Poetry Section Contents
Suheir Hammad, "a prayer band"
Thomas Sayers Ellis, "Groovallegiance"
Lorraine Healy, "Where They Were"
Stephen Paul Miller, from "I’m Trying to Get My Phony
Baloney Ideas about Metamodernism into a Poem"
SUHEIR HAMMAD
a prayer band
every thing
you ever paid for
you ever worked on
you ever received
every thing
you ever gave away
you ever held on to
you ever forgot about
every single thing is one
of every single thing and all
things are gone
every thing i can think to do
to say i feel
is buoyant
every thing is below water
every thing is eroding
every thing is hungry
there is no thing to eat
there is water every where
and there is no thing clean to drink
the children aren’t talking
the nurses have stopped believing
anyone is coming for us
the parish fire chief will never again tell anyone that help
is coming
now is the time of rags
now is the indigo of loss
now is the need for cavalry
new orleans
i fell in love with your fine ass poor boys sweating
frying catfish blackened life thick women glossy
seasoning bourbon indians beads grit history of
races
and losers who still won
new orleans
i dreamt of living lush within your shuttered
eyes
a closet of yellow dresses a breeze on my neck
writing poems for do right men and a daughter of
refugees
i have known of displacement
and the tides pulling every thing
that could not be carried within
and some of that too
a jamaican man sings
those who can afford to run will run
what about those who can’t
they will have to stay
end of the month tropical depression turned storm
someone whose beloved has drowned
knows what water can do
what water will do to once animated things
a new orleans man pleads
we have to steal from each other to eat
another gun in hand says we will protect what we have
what belongs to us
i have known of fleeing desperate
with children on hips in arms on backs
of house keys strung on necks
of water weighed shoes
disintegrated official papers
leases certificates births deaths taxes
i have known of high ways which lead nowhere
of aches in teeth in heads in hands tied
i have known of women raped by strangers by neighbors
of a hunger in human
i have known of promises to return
to where you come from
but first any bus going any where
tonight the tigris and the mississippi moan
for each other as sisters
full of unnatural things
flooded with predators and prayers
all language bankrupt
how long before hope begins to eat itself?
how many flags must be waved?
when does a man let go of his wife’s hand in order to hold his
child?
who says this is not the america they know?
what america do they know?
were the poor people so poor they could not be seen?
were the black people so many they could not be counted?
this is not a charge
this is a conviction
if death levels us all
then life plays favorites
and life it seems is constructed
of budgets contracts deployments of wards
and automobiles of superstition and tourism
and gasoline but mostly insurance
and insurance it seems is only bought
and only with what cannot be carried within
and some of that too
a city of slave bricked streets
a city of chapel rooms
a city of haints
a crescent city
where will the jazz funeral be held?
when will the children talk?
tonight it is the dead
and dying who are left
and those who would rather not
promise themselves they will return
they will be there
after everything is gone
and when the saints come
marching like spring
to save us all
Suheir Hammad is the author of several books, including her
latest
collection of poems, ZaatarDiva by Cypher (http://www.CypherBooks.com).
She
is an original cast member and writer of
Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. Her
website is
http://www.SuheirHammad.com.
THOMAS SAYERS ELLIS
Groovallegiance
for Michael Veal
A dream. A democracy. A savage liberty.
And yet another anthem and yet another heaven
and yet another party wants you.
Wants you wants you wants you.
Wants you to funk-a-pen funkapuss.
Wants you to anthologize then re-troop your group.
Wants you to recruit prune juice.
My peeps.
My poetics.
My feet.
All one.
All one.
All one, heel and toe.
My peeps.
My poetics.
My feet.
All one.
All one.
All one, lowly heel and toe.
Br'er feet and br'er beat repeatedly beaten.
Repeatedly beaten repeatedly beaten.
Br'er feet and br'er beat repeatedly beaten.
Repeatedly beaten repeatedly beaten repeatedly beaten.
Br'er feet and br'er beat repeatedly beaten.
Feet feet feet.
Every feet a foot and free, every
feet a foot and free,
every feet a foot and free.
A foot and free.
Agony and defeat, a foot and free.
A foot and free.
Every feet a foot and free, every feet a foot and free,
every feet a foot and free.
A foot and free.
Agony and defeat, a foot and free.
Feet feet feet
Reverend feet, a foot and free. Reverend feet,
Repeatedly beaten
Feet feet feet.
A million marchers.
Two parties.
One Washington.
One Washington.
Two parties.
A million marchers.
An afterparty.
An afterparty after marching.
The aftermarch.
An aftermarch-afterparty after
marching
all the way to Washington.
Another march another party.
Another aftermarch after another
afterparty.
After another afterparty after
marching.
After another march afterpartying
and after marching
all the way to Washington.
Always Washington always
Washington.
Uncle Jam, enjambed
all the way to Washington.
After all that marching after all
that partying.
Uncle Jam, enjambed.
Always Washington.
A million marchers.
Two parties.
One Washington.
One Washington.
Two parties.
A million marchers.
Footwork.
If feet work for page shouldn't
feet work
for stage, run-on.
Run-on platform.
Run-on floor,
run-on.
If feet work abroad shouldn't feet
work
at home, run-on.
Run blood, run-off.
From run flag.
From run bag,
run-on.
Run and tell it.
Run tell tag run tell toe, run
tell, tell it.
De-decorate intelligence.
If so also de-decorate form. If so
also de-decorate war,
run home.
In every war bloods leave and
bloods bleed
and don't come home. What for in every
war,
what for, and don't come home.
For war for war for war.
In every war bloods leave and
bloods bleed
and don't come home. What for in every
war,
what for, and don't come home.
For more for more for more.
That for, in every war.
That for, for every drug.
The war on drugs is a war on
bloods,
run tell it.
A line is played. A section plays.
All up, into it, and involved,
into it into it
and involved, all up into it and
involved.
Footnote.
Take joke.
Take note to toes.
Clip note.
Go home.
Take note to foot.
Race note.
Footnote to feet.
Foot hurt.
Footnote to note.
Cite hurt.
Toe note to foot.
Bottoms up.
Sore foot to church.
Stop running.
If office, if oath.
Broken votes.
A line is played. A section plays.
A protest you press to test
repeating itself.
A section plays. A line is played.
A protest you press to test
repeating itself.
My peeps.
My poetics.
My feet.
Some ally.
Some enemy.
Mostly tradition.
The jive end.
Br'er rear.
Br'er rear end isms.
Pass out the words.
The kitty is not a toy.
Pass out the words.
The kitty is not a toy.
I owe roots and books to
groundwork's underground crosstalk
of African Telephone Churches.
All one all one all one,
star-spangled funky.
An associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve
University (Cleveland, Ohio), Thomas Sayers Ellis
is a coeditor of On the Verge: Emerging Poets and
Artists (1993), and a contributing editor of the
journal, Callaloo. His poem, "Groovallegiance,"
appears in his recent book The Maverick Room (Graywolf
Press, 2005,
www.graywolfpress.org), and is reprinted here
by permission of the author. He is currently compiling and
editing Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets.
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Lorraine Healy
Where They Were
For Anne Marie Macari
They were in Sweden, in Paris.
In Mexico City. In Venezuela.
The thirty thousand, the however
many had not answered
the latest roll call.
So said the general. The colonels.
Some lieutenants. Even the few
cadets of the Army School I knew.
Gone to Denmark. To Barcelona.
Zipping through Rome in little
scooters. Sending postcards. Asking
their poor mothers for more money.
Who were the mothers in the Plaza?
Covering up for the gone.
Making a wretched, wretched noise.
I went from thirteen to eighteen
eating the white sour bread of lie,
and the way we sang bland rock ‘n roll
quieted the whispers, kept us
light-blue and innocent.
They were in Lima, crowding Madrid,
smoking la frula of Amsterdam,
on the long solitary walk of exile;
alive but skinless with nostalgia,
alive and breathing the rare foreign air.
So said the majors. And the beautiful,
immaculate Navy cadets on deck,
and the police. The news anchormen
tut-tutting the rumors, patting their gilded
hair. Were they homesick, the gone?
And we awoke and were so heavy
with the black-green years. So much mud
to go through, sifting for little things,
an earring, one of the wrist bones, a name.
We had been celibate for the motherland.
There was such a roar instead of singing.
The news came from abroad in empty envelopes.
The full things were the ditches where
the gone were entwined and known only
to themselves and each tangled other.
The cadets wore royal blue crossed
with red silk sashes. They could dance.
Nobody knew how we had come to own
so much hatred. Nobody knew. Nobody.
Nunca supimos nada.
Lorraine Healy is an Argentinean poet
and photographer living on Whidbey Island, Washington. She is
the author of The Farthest South (New American Press,
2003,
www.mainstreetrag.com/LHealy.html) and The
Archipelago (Finishing Line Press, 2005).
STEPHEN PAUL MILLER
From "I’m Trying to Get
My Phony Baloney
Ideas about
Metamodernism
into a Poem"
I forget
our SeaWorld
discounts.
“We save
30 or 40 dollars.”
“So
what?”
objects
my 7-yr.-old son,
Noah.
“Money’s
a stupid little man
who makes you
buy things.”
Post-17th
century
modernism
pushes what follows
like a vacuum cleaner
salesman
selling
one
more part,
says Bruno
Latour.
We
turn and
Noah calls
the highway—
a thin
valley between two
South
Californian hills—
“a
lowway.”
At the Delmar
Hilton, we run into a new doctors’
convention
and I enjoy coffee in a china cup
“Can
there be
an
invention convention?” asks Noah from
the back seat on the way to
SeaWorld.
Greeks say “postmodern.”
to describe
a style
after one
“of the moment,”
—as
modern means—
but now
the postmodern
follows
World War II,
so say “post-World War
II/modernism.”
Thank you!!!
World War II
globalizes America.
Postmodernism Americanizes
the world.
I’m not
so much
American as
similar to it.
That’s bull.
Noah sees me writing
“invention convention”
and says
“anything you say can
be a poem.”
Example?
Near three SeaWorld sprinklers
he reads
Shamu the Whale’s
cartoon bubble: “Caution, Wet Area.”
In the bathroom Shamu says:
“Caution, Wet
Floor.”
“Shamu really cares if
people slip,” jokes Noah. We soak
in the sprinklers
though you never know
which sprinkler will
squirt.
“We’re always naked,” says
Noah,
“You have to grow clothes
you can’t take off not to be….
Sprinklers are more
enjoyable with shirts on….
Don’t throw away any
of your old T-shirts—
they might fit me.” I’m not so
much American
as
similar to it, the idea, I mean,
the reports
tricking people into coming to North America in the 1620’s
and Iraq in 2003. “I
don’t see why they call it SeaWorld, where’s the sea? They
should call it
WaterWorld. SeaWorld doesn’t
sound good. I don’t
mean the music.I mean
the word.”
The sound system
plays “Elephants on Parade.”
“Whatever happens to
Dumbo’s mother?”
asks Noah, “I forget.”
“Dumbo gets a good job and
uses his influence to
bust his mom from jail.” “Oh yeah,”
he recalls,
“The stork makes a mistake
and delivers
an African elephant
with big ears
to an
Asian mother.”….
On Ocean
Beach I meet Risa, a
seventies friend of a friend,
now an Atlanta social worker vacationing
with her family. Risa’s happy to see me.
“You haven’t changed at all: When I think
‘Steve
Miller,’ I think ‘borderline
depressed.’”
Why are we in California anyway?
To me California means back to the Garden—
but more immediately I’m here to cheer my son.
Risa tells me her sister has what my wife has
and her nephew Ray thinks Risa’s his mother.
On the highway, I point at a Red Lobster remind Noah
of how Mommy liked going there with us. He doesn’t
want to remember. To cheer him up, I tell the Risa and
Ray story. As we drive to lunch Eric Clapton’s song to
his dead son plays. I tell Noah about it to make him
feel
better, and it works. Noah is very critical of
Clapton’s
son’s mother as we pass an intricate accident shaving
off a car’s front end. Feeling better, Noah enjoys
pancakes at a Denny’s where the bathroom door says
“MENS.” “It should be ‘M-E-N-apostrophe-S’ or
‘M-A-N’S.’ Hey,” speculates Noah, Maybe, this is
THE MAN’S bathroom.” The urinal mat says “Say
NO to Drugs.” “What does the toilet have to do
with it?” wonders Noah. “Do they want you to
throw your drugs in the toilet?” he asks. I
phone
my LA friend Ken Deifik who says he forgot
how articulate the counterculture in
Woodstock
is until seeing the new director’s cut.
Whatever
the sixties is it melds natural and
human
concerns unlike unions of “human” and
“natural” science
resembling Nazi laboratories and
Utopias.
The modern is the nature/human split, says Latour, and
Latour andLatour’s right: “We’ve never been
modern,”
meaning modernism’s always an illusion—a dynamic
one we can see through but not escape—We’re meta-,
not post-, modern. The new contains all. We’re between
bad (e.g., Nazi) and good (e.g., sixties) people/nature
distanceless reunions. Noah plays in the playground sand
near the main La Jolla Beach. “Nice warm sand,” a kid
says. Ideally, California’s public space is everywhere—
even if it’s really nowhere. California should be one big
Woodstock. Okay, I know it’s maybe the apotheosis of
the suburb, the death of public space, and the
Enlightenment’s close, since public space enables
discourse—why suburbs (lacking much publicly owned
common space) and retro Enlightenment Nazis can
blur. But California can be intimate public space
where it’s easy to have Noah write my poetry, I
finally see as Fahrenheit 911 makes you feel
though
you thought you already felt.
I should settle for academia not killing me.
Proficide is a crime only recently named.
A downside of tenure is scarcity of senior
hires,
tying profs to one plantation, so employers
have a cheap, stable work
force
and can
only fire professors
by slowly
icing them.
The university
can be one big
Florida election—overlooking or lying about evidence,
misinterpreting rules, stonewalling, not admitting error
so turning more and more wrong until it’s full blown
inhuman torture. Insensitivity turns brutal—they might
see it in Bush but think they’ve solid rationale that just
feels right, just as Neocons think they don’t need to make
sense because they’re cool. Sometimes I feel that way but
it’s weird how my job sort of well…misused…well….They
put me through this amazing 14th Amendment-like
role-
reversal-thing where they hit you with your best
shot.
They think of it as using your weight against you—
flipping you—the way Bush v. Gore uses the right to
vote to take votes from African-Americans, again, like
Groundhog Day, you know, because Florida
has no uniform way to count votes, but then it stops
it
from being corrected because never mind.
Similarly, the idea is for your protection
they can’t use past application descriptions,
assessments, and judgments of research and
publications against you so they say you
can’t use
past research and publications at all and
call
a book as past if you just thought of
doing it five
years ago, no matter when it’s published,
thus disqualifying you
for their creative indiscretion.
And then when my wife gets sick,
the university human resources dept. backs
the college of conservative arts by
denying
me a family leave
because they
say
my wife’s too sick
and needs care outside the home and hence I’m
not caring for her. Huh? It allows them to, as women
so often experience, wash
their hands
of harmless special accommodation for dire
needs
and screw up childcare
for the good reason
of them winning.
In another poem I’ll be more
specific, I
guess, or, oh, forget it.
They’re just doing
what they’re supposed to do.
I shouldn’t take it so
personal[ly],
but focus instead on
eating pizza on the beach
with Noah
who asks me what I’m thinking.
I lie and substitute my last thought:
“1968 and
what would have happened?” “Huh?”
The
sun’s
setting in the Pacific
where Bobby Kennedy dies
again.
How could he get out of
Vietnam?
Johnson, McNamara
et al. already know you can’t win and
they’re not stupid.
But
losing
is off the charts.
To help Noah on a monkey bar
I take my eyes off the white sun
and miss the sunset
yet catch its pink tail.
We drive off
and see Mars and a crescent moon.
There’re no
tall
buildings near
so the
ocean/light/sun/west
seem in the same sky
with the south/moon/Mars/night-
like side-by-side stage sets.
Kissinger says if we prolonged the Vietnam war
indefinitely.
the
Russians would
have respected us, not gone into Afghanistan,
and presto
no 9/11! Don’t worry,
though. If the
best we can do’s
eternal quagmire,
we lose one in Vietnam
to gain one in Iraq.
Noah
whines and I tell him to use his
words.
He tells me to use my brains.
We all want credibility.
The problem is Kissinger wants credibility
on being
God,
and Bush can’t wait to
spread good
government
when he doesn’t believe
in any government.
But Bobby Kennedy can and will end the war.
We won’t dwell on it
for as long as we actually do—I mean still are.
Noah and I take a long trip by feeling at home. When
we fly home
we won’t go anywhere.
In the morning,
Noah builds a “castle-hole”
from a wall
he makes to protect him from water
when he notes the “hole”
can project upwards.
The kids copying him,
he says,
show they like him.
Four bathers pass.
“That’s awesome,” says one.
“You raised him well,”
a college-age woman
wearing a bikini
tells me
in a Czech accent.
It’s lucky I get
lost
going to the
zoo
and stop
at wherever
this
beach is.
One reason for a vacation is to be
nowhere.
On the hotel radio
we hear about an “international sand castle contest,”
exciting Noah.
He says he wants to build a castle without being
judged,
though, at the very end, he wants to
win.
Noah tells the judges,
two thin middle-aged women writing on pads,
his castle has “special
features.”
He alerts
them to the charms
inside the castle: “a
path to the roof”
and “a tunnel to a hollow room.”
They call all 20 or so (12 and under) kids
onto a stage facing away from
the beach
but only acknowledge 3 winners,
leaving the other kids to droop off-stage.
Noah’s castle was the only one with formal
integrity.
Though three-dimensional and partially hidden,
it’s of-a-piece
in terms of it sight lines and psychological space.
“The judges know I
won,
they
keep their judgments
on the inside when they should be outside.”
Then he clarifies
their apparent
incompetence:
“They’re too serious.”
Noah and I have collaborated
on a marvelously imperfect meta-vacation
made of grainy meta-thinking
and to celebrate
JetBlue pleasures us
with snacks,
no meal of course,
but supplement,
nothing but excess.
Blue feeds you like Social Security—
it’s best not to need it.
Bring it on,
they suggest,
and you can
eat
watching TV.
There’s no movie
but everyone gets
a television and
their house flies.
Stephen Paul Miller is the author of four books of
poetry, including Skinny Eighth Avenue (Marsh Hawk
Press, 2005,
www.marshhawkpress.org), from which this poem has
been excerpted and reprinted by permission of the author. A
professor of English at St. John's University in New York
City, Miller is also the author of The Seventies Now:
Culture as Surveillance (Duke University Press) and
coeditor of The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York
School Poets (University of Maine's National Poetry
Foundation).
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