194 Racism and discrimination poems

Somebody go & ask Biggie to orate what's going down in the streets. No, an attitude is not a suicide note written on walls around the streets. Twitter stays lockstep in the frontal lobe as we hope for a bypass beyond the streets, but only each day bears witness in the echo chamber of the streets. Grandmaster Flash's thunderclap says he's not the grand jury in the streets, says he doesn't care if you're big or small fear can kill a man on the streets. Take back the night. Take killjoy's cameras & microphones to the streets. If you're holding the hand lightning strikes juice will light you up miles from the streets where an electric chair surge dims all the county lights beyond the streets. Who will go out there & speak laws of motion & relativity in the streets? Yusef, this morning proves a crow the only truth serum in the street.

after Gwendolyn Brooks I. 1981 When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we cruise at twilight until we find the place the real men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool. His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left in them but approachlessness. This is a school I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late. Standing in the middle of the street last night we watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin. The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We watched him run to us looking wounded and thin. He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin. He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz, how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June the boy would be locked upstate. That night we got down on our knees in my room.If I should die before I wake. Da said to me,it will be too soon. II. 1991 Into the tented city we go, we- akened by the fire’s ethereal afterglow. Born lost and cool- er than heartache. What we know is what we know. The left hand severed and school- ed by cleverness. A plate of we- ekdays cooking. The hour lurk- ing in the afterglow. A late- night chant. Into the city we go. Close your eyes and strike a blow. Light can be straight- ened by its shadow. What we break is what we hold. A sing- ular blue note. An outcry sin- ged exiting the throat. We push until we thin, thin- king we won’t creep back again. While God licks his kin, we sing until our blood is jazz, we swing from June to June. We sweat to keep from we- eping. Groomed on a die- t of hunger, we end too soon.

People walk through you, the wind steals your voice, you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat, forerunner of a new race, half and half — both woman and man, neither — a new gender. —Gloria Anzaldúa Jasmine garlands thin for the rib’s cartilage ring. The heart shudders with pure mission. She spreads & knows herself as Adam, Ometéotl, but through himself, Omecíhuatl, he is Eve. He knows but what the garden gives: the garden’s soot awakened tongueless in root. Cerise chrysantha coils around his leg. Gathering the tides of the seas to his side, she conceives where impossibilities seed. Clarity burning coal,                he takes two knots of grass & strings four birds-of-paradise through the ceiba’s rotted leaves: she fashions the sorrows from winter’s purse, sea & sun sifted for sum. Entrammeled, Ometéotl rises one among one body stitched in strange altar.

“The conquest is not sustainable . . .” —Winona LaDuke thanks for bringing that to our attention she said the first time to my response to a history text about a famous painting of the Battle of Quebec that never mentioned the French and only mentioned Indians twice, once as nuisances, once as the noble savage kneeling by the dying English general this was during the French and Indian war I said, soon thousands of French and Indian people would be displaced, sold into indentured servitude my own family among them there would be bounties on the heads of Abenaki people in Maine, and the English would sow the fields of the Mohawks with salt thanks for bringing that up, she said the next book mentioned cannibals in the Caribbean, Indians who believed the Spanish were gods, Indians killing themselves, Indian women in love with Spanish pricks, Indians whose names, even when known, were passed over in favor of the ones given them by the Spanish stop writing about Indians she told me you’re making everyone feel guilty but the next book was back in Maine home territory the diary of a midwife right after that same French and Indian war and she was using herbs not found in English herbals and wrote that a “young squaw” visited her over a period of three weeks, but the famous historian said only that there may have been Indians in the area, while she wrote at length about white men dressing up as Indians to protest against the rich stealing their lands stop writing about Indians she told me again only louder as if I was hard of hearing you have to allow authors their subjects, she said stop writing about what isn’t in the text which is just our entire history this week, she said I’m really upset you’re telling the same story three times because there’s only one story about Indians and we all know what it is so I asked her if there are an infinite number of stories about white people and she told me to stop being racist so I stayed away from class for a week because they were reading a book about a mystery in the Everglades and I knew there had to be Indians in that swamp and I didn’t want to have to write about Indians again it was on to the next book written, she said by a Cherokee writer, which Leslie Silko, who is Laguna, will be interested to find out because the book was Ceremony but that is a small mistake sort of like saying that Dante is Chinese, so I overlooked it now, she told me write about Indians and I might have done that except she went on about Indians putting on a mask of whiteness like white people put on black face, and some of the students wrote it down in their notebooks and everyone started talking about minstrel shows then she wanted me to tell her if there is such a thing as an Indian world view and I said, well, yes and no, which I figured was safe since I would be at least half-right whichever answer she wanted, but when I mentioned the European world view, she said there isn’t any such thing which was quite a relief to me, I hate to think there were a whole lot of people thinking in hierarchies and as if the earth is a dead object and animals and plants and some people not having spirit then she said I’d better stick to what I know, that is, Indians, which is what I was trying to do in the first place, and that maybe European philosophy was too much for my primitive brain in spite of its being my undergraduate major and I pointed out that the oppressed always know more about the oppressor than vice versa, so she just glared at me and told me that I look Scandinavian which was a surprise to me and I wondered why I never was a prom queen since it was always the Scandinavian girls who got that honor, maybe they never noticed I was one of them. Exactly how much Indian are you anyway? she asked. I told her I guessed I was pretty much Indian. I suppose she wondered why I wouldn’t accept that mask of whiteness she kept talking about as myself

After Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Kitchen Table Series” I. THE STRAW Can you throw this away Maybe you should hire more Black staff Where are you

Nothing nastier than a white person! She mutters as she irons alterations in the backroom of Charlotte’s Dress Shoppe. The steam rising from a cranberry wool comes alive with perspiration and stale Evening of Paris. Swamp she born from, swamp she swallow, swamp she got to sink again.

In the beginning was the word And the word was Death And the word was nigger And the word was death to all niggers And the word was death to all life And the word was death to all peace be still The genesis was life The genesis was death In the genesis of death Was the genesis of war be still peace be still In the name of peace They waged the wars ain’t they got no shame In the name of peace Lot’s wife is now a product of the Morton company nah, they ain’t got no shame Noah packing his wife and kiddies up for a holiday row row row your boat But why’d you leave the unicorns, noah Huh? why’d you leave them While our Black Madonna stood there Eighteen feet high holding Him in her arms Listening to the rumblings of peace be still be still CAN I GET A WITNESS? WITNESS? WITNESS? He wanted to know And peter only asked who is that dude? Who is that Black dude? Looks like a troublemaker to me And the foundations of the mighty mighty Ro Man Cat holic church were laid hallelujah Jesus nah, they ain’t got no shame Cause they killed the Carthaginians in the great appian way And they killed the Moors “to civilize a nation” And they just killed the earth And blew out the sun In the name of a god Whose genesis was white And war wooed god And america was born Where war became peace And genocide patriotism And honor is a happy slave cause all god’s chillun need rhythm And glory hallelujah why can’t peace be still The great emancipator was a bigot ain’t they got no shame And making the world safe for democracy Were twenty millon slaves nah, they ain’t got no shame And they barbecued six million To raise the price of beef And crossed the 38th parallel To control the price of rice ain’t we never gonna see the light And champagne was shipped out of the East While kosher pork was introduced To Africa Only the torch can show the way In the beginning was the deed And the deed was death And the honkies are getting confused peace be still So the great white prince Was shot like a nigger in texas And our Black shining prince was murdered like that thug in his cathedral While our nigger in memphis was shot like their prince in dallas And my lord ain’t we never gonna see the light The rumblings of this peace must be stilled be stilled be still ahh Black people ain’t we got no pride?

1 The nineish summer-skinny imp-boy veers the bicycle he has no notion yet of trusting off the sidewalk, where the squashed mulberries form many contusions. Riding as though and as though on an animal (maybe his bike should have gazelle eyes) he is hatching plans somehow angelically pristine of doubt between them and fruition. He dumps the bike on this side of the jungle gyms, while cottonwood foam blows up from the branch, and wind imparts the grass two sibling greens, and parents show their callow half-formed centers cajoling children. He is alone, and sets himself to picking clover; whole minutes pass when all he does is increase one bouquet of grass-high nondescript white clover blossoms. There must be a million in the field not in his hand. He lays the fistful down and takes a roofing nail out of his pocket, and with it and his eldritch patience awls through-holes in his foam-grips. He twists the stems into a stalk he tapers, pinches off, and jams into the handlebars, only to watch the blossoms fall apart and over. He tries and fails again, incredulous now the ornament he planned as though designing a contraption, some trebuchet or hovercraft half-specified and magic, will not work on mere enthusiasm. His tantrum comes on suddenly, a spastic little stomping dance across the grass, and ends without his having made a sound. He is off the way he came. They are not brutal, the feebly dreamt surrounding houses, crops striving in the dirt, child-rearing habits lapsed and current, like childhood diseases. The bric-a-brac on his bedroom floor that damns him to time. But neither are they tender of that thing his paltry ruined posy, the fanning homely crumbs of perfect whim, is evidence of. 2 The hangdog rookie lifeguard shuffles in already delegated an action item involving a stepladder, a spray bottle, and a biohazard bag. The dim guttering aura of his authority tries to fill the locker room, as does the smell of sock, and calms imperfectly the preteens disobeying rule eleven regarding horseplay. The kid attains the utmost, handicapable shower stall, yanks the curtain and deploys his ladder, ascending three rungs of his portable Golgotha and staring as though straining to make out St. Paycheck in a stained glass window. The bottle and empty plastic sack slump at his sides, props whose ritual has slipped his mind, or tools of tradesman or physician agape at a humdinger, for damned if not nine feet up the cinder blocks, improbably massive, glistening, and cantilevered, there does not jut a load of crap. He says, almost quietly, already showing awareness of those situations where resort to melodrama will not help, but still somehow reluctant to let go of being someone singled out by fate, “You have got to be motherfucking kidding me.” No poo-flinger or projectile buttor titters from the bench. The sun, supremely supercilious in the skylights, mums; the ceiling fans the shit perhaps was aimed at spin an rpm too fast for one to follow. The dented cubby rows and columns retain the continence of safe-deposit boxes. If he does not punch out and not come back, the lifeguard shall be our savior in ways we scarcely dreamt or paid him for, thinking all he had to do was watch our children. As for the mystery of whether one is being kidded, it is his to bear. No ceo of pooldom makes that much. 3 The corner drugstore lends the cause a spigot; the cause runs hoses to the parking lot, and proto-nubile junior-high girls lure out of the intersection, by sign and banner, ten perverts an hour. Shucked garden-snail of an errand-runner, five dollars gets you a sort of car wash, and gets the wrestling team closer to their travel fund objective. Small talk with the game and patient coach will pleasantly derail you, as the squad swarms with half-grasped purpose in your service. One is dutiful and has a bucket. One is cheery with a rag. The rowdy buck for the nozzle, the second-rowdiest fleeing when one prevails: rinser-off of quarter panels and future quarterbacks, broad-shouldered as though tapped for it, as though for violin or chess. Can he see, from where he is, the rainbow that he issues, the laughter-stippled day convened for him and his? Days to come he is hawking two-dollar Jujubes out of a knapsack in the alley by the multiplex; there fall to him the odd, ambivalent vagina-samplings behind the Sonic Burger, and on his cast the day he tries to ollie the planters at the bank, a turquoise heart to dot the i in Brandi. We are going to be all right; good supervisors abound; our grab-ass shall be moderated, and those who tskare bound to say I knew you when. We need be lots of things, but never lonely.

american indian outside the guthrie forever wounded by tributes high western movie mockery decorations invented names trade beads federal contracts limps past the new theater wounded indian comes to attention on a plastic leg and delivers a smart salute with the wrong hand precious children muster nearby theatrical poses under purple tapestries castles and barricades on stage with reservation plans native overscreams rehearsed on stage at sand creek blaze of bodies at mystic river frozen ghost dancers chased to death by the seventh cavalry at wounded knee culture wars wound the heart and dishonor the uniform forsaken warriors retire overnight in cardboard suites under the interstates american indian decorated for bravery invented names salutes the actors with the wrong hand at the guthrie treaties break behind the scenes night after night the actors new posers mount and ride on perfect ponies out to the wild cultural westerns hilly suburbs with buffalo bill

she doesn’t wear costume jewelry & she knew that walt disney was/is making a fortune off false-eyelashes and that time magazine is the authority on the knee/grow. her makeup is total-real. a negro english instructor called her: “a fine negro poet.” a whi-te critic said: “she’s a credit to the negro race.” somebody else called her; “a pure negro writer.” johnnie mae, who’s a senior in high school said: “she and Langston are the only negro poets we’ve read in school and i understand her.” pee wee used to carry one of her poems around in his back pocket; the one about being cool. that was befo pee wee was cooled by a cop’s warning shot. into the sixties a word was born . . . . . . . . BLACK & with black came poets & from the poet’s ball points came: black doubleblack purpleblack blueblack beenblack was black daybeforeyesterday blackerthan ultrablack super black blackblack yellowblack niggerblack blackwhi-te- man blackthanyoueverbes ¼ black unblack coldblack clear black my momma’s blackerthanyourmomma pimpleblack fall black so black we can’t even see you black on black in black by black technically black mantanblack winter black coolblack 360degreesblack coalblack midnight black black when it’s convenient rustyblack moonblack black starblack summerblack electronblack spaceman black shoeshineblack jimshoeblack underwearblack ugly black auntjimammablack, uncleben’srice black williebest black blackisbeautifulblack i justdiscoveredblack negro black unsubstanceblack. and everywhere the lady “negro poet” appeared the poets were there. they listened & questioned & went home feeling uncomfortable/unsound & so- untogether they read/re-read/wrote & rewrote & came back the next time to tell the lady “negro poet” how beautiful she was/is & how she helped them & she came back with: how necessary they were and how they’ve helped her. the poets walked & as space filled the vacuum between them & the lady “negro poet” u could hear one of the blackpoets say: “bro, they been calling that sister by the wrong name.”