Chorus

A Few Words

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Add your Voice

Poets

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

 

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a few words

Shut up and sit down. New Age be damned if the old do not heed the voice and concerns of the young. Here are the voices of many, woven into one. If each face is a book, here is a testament: the groundplan of a social network. Here are our fears, disbeliefs, visions, and wishes welded into words. Here is our love, our desires, sprung from the incessant chatterbox of our adolescence. Here is the voice of the un-dead and the un-­compromised. Make no tradition of this. We have had enough.

moderato cantabile

blah blah hard-hitting

first line.

some bullshit about where I'm at.

connecting it

to something

seemingly irrelevant.

elevating a combination

of mundane thoughts

to the epic.

ask a question

to throw everyone off.

explain the past

in terms acceptable

to the present.

challenge the present

to re-consider

its coping mechanisms.

blame myself in the process.

free myself in the blame.

write about

all that I'm going to do about it.

run the risk of being condescending.

get dangerously close

to threatening.

shrug off rejection,

secretly expecting acceptance.

not saying anything about it,

as the next line

disarms with the word, ‘poop,'

put in a creative context.

feel accomplished for typing,

not trying.

get tired

of thinking what comes next.

insert trademark

unconsciously.

wonder how much more

before I can stop

and go back to the luxury

of lifestyle.

prepare the rationale

that denies the distraction.

write down

whatever it takes

to not think

the word waste.

end with superiority complex

wrapped in

the cleverest thing

they done ever did

heard.

At the end of your ten-day meditation retreat

you got in your car

drove thirty peaceful feet

and ran over a bird,

splayed its holy guts on the pavement

like god finger-painting fuck you

across that deep breath

you were holding

the way your mother held her first born.

You, thank goodness,

were torn from the bible

the day before they burned it

for the verse about dancing to tambourines.

Once

you saw the blood of Christ on a knife

carving redwood trees into church pews.

Now every Sunday morning

you hear glaciers melting

and you see the feathers in your rearview mirror

scattering like prayers

searching for a safe place to land.

Hold me to my word

when I tell you I will leave today,

catch a bus ticket west

just to stand in the center of your highway

stopping traffic 'til every feather's answered.

I've seen too many prayers

caught in the grills of eighteen-wheelers.

And folks like us, we've got

shoulder blades that rust in the rain,

but they're still G sharp

whenever our spinal chords are tuned

to the key of redemption.

So go ahead world, pick us

to make things better.

You wanna know what the right wing never got?

We never question the existence of god.

What we question is his bulldozer

turning Palestine into a gas chamber.

What we question is the manger in Macy's

and the sweatshops our children call the North Pole.

What we question is the idea of a heaven

having gates.

Have you never stood on the end of a pier

watching the moon live up to her name?

Have you never looked in the eyes of a thief

and seen his children's hungry bellies?

Some days my heart beats so fast

my ribcage sounds like a fucking railroad track

and my breath is a train I just can't catch.

So when my friends go filling their lungs with yes,

when they're peeling off their armor

and falling like snowflakes on your holy tongue, God

collect the feathers.

We are thick skin

covering nothing but wishbones.

Break in. You'll find

notebooks full of jaw lines

we wrote to religion's clenched fist.

Yeah, we bruise easy.

But the sound of our bouncing back

is a grand canyon full of choir claps

and our five pointed stars

have always been open to the answer,

whatever it is.

Look me in the bullseye,

in the laws I broke

and the promises I didn't,

in the batteries I found when the lights went out

and the prayers I found when the brakes did too.

I've got this moment

and no idea when it will end,

but every second of this life

is scripture.

And to know that, trust me,

we don't need to be born

again.

i begin in a rude place praying awkwardly

my body is ugly. and a consequence of silence.

i watched myself being born

i came from crocodile mouths,

i swam thru the bronx of my mother's belly

she married those cracks in bible passages. her jesus-witch-brew

cried a liquid city between thighs and
blurred

bookcases until a heartbeat broke

centuries

a noisemaker spat and bled thru his golden horn.

a poet held me down on a bed.

this is old news,
all
the stethoscopes have told it before

silence is scary.

i watch
the singing ones
and i want to move in their throats

and i want to sleep in them and wake

and not be so scared allthetime.

i don't want to talk about
the kissing ones
or the ones who are smaller than their mouths who die in the middle of the street and how small children are chastised for wanting to touch them. who are the lullaby god's Worst . . . or the funksmell that follows them across bridges and beneath breasts and powders armpits with their crying.

if i could tell you i love you in a language
where
fear didn't exist

i know

i would remember the earth as a piece of my chest

I.

you kiss my breasts

and the blood gathers beneath my skin just to be near you.

becomes
the
place i bathe you

a
shimmering
mineral pool of diamonds and berries

oshun's honey and magnolia blossoms in bloom.

this is my
dream
. . .

i am a mermaid

you—

on the shore cutting watermelon

y
o
u—

f
eeding me

you—

rubbing oil into my hot body.

you and i

a river
running through us.

II.

this was me before you—

mouth wide in the arkansas lapping the waves

that
flowed
from your hands.

my feet in the river

pressing blessings
through
rocks and mud

sending godlove anointed water to you.

i
praye
d fo
r
you—

through lotawatah/ and tenkiller/

and eufala/ bird creek.

deep fork.

through
waters surrounded by
land and air.
o
pen
sky
.

through lakes and rivers who'd heard rumors

of the sight
of
the
sea
.

how the very presence of it will

drop

you

to

your

knees.

i sang your ship to me

sang
the siren song that was in my belly the first time I saw your face

your eyes

the unbearable beauty of you.

come to me come to me come to me come to me come to me

if you had sailed away from me . . .

if you had sailed away from me

i would have died on this rock

fish falling
through
my fingers like sighs.

you listened to me-

  through the altamaha/ and the o
ho
o
pe
e/

the ogeechee.

  the flint/ocmulgee/the mighty chattahoochee.

your heart and soul swimming to me.

and
now?

there is nothing else that sustains me.

sweet soft. a quick/lick from a sugared spoon.

III.

your rivers are georgia pines deeper than green.

the liquor in a pot of collards. a smoky bone.

the tip of your tongue in my mouth.

taste the salt o
f
my t
ear
s.

you are macon mud rich