All posts tagged: Poetry

Herman’s Bones

Herman’s Bones

April 22, 2024 , ,

By AMALIA BUENO  

This poem is excerpted from Eh, No Talk Li’dat.

Eh, No Talk Li’Dat, an anthology forthcoming from Kaya Press, is centered on Pidgin, or Hawai‘i Creole English. The following poem is excerpted from this anthology.  

Pidgin began as a dialect of trade between Native Hawaiians and Western seafarers and merchants and evolved as a Creole language in the sugar plantations in the 1920s and ’30s, yet, until today, it is deemed substandard by school administrators and is not recognized as a Creole language by the State Department of Education. It is the only language I can think of in the U.S. that was co-authored by the various ethnic groups in the islands: Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders (Samoa, Tonga), sugar planters and migrant laborers from Asia (China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines), Portugal (Madeira and the Azores), and Puerto Rico. Recent speakers and innovators of Pidgin include transplants from Micronesia. In addition to the poems, stories, and excerpted plays, all written in Pidgin and contributed by over forty of Hawai‘i’s writers, the genre-defying Eh, No Talk Li’Dat includes archival materials, newspaper articles, transcripts of televised comic skits, and comic strips. 

— R. ZAMORA LINMARK 

 

After Hart Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb” 

Da ocean like us know we all going die. 
She stay keeping all our bones. 
I seen da wave take ’em 
den bring ’em to da shore 
den take ’em back out again. 
Plenny bones,  
and inside da bones—mana.1   

One day, da ocean all quiet, 
da waves all calm, den alla sudden 
all kapakahi.2 
Da waves wen straight up, 
alla way up,  
up to da sky 
fo’ real kine was all spiritual like 
like I was at church 
and everybody all quiet.  

I wen3 look up 
up at da stars, and das when, 
inside da stars 
I seen all da bones 
all da answers  
to everything.   

Our fren Herman,  
way up high in da blue waves 
he not evah going come back. 
Way up high,  
his bones, his mana 
da ocean stay keeping ’em  
so lucky da ocean  
fo’ keep Herman fo’ evah 
cause only she can. 

—

1. mana (Hawaiian): power, divine or supernatural
2. kapakahi (Hawaiian): lopsided
3. wen (Pidgin): past-tense indicator, also spelled wen’, went
 

 

Amalia Bueno is an educator and writer based in Honolulu. Her poems and stories have been published by Bamboo Ridge, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Philippine American Literary House, among others. Her literary interests include Pinay poetry, decolonization, and Hawai‘i Creole English. Her poetry chapbook, Home Remedies, was published in 2015.

[Purchase Issue 27 here.]

Herman’s Bones
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It’s Important I Remember That Journalism is the First Draft of History—

It’s Important I Remember That Journalism is the First Draft of History—

April 22, 2024 , ,

By CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON

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.

[Purchase Issue 27 here]

It’s Important I Remember That Journalism is the First Draft of History—
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Workshopping the Elements

Workshopping the Elements

April 22, 2024 , ,

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;

Workshopping the Elements
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Indoles and Aphrodite

Indoles and Aphrodite

April 22, 2024 , ,

By LAKSHMI SUNDER

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

Indoles and Aphrodite
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Sunnyside

Sunnyside

April 22, 2024 , ,

By JANUARY GILL O’NEIL

                        —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.

Sunnyside
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