If you’re me, it’s luxurious to go unobserved

Art by Kristina Closs

[My favorite scent is my own funk, my least favorite scent, other]

by Diane Seuss

My favorite scent is my own funk, my least favorite scent, other

people’s funk, and this, my friends, is why we cannot have nice

things. I value the advice I give others but I don’t like the advice

that comes my way unless it reflects what I would have done anyway.

You know how it goes. I like how my voice sounds in the car

when I sing along with Earth Wind & Fire but no one else can

pull it off, no one. My bad acting, when I acted, was charming.

I intended it to be bad, as a comment on the state of theater

in the 20^th century. On days I don’t have to see anyone I don’t brush

my hair, I don’t wear underwear or shoes or chemical potions meant

to extinguish my funk, and in these times, I am nearly perfectly happy.

If you’re me, it’s luxurious to go unobserved. When asked the inevitable

question, whether I’d wear eyeliner if I was the last person on earth,

no, hell no. Eyeliner is war. When I’m alone I lay my weapons down.

from frank: sonnets

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What I love Understands itself As properly scarce.

Art by Kristina Closs

I Know What I Love

by Jericho Brown

It comes from the earth.
It is green with deceit.
Sometimes what I love 
Shows up at three 
In the morning and 
Rushes in to turn me
Upside down. Some-
Times what I love just
Doesn’t show up at all.  
It can hurt me if it 
Means to…because 
That’s what in love
Means. What I love 
Understands itself 
As properly scarce.  
It knows I can’t need 
What I don’t go without.  
Some nights I hold 
My breath. I turn as in
Go bad. When I die 
A man or a woman will
Clean up the mess 
A body makes. They’ll
Talk about gas prices
And the current drought 
As they prepare the blue-
Black cadaver that still,
As the dead do, groans:
I wanted what anyone 
With an ear wants— 
To be touched and 
Touched by a presence
That has no hands.

from The Tradition

I was born when I was written

With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Tyehimba Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess’s much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them. (from the publisher, Wave Books) 

I don’t have the words at this hour to properly articulate the incredible multitudes contained within Tyehimba Jess’s masterpiece, Olio.  I was actually enroute to the library just yesterday to pick up the copy I had put on hold when I read the announcement that it had just won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry–and although I’ve only spent a bit of time with it, I can already see why. Here is a poem written in the voice of Edmonia Lewis, considered the first woman of African-American and Native American heritage to become a globally acclaimed fine arts sculptor. If you’d like to see the sculpture referenced, Minnehaha, you can view it here.

“Minnehaha”
Edmonia Lewis, Marble, 1868

What part of me is mine that was
not mined from the mind of poets,
artists rewriting the past blow
by blow till it’s pulverized past
the barely recognizable?
I was born when I was written,
then hammered out of a mountain.
I was shattered and then broken,
then sharpened to the human. I’m
carved in marble that never dies,
hardly crumbles; a stubborn queen
who’ll die only with those people
who crave a ruling monarchy
of fictions–tales my sculptor plied
to strike against their pale armies
of indignities. History
is their favorite lie. I found
my face buried in its would-be
pages, then excavated by
a native who fled the country.
Such was her misery at home
in the land where my legend roams
the canonized American
poetry. I’m her stone arrow,
her refusal to bow. I wear
her chisel-sharp aim as my crown.