“One had to forget—because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past. And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one’s mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of breechwood.

[…]

Pnim slowly walked under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.”

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnim (p. 134-35)

[…]

The island smelled of goat and guano.   

The goats were white, so were the gulls,   

and both too tame, or else they thought   

I was a goat, too, or a gull.

Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek,

baa … shriek … baa … I still can’t shake   

them from my ears; they’re hurting now.

The questioning shrieks, the equivocal replies   

over a ground of hissing rain

and hissing, ambulating turtles

got on my nerves.

When all the gulls flew up at once, they sounded

like a big tree in a strong wind, its leaves.   

I’d shut my eyes and think about a tree,   

an oak, say, with real shade, somewhere.   

I’d heard of cattle getting island-sick.   

I thought the goats were.

One billy-goat would stand on the volcano

I’d christened Mont d’Espoir or Mount Despair

(I’d time enough to play with names),   

and bleat and bleat, and sniff the air.   

I’d grab his beard and look at him.   

His pupils, horizontal, narrowed up

and expressed nothing, or a little malice.   

I got so tired of the very colors!   

One day I dyed a baby goat bright red   

with my red berries, just to see   

something a little different.

And then his mother wouldn’t recognize him.

Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food

and love, but they were pleasant rather

than otherwise. But then I’d dream of things   

like slitting a baby’s throat, mistaking it   

for a baby goat. I’d have

nightmares of other islands

stretching away from mine, infinities   

of islands, islands spawning islands,   

like frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs   

of islands, knowing that I had to live   

on each and every one, eventually,   

for ages, registering their flora,   

their fauna, their geography.

Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it   

another minute longer, Friday came.   

(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)   

Friday was nice.

Friday was nice, and we were friends.   

If only he had been a woman!

I wanted to propagate my kind,   

and so did he, I think, poor boy.

He’d pet the baby goats sometimes,

and race with them, or carry one around.   

—Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.

And then one day they came and took us off.

Now I live here, another island,

that doesn’t seem like one, but who decides?

My blood was full of them; my brain   

bred islands. But that archipelago

has petered out. I’m old.

I’m bored, too, drinking my real tea,   

surrounded by uninteresting lumber.

The knife there on the shelf—

it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.

It lived. How many years did I   

beg it, implore it, not to break?

I knew each nick and scratch by heart,

the bluish blade, the broken tip,

the lines of wood-grain on the handle …

Now it won’t look at me at all.   

The living soul has dribbled away.   

My eyes rest on it and pass on.

[…]

Chicana poet Lorna Dee Cervantes reads her absolutely amazing “Poem For the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, An Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races”

One of my favorite poems of all times:

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous
because we’ never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told
us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’
magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.

 - Charles Bukowski

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time ——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You ——

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two ——
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagersnever liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

“Despite the astonishing variety of American landscapes, each town of more than a few thousand people seems to wear some version of the same mask. Those who travel the interstates know this, and many take comfort in the fact that each Holiday Inn, each Pizza Hut, looks just like the last. The places themselves through which the highways slice—the distinctive communities of organisms and landforms known as bioregions—are merely backdrops. We understand our homes not as watersheds or plant communities, but as human constructions: counties, zip codes, nations. We live between the airport and the off-ramp, just past the mall. As a result, we are as displaced as ever people have been. But unlike the millions of forced from their native lands, our placelessness is voluntary. We are so liberated from the particularity of place that we don’t even know what we’re missing.” — Laird Christensen (World Literature Today 82.4)

She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor 
window. Her hands are pressed white against the 
concrete moulding of the tenement building. She 
hangs from the 13th floor window in east Chicago, 
with a swirl of birds over her head. They could 
be a halo, or a storm of glass waiting to crush her. 

She thinks she will be set free. 

The woman hanging from the 13th floor window 
on the east side of Chicago is not alone. 
She is a woman of children, of the baby, Carlos, 
and of Margaret, and of Jimmy who is the oldest. 
She is her mother’s daughter and her father’s son. 
She is several pieces between the two husbands 
she has had. She is all the women of the apartment 
building who stand watching her, watching themselves. 

When she was young she ate wild rice on scraped down 
plates in warm wood rooms. It was in the farther 
north and she was the baby then. They rocked her. 

She sees Lake Michigan lapping at the shores of 
herself. It is a dizzy hole of water and the rich 
live in tall glass houses at the edge of it. In some 
places Lake Michigan speaks softly, here, it just sputters 
and butts itself against the asphalt. She sees 
other buildings just like hers. She sees other 
women hanging from many-floored windows 
counting their lives in the palms of their hands 
and in the palms of their children’s hands. 

She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window 
on the Indian side of town. Her belly is soft from 
her children’s births, her worn levis swing down below 
her waist, and then her feet, and then her heart. 
She is dangling. 

The woman hanging from the 13th floor hears voices. 
They come to her in the night when the lights have gone 
dim. Sometimes they are little cats mewing and scratching 
at the door, sometimes they are her grandmother’s voice, 
and sometimes they are gigantic men of light whispering 
to her to get up, to get up, to get up. That’s when she wants 
to have another child to hold onto in the night, to be able 
to fall back into dreams. 

And the woman hanging from the 13th floor window 
hears other voices. Some of them scream out from below 
for her to jump, they would push her over. Others cry softly 
from the sidewalks, pull their children up like flowers and gather
them into their arms. They would help her, like themselves. 

But she is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window, 
and she knows she is hanging by her own fingers, her 
own skin, her own thread of indecision. 

She thinks of Carlos, of Margaret, of Jimmy. 
She thinks of her father, and of her mother. 
She thinks of all the women she has been, of all 
the men. She thinks of the color of her skin, and 
of Chicago streets, and of waterfalls and pines. 
She thinks of moonlight nights, and of cool spring storms. 
Her mind chatters like neon and northside bars. 
She thinks of the 4 a.m. lonelinesses that have folded 
her up like death, discordant, without logical and 
beautiful conclusion. Her teeth break off at the edges. 
She would speak. 

The woman hangs from the 13th floor window crying for 
the lost beauty of her own life. She sees the 
sun falling west over the grey plane of Chicago. 
She thinks she remembers listening to her own life 
break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor 
window on the east side of Chicago, or as she 
climbs back up to claim herself again.

The Woman Hanging From The Thirteenth Floor Window fromShe Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 2006 by Joy Harjo.

No way!

Amiri Baraka in a great performance

Amazing combination of poetry and jazz!

Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear   

my head about this poem about why I can’t   

go out without changing my clothes my shoes   

my body posture my gender identity my age

my status as a woman alone in the evening/   

alone on the streets/alone not being the point/

the point being that I can’t do what I want   

to do with my own body because I am the wrong   

sex the wrong age the wrong skin and   

suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/   

or far into the woods and I wanted to go   

there by myself thinking about God/or thinking   

about children or thinking about the world/all of it   

disclosed by the stars and the silence:   

I could not go and I could not think and I could not   

stay there   

alone   

as I need to be   

alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own   

body and   

who in the hell set things up   

like this   

and in France they say if the guy penetrates   

but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me   

and if after stabbing him if after screams if   

after begging the bastard and if even after smashing   

a hammer to his head if even after that if he   

and his buddies fuck me after that   

then I consented and there was   

no rape because finally you understand finally   

they fucked me over because I was wrong I was   

wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong

to be who I am   

which is exactly like South Africa   

penetrating into Namibia penetrating into

Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if

Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the

proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland

and if

after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe

and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to

self-immolation of the villages and if after that

we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they

claim my consent:

Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of

the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what

in the hell is everybody being reasonable about

and according to the Times this week

back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem

and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they

killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba

and before that it was my father on the campus

of my Ivy League school and my father afraid

to walk into the cafeteria because he said he

was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong

gender identity and he was paying my tuition and

before that

it was my father saying I was wrong saying that   

I should have been a boy because he wanted one/a

boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and

that I should have had straighter hair and that

I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should

just be one/a boy and before that         

it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for

my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me

to let the books loose to let them loose in other

words

I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.

and the problems of South Africa and the problems

of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white

America in general and the problems of the teachers

and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social

workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very

familiar with the problems because the problems   

turn out to be   

me

I am the history of rape   

I am the history of the rejection of who I am   

I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of   

myself   

I am the history of battery assault and limitless   

armies against whatever I want to do with my mind   

and my body and my soul and   

whether it’s about walking out at night   

or whether it’s about the love that I feel or   

whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or   

the sanctity of my national boundaries   

or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity   

of each and every desire   

that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic   

and indisputably single and singular heart   

I have been raped   

be-

cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age   

the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the   

wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic   

the wrong sartorial I   

I have been the meaning of rape   

I have been the problem everyone seeks to   

eliminate by forced   

penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/   

but let this be unmistakable this poem   

is not consent I do not consent   

to my mother to my father to the teachers to   

the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy   

to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon   

idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in   

cars   

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name

My name is my own my own my own   

and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this

but I can tell you that from now on my resistance   

my simple and daily and nightly self-determination   

may very well cost you your life

June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005).