Poems

To Anonymous…

Posted on by A. Long

The larger picture is this: Brooklyn is a bitch built on turmoil

blood, black and white, has steeped into its foundation

that’s the legacy we fight over 

and churn the butter to claim

when you from here

I will always do better 

but I giggle through your attempt at trying to tell me my history

my grandfather was a blockbuster

blacktaxed

he stood on our porch with a shotgun in hand 

as they scribbled nigger across his domain

it was as real as the bricks and mortar I reside in my mixed neighborhood

seeing as how that wasn’t the point though. let me stay on message

thanks for reading, for being a critic

for caring enough about the consequences of your words and mine to blot out your name so I can impartially give you these facts

shoutout to the first of firsts and to dissenters in the ranks

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The Lynching

Posted on by A. Long

His spirit is smoke ascended to high heaven.
His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
Had bidden him to his bosom once again;
The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
All night a bright and solitary star
(Perchance the one that ever guided him,
Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)
Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.

By Claude McKay, 1922

misty eyed

Posted on by A. Long

somewhere in me beneath the mists

is a city on fire

burning like napalm bombs

im pissed,

and somewhere, even deeper

is also a calm feeding the flames

 

The Press

Posted on by A. Long

Hail the press, sword-arm of justice

once chosen for its resistance but the existence of fake news is a mass misconception because there has always been the fake and the real

since inception.

The black journalist, duplicitous in nature, was shut out of newsrooms

strung up by their necks 

literature spread that let the long-arm of the law snatch boys from their cribs

who fit the profile

The panther party persisted 

the so called Freedom Messengers

inciting revolutions with pens and passion

pantherp

What did the press and the president say of them then

the fake, the real. The red or the blue pill

John Henry’s Woman

Posted on by A. Long

my daddy’s name was john henry

my moms name was polly ann

he never sold crack 

but was a hard workin man who laid track in the subways

bent back like his people 

and when he died from all that 

he gave ma his legendary hammer

she had a slammer that was mean 

and took no shit from men, white brown or black

weary, she 

me and your daddy built this city

so you wouldn’t have to

now take this hammer 

and show’ em what you can do

 

 

Morning Song

Posted on by A. Long 

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival.  New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety.  We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses.  I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s.  The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars.  And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

–By Sylvia Plath

Monet’s Waterlilies

Posted on by A. Long

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy

–by Robert Hayden

Dedication

Posted on by A. Long

i wrote a lil diddy

dedicated to daddy’s nickname

that i got tattooed 

when i was 22

it went like this: i am to soar, evermore, like the eagle above the clouds do 

then i wrapped my skin in wings so i’d always feel free, got a job and two degrees to support a writing habit, see

So I…

Posted on by A. Long

nana died. sometimes daddy isnt here. sometimes i sit so still that i kind of want to be invisible. except Mommy always sees me. so i smile.

im pretty sure no one person should watch this much Buffy in one sitting when my Mom comes in. she peers at my sunken form on the couch. been in relatively the same spot since graduation. i cant afford college though i got in places. i cant hop off to see the world, but i can turn on the tv. im not good enough. i cant leave and move forward. i cant go back to high school. i cant-

enough, she says. she picks up my blanket, muttering in Spanish that you are who you are and you are where you are. then she unceremoniously dumps me on the floor of my future. so i get a job.

we fight about me cutting my hair. we fight about schools. we fight about the dishes and cleaning the bathroom. so i go away.

Ma calls. she’s hurting. she’s busy with the little ones. she’s angry. she needs help. she misses me. so i go home.

my Mother pushes me to write. to create. to paint. to be better. so i get a masters.

sometimes when life’s too stressful and there’s deadlines and i cant finish anything and i shouldnt be a writer and i suck compared to everyone else and im tired–

she hugs me and smiles. so i smile.

 

 

 

Art & Paintings, Poems, Short Poems

when he stopped writing her

Aside | Posted on by A. Long

the letter always bled for her for her eyes (brown as those old bottles in the medicine cabinet) bleeding words like teardrops yet without spilling onto the green tile floor those words always pure only staining the paper glossy black ink blood like muslin stuck to an old wound those words always strong yet blurred, obscure words only a scholar would find obscene

happy are those who die because they have returned to those first crumbs of dirt that fed us to that first hole to that soft black and smell of coal

-Pablo Picasso