Category Archives: Race

Mattering

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doesn’t seem a big deal
your language and ideas
feeding someone who seeks
to starve you
to isolate you
to erase you
until you recognize
that the engineer of your destruction
looks and sounds like you
that is black respectability politics
at its worst
when your work does not count
until it no longer belongs to you
until it no longer represents you.

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story of between

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hearts gathering waves
of past markers like photos
we walking parallel
towards the here and now
of between
as we walked
among soldiers of freedom
lifting our voices
from silent tears
to forever paths
heartbeats
from meeting each other
and this is how
you knew me
i knew you
long before meeting
where the between
of here and now
recognizes
repetition in our histories
of motion
of emotion
where the between
syncs and links
manifesting that moment
where we meet
in the here and now.

I use your insults against me as poetry

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So yes, folk, I do get fan letters. I also get trolls. And then there’s spies who look at my social media for the purpose of running my name up and down hallways because they have nothing better to do, which is ironic, considering the fact that most of them get bigger paychecks than me. In fact one of them sent a nasty note to me via FB msgr whining about me being “sexually frustrated, anal retentive, and racist.” Someone, probably a man who really resents my voice on matters like consent and privilege, wrote this whiny set of accusations. I’m petty enough to use it in the next three poems in a short series called the accusations. Use it, said Blade to Whistler. Use it.

 

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My Father the Teacher

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My Dad taught me how to ride a bike
he took us to the park to fly kites
he took us on walks
he worked the night shift to feed us
he was there in my life

My Dad was also an angry man
as Black men living in America must be
because anger at injustice should be expected
but he also did what angry Black men do
he went to church even though he despised it
but even as he hated church
he still took us to church
he was there in my life

My Dad at 79 continues to teach me
even as i now teach him feminism and texting
even as we teach each other forgiveness
even as he continues to teach me
about the history of Black men in America
just as he taught me Black History as a child
he is here in my life.

black love

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paint me black
exquisite ebony
make it too sheer
to wear on anything
but velvety skin

paint it raven
black as my ardor
for you
for me
blacker than black
black to black black
blackness being black
black being too good to
speak of without tears
of rapture
of delight
of deliverance

I
with anguish
with ecstasy
want you to
pencil in the lines
on onion paper smearing
between fine lines the stripes
of Noah’s hoop blending
all hues smoothly into
rich sable

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untitled by Cherie Ann Turpin

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not accustomed to being asked to consider how i feel

much less acknowledged that i exist

my voice muted for so long i forgot it had sound

however meaningful or meaningless the question at that moment

i was moved to answer even as i was not really human at that moment

but a ghost from another reality asked to recount a moment

that was mine to recall or forget as i chose

according to my own sense of worth

as i came back to an understanding that i mattered

even if i really was a little pissed off

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hint

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“We’ve been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty; we’ve been made victims of the old fool’s game: each one will love the other sex. I’ll give you your body and you’ll give me mine. But who are the men who give women the body that women blindly yield to them? Why so few texts? Because so few women have as yet won back their body. Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word ‘silence’, the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word ‘impossible’ and writes it as ‘the end.'” — Helene Cixous, from Laugh of the Medusa