Directed by Desire by June Jordan

“And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.”

— June Jordan

Get Directed by Desire by June Jordan

from Poetry Foundation:

"One of the most widely-published and highly-acclaimed African American writers of her generation, poet, playwright and essayist June Jordan was also known for her fierce commitment to human rights and progressive political agenda. Over a career that produced twenty-seven volumes of poems, essays, libretti, and work for children, Jordan engaged the fundamental struggles of her era: over civil rights, women’s rights, and sexual freedom."

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

“The brightest memory fades faster than the dullest ink.”

— Claudia Rankine

Get Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankin

from wikipedia:

Claudia Rankine is a Jamaican poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City. She has taught at Case Western Reserve University, Barnard College, University of Georgia, and in the writing program at the University of Houston. As of 2011, Rankine is the Henry G. Lee Professor of Poetry at Pomona College.

Selected Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks

“What, what am I to do with all of this life?”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

Get Selected Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks

Read POTD - Kithenette Building by Gwendolyn Brooks

from wikipedia:

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an African-American poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 and was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.

S O S: Poems 1961-2013 by Amiri Baraka

“There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you.”

— Amiri Baraka

Get SOS: Poems 1961-2013 by Amiri Baraka

from wikipedia:

Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones; October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), formerly known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka,[1] was an African-American writer of poetry,drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at a number of universities, including the State University of New York at Buffalo and theState University of New York at Stony Brook. He received thePEN Open Book Award, formerly known as the Beyond Margins Award, in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone.

Push by Sapphire

“… but you cant get all hung up on details when you are trying to survive…”

— Sapphire

Get Push by Sapphire

Ramona Lofton (born August 4, 1950), better known by her pen nameSapphire, is an American author and performance poet.

Collected Poems of Audre Lorde

“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.”

— Audre Lorde

from wikipedia:

Audre Lorde; born Audrey Geraldine Lorde, February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) was a Caribbean-American writer, radical feminist, womanist, lesbian, and civil rights activist. Lorde served as an inspiration to women worldwide, one of her most notable efforts being her activist work with Afro-German women in the 1980s. Her identity as a black lesbian gave her work a novel perspective and put her in a unique position to speak on issues surrounding civil rights, feminism, and oppression. Her work gained both wide acclaim and wide criticism, due to the elements of social liberalism and sexuality presented in her work and her emphasis on revolution and change.[1] She died of breast cancer in 1992, at the age of 58.

POTD - The Figurative Heart by Billy Burgos

The Figurative Heart

by Billy Burgos

We blame the heart so often.
We ask it to bear our guilt like
a wet bag of sand, then to hold
those small boxes of infatuation.

We ask the heart to lie to us
right behind the request to keep
the tune of our spirit playing on.
Yet when it lies, we blame that muscle
for each remembered deception.

At this red hour, with the darkening
city unrolling slowly like a dirty rug,
there is no figurative heart. There is
only this-and-now, the entire machine.

Even the threading of streetlights that
appear to lead off into nothingness eventually
end and come back. The night always brings back.
And maybe another -the heart only

speaks through the juried soul,
that invisible conduit that can bear nothing.
Like faith it is only an assured expectation,
something not-yet-beheld. We cannot
call it a liar, we can only call it god.
 

Catch Billy at the Poesia Para La Gente event September 7.

Billy Burgos on Writ Large Press

POTD - My Hair is a Fanatical Quill by Yago S. Cura

My Hair is a Fanatical Quill

by Yago S. Cura

The young lady said, your hair,
may I touch it? And I obliged, sort 
of swan in an injured, curtsied bow.

She pawed and graded my exquisite locks 
and confessed the purse my hair
could fetch in the black markets of the world.

I had been summoned to slay mawfuckers
with my pizazzy Powerpoint for Playas’
and now, like a genie, I could not be rebottled.

The thought of follicle bazaars in Tangiers
or the Sarajaven mob trafficking my now 
very valuable head ricocheted in my synapses tanks. 

I had been thinking of nothing lucrative at all, nothing 
like pure poetry strawberries as large as the heads of Shih Tzus 
or contraband submarines forged in the jungles of Colombia.

I had been thinking that I don’t listen to Otis Redding enough
that I take too many scalding showers and don’t leave my hair
the chance to fume the bouquet of my wholly singular odor.

And now I am finally thinking of the young lady, her fingers
comb the epicenter of my vanity, they graze my thick head

my dull, oaken dome from which spectacular beauty glows.

Catch Yago at Poeisa Para La Gente on September 7

Yago S. Cura

POTD - The Leaving by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

The Leaving

by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

My father said I could not do it,
but all night I picked the peaches.
The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily.
I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden.
How many ladders to gather an orchard?
I had only one and a long patience with lit hands
and the looking of the stars which moved right through me
the way the water moved through the canals with a voice
that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering
and those who had gathered before me.
I put the peaches in the pond's cold water,
all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands
twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors,
all night my back a straight road to the sky.
And then out of its own goodness, out
of the far fields of the stars, the morning came,
and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses
just after it has been rung, before the metal
begins to long again for the clapper's stroke.
The light came over the orchard.
The canals were silver and then were not.
and the pond was--I could see as I laid
the last peach in the water--full of fish and eyes.

When I heard Pegeen Kelly read, in particular the poem "Song", I was so struck at the voice that seemed to flow through her with words. ​

---

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