English: Poetry

I hope to God you will not ask

Esther Belin

I hope to God you will not ask me to go anywhere except my own country. If we go back, we will follow whatever orders you give us. We do not want to go right or left, but straight back to our own land. —Barboncito

I hope to God you will not ask

Me or my People to send

Postcard greetings: lamented wind

Of perfect sunrisings, golden

 Yes, we may share the same sun setting

But the in-between hours are hollow

The People fill the void with prayers for help

Calling upon the Holy Ones

Those petitions penetrate and loosen

The binds you tried to tighten

Around our heart, a tension

Blocking the wind, like a shell

Fluterring inside, fluttering inside

About This Poem

“The poem is an anagram poem using a phrase taken from Navajo headman, Barboncito, in his speech to General Sherman on May 28, 1868. As a citizen of the Navajo Nation, I am grateful to our leaders who had courage and vision to express our innate connection to our homeland, Diné bikéyah. This poem was inspired by the work of Terrance Hayes and his wonderful craft of anagram poetry.”

—Esther Belin

Untitled [Executions have always been public spectacles]

mónica teresa ortiz

Executions have always been public spectacles. It is New Year’s 2009 in Austin and we are listening to Jaguares on the speakers. Alexa doesn’t exist yet so we cannot ask her any questions. It is nearly 3 AM, and we run out of champagne. At Fruitvale Station, a man on his way home on a train falls onto the platform, hands cuffed. Witnesses capture the assassination with a grainy video on a cell phone. I am too drunk, too in love, to react when I hear the news. I do not have Twitter to search for the truth. Rancière said looking is not the same as knowing. I watch protests on the television while I sit motionless in the apartment, long after she left me. Are we what he calls the emancipated spectator, in which spectatorship is “not passivity that’s turned into activity” but, instead, “our normal situation”? Police see their god in their batons, map stains and welts on the continents of bodies. To beat a body attempts to own it. And when the body cannot be owned, it must be extinguished.

About This Poem

“Point number seven of the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program, which calls for ‘an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people,’ came to mind—for me—that as poets, we are responsible for not just witnessing and documenting time and history, but reflecting and critiquing our society’s very soul. In Jacques Ranciére’s The Emancipated Spectator, he addresses the audience as spectators, not active participants. In this poem, the narrator is implicated in being a passive witness to a country that sensationalizes and reproduces violence, as well as exploits death. I sought to craft a critique on complicit relationships to public spectacles and state-enacted executions, while also attempting to archive a particular type of violence that has haunted this country since the colonization of the Americas.”

—mónica teresa ortiz

I Tried to Write a Poem Called “Imposter Syndrome” and Failed

Emilia Phillips

The way that the sea fails

to drown itself everyday. And entendre alludes all those not listening.

The way unfertilized chicken eggs fail to have imagination,

           dozened out in their cardboard trays,

by which I mean they will never break

           open

from the inside. The way my imagination (née anxiety) has

           bad brakes and a need

to stop sometimes. The way I didn’t believe

it when he told me we were going to crash into the car idling

           at a red light

ahead of us. To know our future like that seemed unlikely.

           But to have time to tell me?

—Nearly impossible. I may have broken

           several ribs that day

but I will never know for sure. I’m okay,

I guessed aloud to the paramedic. It doesn’t matter

           if you’re broken if you’re broke,

I moaned in bed that night, after several glasses

           of cheap red. I thought it would make a good blues

refrain. I made myself

           laugh and so I made myself hurt—

MEMOIRS BY EMILIA PHILLIPS, goes the joke.

A friend of mine competes in beard and mustache tournaments,

           even though she can’t grow one herself—

Once, she donned a Santa Claus made entirely out of hot-glued tampons.

It was as white as the spots in memories I doubt.

           The first woman

I kissed who had never kissed a woman before

couldn’t get over how soft my face is,

           even the scar. Once,

a famous poet said what’s this and touched my face

           without asking—

his thumb like a cat’s tongue on the old wound.

He must have thought he was giving

me a blessing.

About This Poem

“This poem came out of an experiment: could I turn self-deprecation into self-celebration? As someone who suffers from anxiety, I used to spend hours fretting over tiny interactions, what I should or shouldn't have said, how I appeared to someone else. Now, I think I've been able to reframe these reflections in tenderness—I can love my most imperfect self.”

—Emilia Phillips

ED ASNER

Ronaldo V. Wilson

                          “...style...”

Grind me Nautica, Vic Tayback. Line chef para Alice arm hair, fore-sausage & anchor tat, snatch, a silvered chest, V- neck, sleep hard Weezy— Zebra-Jive-Turkey.

As in how do you do that? Glimpse, a tad, pecking the surface glaze, or Dove Men+Care. iNot be puppy breath, tan streak down the cheek, scar, or Bowie’s bass: VANILLA ICE

tricks a pompadour. Jim Carrey a detour, when slips the tongue. Airborne pellet in seltzer fizz. ED—

 father had a junk business...barrels

of jimmied pistols...they wouldn’t fire

 ...but they were good for kids.

About This Poem

 “‘Ed Asner’ is from a cycle of poems that explores a kind of quotidian whiteness, as expressed through North American (U.S.) 70s televisual and current pop iconography as influence. The poems are intended to act as sonic, sculpted responses to questions of memory and desire. Between modes of critique and play, I enact this work as a means to explore race, gender, power, and representation.”

—Ronaldo V. Wilson

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin

Terrance Hayes

When James Baldwin & Audre Lorde each lend

Stevie Wonder an eyeball, he immediately contends

With gravity, falling either to his knees or flat on

His luminous face. I’ve heard several versions

Of the story.  In this one Audre Lorde dons

Immaculate French loafers, turtlenecked ballgown,

And afro halo. An eye-sized ruby glimmers on

A pinky ring that’s a hair too big for Jimmy Baldwin’s

Pinky. He’s blue with beauty. They’re accustomed

To being followed, but now, the eye-patch twins

Will be especially scary to white people. Looking upon

Them, Wonder’s head purples with plural visions

Of blackness, gavels, grapples, purrs, pens. Ten to one

Odds God also prefers to be referred to as They & Them.

About This Poem

I hope this poem both speaks for itself and is readable between the lines. Let’s say it all happened sometime in the early 70’s.

—Terrance Hayes

The recliner calls 

while my neighbors poach Wi-Fi

All my snacks are gone