poetry:

Deus Ex Machina

Today, she comes to me in the grocery store,
In the frozen food aisle of all places.
After weeks of nervous faith-
Nails bitten to the quick,
Dirty hair pulled back to hide the knots and tangles-
Like a ghost appearing slowly in a doorway,
Hope has come again, today.
I gasp for air, exhausted from holding my breath so long.

Who knows why she went in the first place?
She's fickle is all I can figure,
Evaporating at the slightest sign
Of illness
Or poverty
Or failure.

The ghost doesn't smile.
She just stands there. Still.
But her presence is felt.
Is noted.
Is celebrated.

I'm a little bit proud of myself;
I waited her out this time.
No pounding my head with clenched fists.
Just a box of candy eaten at midnight,
A canceled lunch date
And an early morning nightmare.

And now she's here again,
Approaching me with a warm light,
Not as bright as a comet, but brighter than the TV screen.
My eyes burn and I bite my bottom lip.
"I knew she would come," I whisper to the fishsticks.

by Lori Cossens

Untitled

Love isn’t always glamorous or easy.
Love helps you to the bathroom when you’re sick.
When you walk out the door in a rage,
love trails after you wherever you go.
Love is the moment you look up
and find someone watching you as if you were a candle—
as if you were the only light in a world of darkness.

by Jami Sue Jones

Right Through The Heart

and out the other side,
pumping like a bitch in heat,
beast with two backs, the
left and right ventricles.

It has to be love
when it goes straight through;
no bone can stop it,
no barb impede its journey.

When it happens you have to bleed,
you want to kiss and hold on

despite all the messy blood
you want to embrace it.

You want it to last forever,
you want to own it.
You want to take love's tiny life
in your hands

and crush it to death before it dies.

by Susan Musgrave

Untitled

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and
frightened. Don't open the door to the study and
begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

by Jelaluddin Rumi

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
-the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

by e. e. cummings

Stations

Some women love
to wait
for life / for a ring
in the June light / for a touch
of the sun to heal them / for another
woman's voice / to make them whole
to untie their hands
put words in their mouths
form to their passages / sound
to their screams / for some other sleeper
to remember / their future / their past.

Some women wait for their right
train / in the wrong station
in the alleys of morning
for the noon to holler
the night to come down.

Some women wait for love
to rise up
the child of their promise
to gather from earth
what they do not plant
to claim pain for labor
to become
the tip of an arrow / to aim
at the heart of now
but it never stays.

Some women wait for visions
that to not return
where they were not welcome
naked
for invitations to places
they always wanted
to visit
to be repeated.

Some women wait for themselves
around the next corner
and call the empty spot peace
but the opposite of living
is only not living
and the stars do not care.

Some women wait for something
to change / and nothing
does change
so they change
themselves.

by Audrey Lorde

Nikki-Rosa

childhood remembrances are always a drag
if you're Black
you always remember things like living in Woodlawn
with no inside toilet
and if you become famous or something
they never talk about how happy you were to have your mother
all to yourself and how good the water felt when you got your bath from one of those
big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in
and somehow when you talk about home
it never gets across how much you
understood their feelings
as the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale
and even though you remember
your biographers never understand
your father's pain as he sells his stock
and another dream goes
and though you're poor it isn't poverty that
concerns you
and though they fought a lot
it isn't your father's drinking that makes any difference
but only that everybody is together and you
and your sister have happy birthdays and very good christmasses
and I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me
because they never understand that Black love is Black wealth and
they'll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy.

by Nikki Giovanni

Right To Life

(Saille)

A woman is not a pear tree
thrusting her fruit in mindless fecundity
into the world. Even pear trees bear
heavily one year and rest and grow the next.
An orchard gone wild drops few warm rotting
fruit in the grass but the trees stretch
high and wiry gifting the birds forty
feet up among the inch long thorns
broken atavistically from the smooth wood.

A woman is not a basket you place
your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood
hen you can slip duck eggs under.
Not the purse holding the coins of your
descendants till you spend them in wars.
Not a bank where your genes gather interest
and interesting mutations in the tainted
rain, any more than you are.

You plant corn and you harvest
it to eat or sell. You put the lamb
in the pasture to fatten and haul it in
to butcher for chops. You slice
the mountain in two for a road and gouge
the high plains for coal and the waters
run muddy for miles and years.
Fish die but you do not call them yours
unless you wished to eat them.

Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.
You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,
fields for growing babies like iceberg
lettuce. You value children so dearly
that none ever go hungry, none weep
with no one to tend them when mothers
work, none lack fresh fruit,
none chew lead or cough to death and your
orphanages are empty. Every noon the best
restaurants serve poor children steaks.

At this moment at nine o'clock a partera
is performing a table top abortion on an
unwed mother in Texas who can't get Medicaid
any longer. In five days she will die
of tetanus and her little daughter will cry
and be taken away. Next door a husband
and wife are sticking pins in the son
they did not want. They will explain
for hours how wicked he is,
how he wants discipline.

We are all born of woman, in the rose
of the womb we suckled our mother's blood
and every baby born has a right to love
like a seedling to sun. Every baby born
unloved, unwanted is a bill that will come
due in twenty years with interest, an anger
that must find a target, a pain that will
beget pain. A decade downstream a child
screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad is summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns.

I will choose what enters me, what becomes
flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,
no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,
not your uranium mine, not your calf
for fattening, not your cow for milking.
You may not use me as your factory.
Priests and legislators do not hold
shares in my womb or my mind.
This is my body. If I give it to you
I want it back. My life
is a non-negotiable demand.

by Marge Piercy

Thunder

To say you play me like a violin
is a cliché, lover, and untrue
because what you do is blow me
like a tuba.
You lick me deliciously
like a lime popcicle on a July night
during a thunderstorm
where I am the wind howling
as your cool tongue meets
my very warm skin
and I crack into peels of thunder
for you.

by Mary Beth Mapstone