Issue 27 Poetry

Call and Response

By TREY MOODY

My grandmother likes to tell me dogs
            understand everything you say, they just can’t
say anything back. We’re eating spaghetti 

            while I visit from far away. My grandmother
just turned ninety-four and tells me dogs
            understand everything you say, they just can’t

Call and Response
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It’s Important I Remember That Journalism Is the First Draft of History—

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,

It’s Important I Remember That Journalism Is the First Draft of History—
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Around Sunset

By JAMES RICHARDSON

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

Around Sunset
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Black-Out Baby

By JULIET S. K. KONO  

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 

  

Da Japs, my strange kine relatives, 
wen jes bomb Pearl Harba. 
Ebery nite from den on, each house 
had only one black-out light with  
a puka in da center. 
People had fo tar dea windows 
and craks unda da do-uz 
had fo be stuf wid rags, 
scolding da lites dat dare fo show up. 
If not, da block checkas go come, 
jes like termites come aroun da lites. 
And those who broke da law,
going hea banging on dea do-uz 
and if you one Jap, 
you gotta be careful cuz 
dey can sen you  
to one jail kine camp, 
somewea in Colorado.  

One nite, one woman wen go into layba 
wen was real hot unda the black-out lite. 
Into this dark-kine time, one baby wuz born. 
Da baby was me. One black-out baby— 
nosing aroun in the dark 
wid heavy kine eyes, 
and a “yellow-belly,” 
filled wid one real angry cry!  

 

Juliet S. K. Kono is a poet and fiction writer born and raised in Hilo, Hawaiʻi. She is a survivor of the 1946 tsunami. She has written extensively about the Japanese American experience across the generations. Author of four books, including Hilo Rains and Anshu, she is retired and lives with her husband in Honolulu.

[Purchase Issue 27 here]

Black-Out Baby
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Was to Get It

By MATTHEW LIPPMAN 

 

I tried to get in touch with my inner knowledge.
Turns out I have no inner knowledge.
I used to think I did.
Could sit on a rock contemplating the frog, the river, the rotisserie chicken
and know that everything is connected to everything else.
Or, that I had a messed-up childhood and never fully left the home.
Or, that abandonment was a product of eating too much candy.
But then the dog saw the squirrel.

Was to Get It
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Ecstasy Facsimile

By MARK ANTHONY CAYANAN

Longing to make his life compact as sushi, my shame
borrows the saint’s apron, shackles his swivel in her cincture. My shame
walks the earth with an electric blanket, goes to the gym to window-shop with
            it, heads for the hills where he takes selfies meditating. To the person
            on the bus who inquires, my shame

Ecstasy Facsimile
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Atlanta Spa Mass Shootings

By ANN INOSHITA

 

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

 

March 16, 2021

Trump blamed China fo COVID-19
calling da virus Kung Flu and da China virus,
so get pleny people from pleny states going afta Asian Americans
blaming Asians fo da pandemic.

Atlanta Spa Mass Shootings
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Woodpecker

By JEFFREY HARRISON

At first I thought the pileated woodpecker
that lifted up from the yard as we came home
from a walk in the woods, flapping
away on long black wings that curved
up at the tips and flashed white
underneath, might be a visitation

Woodpecker
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