law

left intact. No one knows how to stop

the bleeding. This many black bodies deep,

the synonymy between ropes & gunfire is lost

on no one, you assume. You assumed, brother,

that this was your solitary cross, the only anguish

your daughter might actually be spared: the bulls-eye,

its glare, this hunt you know better than any other algorithm:

subtraction by bullet, our daily negation, how ageless it is,

the laughter too, yes, the grisly surprise

of every birthday past the age of 18,

the music we have yet to invent

for mourning this specific.

Detroit wails in the wake of a shotgun blast

& you do not know how to write

what you can’t imagine the end of.

Why don’t we grieve for women,

for girls, the same way we do

our men, our vanishing boys?

Perhaps it is this body, ever mutable

in its danger, always shifting between target

& terror that demands too much

recognition, this history of sons swinging

& drowned & cut up & caged

which elides revision, leaves no space

for other grief. Genuflected by disbelief,

you spend entire nights alone,

folded into the shape of a mouth,

cursing the limits of strength.

***

Used with permission.

To hear Bennett read this poem, please visit his contribution to #BlackPoetsSpeakOut. “I am a black poet who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have a right to be angry.”

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Joshua Bennett hails from Yonkers, NY. He is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University, and has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Winner of the 2014 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, his work has been published or is forthcoming in Anti-, Blackbird, Callaloo, Drunken Boat, Obsidian and elsewhere. Joshua is also the founding editor of Kinfolks: a journal of black expression.

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

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

***

If you are still planning to submit to our Virtual Open Mic: Poems that Resist Police Brutality and Demand Racial Justice the mic is still hot. Six posts and counting. Thank you who have, and who yet will share this witness with us.

Poem of the Week: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Elegy

I remember the boys & their open hands. High fives

            of farewell. I remember that the birches waved too,

                        the white jagged limbs turning away from incessant wildfires.

The future wavered, unlike a question, unlike

            a hand or headstone. The future moved & the fields already knew it.

I remember the war of the alphabet, its ears sliced from its face. I

know that language asks for blood.

The children of kudzu, lilac, the spit of unknown rivers. I remember the jury

& the judge of the people. The buckshot that blew

the morning’s torso into smoke.

That last morning I begged the grandmothers to leave their rage next to red candles

& worn photographs of their children & their blue-eyed grandson

with his bleeding heart. The savior bled flowers.

I scattered the stones the trees bore. Gray vultures came for my children.

            They knew the old country better than me. They broke through

                        skyscrapers & devoured both villain & hero.

& boys were pouring, wanted & unwanted & missing yet from the long mouth

where their voices were forced to say they were nothing. But they were men,

invisible

& native & guilty beyond their glottal doubt.

I remember calling out to the savage field where more boys knelt & swung

through the air. I remember how their eyes rolled back

in blood, milk, & gasoline. Their white teeth

                                    chewing cotton into shrouds, scars & sheets.

They gave me their last words. They gave me smiles for their fathers.

            They slept in my arms, dead & bruised. Long as brambles.

                        The bullets in their heads & groins

                                    quieting like a day. The meat of nothing.

I held their million heads in my lap when the bodies were taken away.

I don’t know if what’s left will dance or burn.

                                    I wash their eyelids with mint.

                                                                        But let God beg pardon to them & their mothers

& I don’t know if the body is a pendulum of where love cannot go

when the tongue is swollen with the milk of black boys.

I pulled their lives from the trees & lawns & schools.

The unlit houses & the river. Their forewings wet

with clouds

& screaming. I won’t leave them,

                        huddled like bulls inside the stall of a word. I am the shriek,

                                                the suture, the petal

                                                            shook loose from their silence. 

***

Used with permission.

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Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and visual artist. She is the recipient of fellowships including the Cave Canem Foundation, Millay Colony, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her visual and literary work has appeared widely. Griffiths is the creator and director of P.O.P (Poets on Poetry), a video series of contemporary poets featured by the Academy of American Poets. Her third collection of poetry, Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose), was selected for the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her fourth collection of poetry, Lighting the Shadow, will be published by Four Way Books in 2015. Currently, Griffiths teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.

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

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

Poem of the Week: Craig Santos Perez

  

from understory

(to my wife, nālani

and our 7-month old daughter, kai)

kai cries

from teething--

how do

new parents

comfort a

child in

pain, bullied

in school,

shot by

a drunk

APEC agent?

#justicefor

-kollinelderts--

nālani gently

massages kai's

gums with

her fingers-

how do

we wipe

away tear--

gas and

blood? provide

shelter from

snipers? disarm

occupying armies?

#freepalestine--

nālani sings

to kai

a song

about the

Hawaiian alphabet--

what dreams

will echo

inside detention

centers and

cross teething

borders to

soothe the

thousands of

children atop

la bestia?

#unaccompanied--

nālani rubs

kai's back

warm with

coconut oil--

how do

we hold

violence at

arm's length

when raising

[our] hands

up is

no longer

a universal

sign of

surrender? #black

livesmatter--

kai finally

falls asleep

in nālani's

cradling arms,

skin to

skin against

the news--

when do

we tell

our daughter

there's no

safe place

for us

to breathe #...

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From  Hawai'i Review special online issue, Write for Ferguson. With special thanks to editors Anjoli Roy and No'u Revilla. 

Used with permission.

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Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Creative Writing Program in the English Department at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa.