Art and shiny things…
1.
I’ve hesitated beside the jewelweed, deep in the sevenbark,
told them I will not, not again—
What sovereign lies? What queen in her epistolary cage?
An ochre shotglass empties,
a lantern, unlit, heedlessly shines.
In vain I have opened mirrors & edges of mirrors.
-Jennifer Givhan
It cuts through suddenly, expertly, this want to talk to you — like the way you used to open pomegranates. Nothing was wasted, not time, not an extra ruby-seed on the inside. You always said that one does not cut a fruit — you ask them to open, gently, and they would let you in. They knew you would be fair while splitting them. I try to talk to you, cutting through time. It does not open. It says, learn from your mother.
-Sujit Prasad
The bakery’s graffiti either spells HOPE
or NOPE. But hope and results
are different, said Fanny Brawne to her Keats
voiding his unreasonable lung.
Getting off the medicine
completely means light again
blinking to light. Device returned
to its factory settings. The complete black
of before the meteor shower
above the bakery. If you lose the smell
of leather, lemon, or rose,
studies show you will fail at being
Poets.org, Christopher Salerno
rt Gemi on Pixiv
Don’t take it personal’, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal—
the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,
the wet hair of women in the rain—
And I cursed what hurt me
and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.
The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and its laws,
and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.
Tony Hoagland, Poetry Magazine
In 2014 to celebrate Black History Month, NPR Books asked Afua Richardson, an award-winning illustrator who’s worked for Image, Marvel and DC Comics, to illustrate something that inspired her. She created this extraordinary video – 50 seconds that perfectly melds the oral, visual, and textual traditions of storytelling into something of pure magic, resonant with historical echoes.
Blood & Water: The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes from AfuaRichardson on Vimeo.
Will we breathe
like ballet
dancers, learn
to bleed song—
toes pointed?
Will you still
learn this dance?
This is me
trying to
lengthen my-
self. To stand
on the thin
ends of my
swollen toes
and fool my-
self into
Marlin M. Jenkins, Puritan Magazine
Before another sunrise wakes me, before another night is gone, I’ll find out where this highway takes me. You know I got to travel on. Left my troubles all behind me, back there when I climbed on board. Jordon River’s where you’ll find me It’s wide but not too wide to ford.
– Sutton Foster
Coffee and Irony 