Day 3: Dickinson, Mundo, Davis, Piatt celebrate National Poetry Month

The Literate Slave

Piss and shit stain the dawn,

the bloated body hangs like an empty sack.

The mouth is gaped, the eyes

face the rising sun’s betrayal.

We have taught ourselves to see only with our eyes

and not with our hearts.

The shape we see does not become that boy

whose name showed itself to him.

Dumb boy, receiving things that can’t be given back.

His words, for he held them as if they were his alone,

he kept in a room with no door,

and they danced together and alone.

They shouted out the glory of their existence

until he couldn’t help it and the words that slept

behind his pillowed lips whispered and grew.

We hissed at him in the night’s dark sweat;

live in the terror which makes survival possible,

for safety, live in the things that hold you to earth.

Who would give their breath for symbols?

A noose for every loop, the smooth and hard stops,

the lines crossing and weaving on the page

that reminded him of his own striped back.

This morning the slave shacks wail

and hang their broken heads.

There his knowledge hangs,

heavy fruit rotting.

Portland, Oregon

Tanya Dickinson (photo provided)

* * *

re: Your mother

I wish I could interview another you,

the one from 1972

with the Elvis sneer and the Joan Jett do,

who knows all you’ve forgotten and

remembers everything you knew.

I’d ask, How did Apollo ever earn your trust?

Did snakes lick your ears clean of his dirt and dust?

That kouros ideal, son of light and lust…

Was this liar’s lyre so inspiringly robust?

Because, honestly, I see no signs of Zeus,

no bull, no eagle and no Golden Goose.

I see a bitter old fool full of bile and abuse,

a kind of soulless soul only hate can produce.

And now cursed with a truth no one can believe

and the pain of loss no one can relieve,

I’d ask, Why cling to the tangled web we grieve

holding back that final ace up your sleeve?

I guess I’ll never fully know the reasons why.

And I‘ll never figure out how he drank you dry.

But somewhere in the depths of truth lives a lie

that will haunt me until the day I die.

Alta Loma, California

Frank Mundo (photo provided)

* * *

Study of the Back Door

I am sick of courage. I grit my teeth into diamonds. You a good father, making me spit sawdust like a working thing and all/ feminism of the plow and sweat. I erode my eyes against your absence of mercy. You raised your girl right. Granite enough to chisel into like renewable resource. I ain't never runnin out on you, Pops. The same way every Cadillac gon have gas till the end of time. Whatever I gotta tell you to get your eyes to flutter somewhere Georgia summer soft, sometime before you forged your God into an unlocked handcuff dangling at your wrist like the trust of a girlchild. I'm the youngest of your mistakes. Which is to say I have not had time to heal away my being. I am a scar ready to peel off the mystery of its face. I'm erasing my body until all that is left is a handful of chipped teeth. I invent a new word for gone every time we lock eyes. Teach me the ease of cowardice. I do not know if the grass is greener on the other side, but I know the ground here is tired of conjuring fruit from barren blood. This is the story I guess: a man the shade of lumbered and labored oak claims the night as his overcoat. Every star implodes in his synapses. Cuz back in the day, children used to respect they parent’s trauma. They was seen and not swallowed. And they knew better than to come home after certain darks.

Ridge, New York

* * *

Toxic Weeds

In recent times,

Things got broken

People got meaner… children got shot,

Hate grew wild… thoughts became feral