A woman’s body is a pool.
Jump in. Splash around.
Poetry & Fiction
Peggy’s last breath, for all of us
The piano I can play
The singing comes harder
I notice that on the beach
When I walk it after my long swim
Having taken the current down
No fighting with it to get back
Always Late with First Kisses
The late Carmelita Estrellita submitted this lyric to “First” back in 2013. Your editor didn’t post it then but now is better than never.
Estrellita’s Last Quartet
Carmelita (AKA Natalie) Suzanne Estrellita died last Friday. She was 60 years old.
The transgender rhymer was a world-class wit who realized, per Oscar Wilde, “those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.” Like Wilde, Estrellita got off some of her best shots in conversation, but many of them made it into lyrics she published in “First of the Month/Year”: “anguish as a second language”…”loss is more”…”Am are I?”…”knee-jerk heart”…”jerk de soleil”….”you don’t know me from ishmael/I don’t know you from dick…”
Migration Suite
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, Van Fleet Mississippi 1928
(After Isabel Wilkerson)
ida mae’s most memorable toys were
water moccasins
she dangled them
from the tips of sticks tossed the snakes
into the air & caught them (on the sticks
not in her hands)
Two for Phil (“Sometimes, We Tremble”)
Roxane Beth Johnson’s first book of poetry, Jubilee, won the Philip Levine Award for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press. In awarding the prize, Levine commented: “These luminous poems depict a world I never knew—or knew as a child and since forgot—and they do so with the authority of a totally mature voice. The artistry that unifies this collection is so perfect it is almost invisible. Altogether an amazing debut.”
Here’s a poem from Jubilee:
Assimilation
People who speak Spanish all have outside jobs, my daughter announces
as the Mow ‘n Blow crew descend from a truck to ravish our lawn. I read her a book about dark children dancing, playing drums with wrinkled elders, eating fried plantains. Bored, she grabs Dr. Seuss.
I’m not Latin Mommy.
I’m light pink like you.
If your family would call, I tell my husband or if you made rice and beans.
Maybe if we got somebody white to cut the grass.
Women’s Studies
Reeva Steenkamp
Cameras adore him —
that chiseled face, all
angle and shadow,
bright with tears. He sobs
about waking from nightmares,
won’t look at the picture
of what used to be my head.
Institutional Memories
Honorable Discharges at the Dementia Center
don’t part your lips on the dementia ward
unless you want to be crammed full of puree
you’re in the company of mostly angels
who’ve already made it past their judgment day
Irish Wake
Shane MacGowan in corner, strumming a guitar:
Oh, Kitty, my darling, remember,
that the doom will be mine, if I stay,
’tis far better to part though it’s hard to,
than to rot in their prison away…
Lincoln, sitting silently, chin in hand, leaning slightly forward, just like the portrait painted of him.
Enter Kennedy, walking in, as if to a press conference, but slightly slower. Lincoln, after a pause, as Kennedy stops, as if to look around: “You too? Well, that’s okay. I was kind of expecting you anyway.” Lincoln rises. Reaches to shake hands. “You look good. Welcome.”
Me and Petrarch
my love’s way beyond unrequited
I need a new word now
to describe the yearning of yearning for someone
I’ve never even found
me and Petrarch
sitting in a tree
he’s gonna be married
long before me
Estrellita’s is a world-class wit but her stuff is more than clever. It’s deep too. And it’s getting deeper. Dig Estrellita’s new stretchy collection of lyrics which starts with a Rolling Stones tribute and ends on “Petrarch’s Ark.”