sometimes she is a stranger unto herself floating in the voice of what survived free falling, a kind of flying seeming seamless really a scar can heal call it a pretty dress perhaps a gown invisible weather approaching unannounced like a shivering wind or a seasoned storm to be a feather for love on a beaming wing to swim the air everywhere is swimming her…
what becomes of children who survive us? indigo rosebuds or sunflowers risen of landfills voices made of tire swings and milk crates stick figures in sand drawn by fallen twigs who looks history in the eye, grins imagines worlds away within the power to better love above law risk above comfort for the lost and departed wandering in memories unspoken who will unruin this generation…
vermilion wax seeps soft down a braided back of wick the mischievous flame swallows small devils rendered helpless shadows tremor the parquet how we rid a room of virulence tug a cork from deep copper wine and pour toward the mestizo priest hospitality defies sin, a spineless bruised banana lay near the lanterns gutter we marooned in the projects hid in the holy hood of…
Get off at Cleveland Street. You will discover a neighborhood of noise and the music will make your hips laugh the concrete is a pasture of broken nerves more importantly, head towards the house whose shrouded shoulders shiver under the ragged shawl of an amusing sky this is 61 Ashford Street an old woman called my grandmother spends most summers on the front porch if…
you who are beautiful are always thinking. there is no image like the image of a man who thinks. the inside of my right thigh will be where he writes his autobiography. he is obsessed with leaving love notes on my skin and I will wake up some mornings i walk past the bathroom mirror finding things like “remember me” drawn backwards across my collarbone….
early this morning, just after homemade coffee you drove me to playalinda beach with your right hand on my left knee and the other limp-wristed on the steering wheel, on our way from the bridge between the highway and the hammock trail, half of me soaring out the sunroof with my arms spread wide, pelican-like, open palms toward blue topaz, squinting at a blazed sun…
you rise a witch bleeding gently in morning fanning flies from fruit you slice an avocado open and spoon the pit out sprinkle sea salt and cayenne pepper put a pot to boil on the stove stuff sage and rosebud in a strainer your hair is messy, eye boogers in the corners you smell like a sleeping beauty who sweat her kinks out in the…
somewhere a little girl is reading aloud in the middle of a dirt road. she smiles at the sound of her own voice escaping the spine of a book. she feeds on her hunger to know herself. she has not yet been taught to dim, she sits with the stars beneath her feet, a constellation of things to come. as if a swallowed moon, she…
i did not want to write a poem full of corpses so i wrote a sacred pink blue sky jeweled on the horizon laughter as the loudest star sleeps humor hugs every ache whole how heavy heads lay after a long day in the humid heat caribbean moon sighs and joyous dreams i did not wish to speak of what should not be spoken so…
In her first poem, Aja Monet tackled the question: why do we write? Aja Monet was in class at Baruch College Campus High School in Manhattan when a terror attack brought down the World Trade Center. The day awakened her to the “interconnectedness” of people and brought her a new perspective on her place in the world, she said. “For me, language was always about trying to articulate…
