By SEAN CHO A.
in the absence of wind: stillness of course.
the slowness of the leaves is a reminder
of the importance of scale. of time. scale
of time. the stillness in the branches becomes
Some descended from the arms
of our chapel cross, while lower
brothers abandoned statues
to bathe and drink at the heart
of our campus. Here, this flock
is no congress, no murder—
too innocent for such names.
By L. S. KLATT
my mother died, & I
was moth, my body
alert with warning
coloration. Instar,
I cut myself
out & started
again. I couldn’t
possibly have been
Atlas, colossal,
camouflaging
and Ida B. Wells, well, frustrated
the engenderment of the official record;
crisscrossed the country interviewing
poplars that had been accessories to atrocities,
not unlike that which felled her dear friend
Thomas Moss in Memphis, what became the lynch-
pin to her crusade though he specifically
never dangled from a wooden limb
like natural confections scanned for bruises
in the produce section of People’s Grocery.
There is no justice here, he’s believed
to have said before being proven
correct, after the mob descended on his jail cell
with cocked weapons, wearing black masks, blacker
even than those that frame ivory teeth trained
to curvature by the terror of sudden swings
in white men’s temperament: teeth, it was told
around town after town, that rot from the sugar
of white women, sugar that black men steal,
which makes the bloodshed that much sweeter,
worth snapping necks for like stalks of sugarcane,
to say nothing of the black women left hanging at all.
The big lie looms large over the ripening fruits,
standing on their porches with shotguns loaded—
or with their luggage packed, prepared to spread wing
and fly before they’re flown up the bark of a tree
with hounds nipping at their heels and bulbs flashing
for the morning newspapers where it would read
that a dangerous deviant was sentenced to death
by a coalition of concerned citizens: a red record
printed authoritatively in black until a black woman—
Ida B.—took her proverbial red pen to the horrid story
and made history retract its initial word on the subject,
though not its inherent threat which is set in tombstone.
Courtesy Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Telepathologies, Doppelgangbanger, and It’s Important I Remember (forthcoming). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.
By MERYL ALTMAN
—after Pindar, Olympian Ode #1
Water is best; and gold, which shines like fire
burning at night, says this is a very rich man
like nothing else does; and when you need
an image for the thrill of victory, what could be
stronger than the sun? there can, one supposes,
be poems about the moon, or a good loaf of bread,
but no one searches the empty daytime sky
for any fainter star when the sun is shining;
We watch the trees the way we watch the birds,
sitting more quietly than we have to,
though trees do not respond to sudden motion,
a crossing fox, a knock on the window,
or anything less momentous than the day.
The days seem kindlier near sunset, easier
when they are softly falling away
with that feeling of sad happiness
that we call moved, moved that we are moved
and maybe imagining in the dimming
all over town of hurry and resentment
that difficult loves rekindle
My freedom is not
to answer the phone
or open the door. I don’t care
if I’m not liked anymore.
I’m free to be that, disliked, to sweat
to be that—take flight, from like or dislike.
Aphrodite was whipped from the sea, spun from the foam of Oranos / Uranus.
In science class, I’m laughing at Uranus / your anus. Now, I’m cornered in timeout.
He wants me when I’m fresh, for my curves. He wants me when I’m fermented,
for my composting capabilities. I can grow something made from him.
But the daughter would be born with the worms, and it doesn’t take much for
worms to molt into Medusan snakes. Aphrodite was worshiped as a goddess
—for Joseph O. Legaspi
And when you whispered under your mask, I don’t think I can stand these two young lovers, bright as the low winter sun shining through the dingy subway car windows, I knew what you meant: maskless, giggling, boy holding girl by the waist, taking selfies on a gray seat made for two. We sat across, letting their tenderness reflect on us: her back to his chest making a hearth of their bodies while the train snakes its turn over the elevated tracks. Hi-rises loom over gentrified streets, the graffitied walls, a sign for $0.99 pizza—how old neighborhoods create a new belonging. Nothing jostles these two as they attend to their own happiness, not the train’s hard lurch, its rumble and squeal, this couple at the beginning of their desires, you turning to me with your brown eyes in the day’s last light as we approach our final stop.
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