Maybe you noticed. Maybe you didn’t.

We skipped, leapt, jumped over, passed by, forgot, hop-scotched, tripped over, and regretted last week’s inadvertent oversight. Here’s the deal.

Last Wednesday’s "Avenues" omission did not spark my consciousness of its delayed existence until the following day. Truth be told, we were in northern Virginia visiting my 97 year old Mom, who resides in her own apartment in an assisted living facility.  Part aaduna related, part family connections, part discovery, part remembrances…when the road trip ended, the missed “Avenues on Wednesday” finally smacked me upside the head. And made me ponder what to do to make up for that lax of posting.

Now, some of us may believe and embrace the fact that two is all too often better than one.  Well, whether or not you think that is true, we decided to take that two lane roadway today. 

This “Avenues on Wednesday” presents two powerful voices. Two distinct voices.  Two aaduna contributors, colleagues, and friends. Two critical supporters of the annual aaduna fundraiser. 

Two women.

Their words.

Heidi Nightengale

Cyd Charisse Fulton

Enjoy their creativity.

Their unique way.

Their poetic and enchanting words.

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Heidi Nightengale (photo provided) 

A Double Paged Song of Wind

            After watching a video of my brother ice fishing

Out on the Ice

a double song paged wind
comes to bring
a melody to learn
to love again
things he had once dreamed
and lost.
To feel everything simple
but forgotten.
In the fog, the misting blindness
of loss, longing, loveliness
sends a wanting on a warm wind with
double noted warmth and cold
to care again,
to care for the simple.
A twice way wind which
brings a glance of a side way
look as he looks up in the cataract clouds
and sees his father:
his father’s face an older melody
and his face
warmed
but chilled, too,
as the nakedness of the back of his neck
feels the double noted glance of his father.
As much double edged as the chance
of falling through.

As he walks back across

the moaning ice
he hears the double wind
calling like an Ava--
One calling like the pipes
of a funeral
one ringing
like the bells of joy,

And he has known both.

Heidi Nightengale © 2018

Heidi Nightengale has been writing and publishing in local, regional and national literary magazines for 30 years. Her chapbook Bird Vision, was published by Pudding House Press in 2008, and her chapbook, Tillable Soil was released by the Poets and Writers affiliated press, Clare Songbirds Publishing House. She has been a writer in the schools in three states. She currently teaches for SUNY Empire State College when she is not listening to traditional Irish music and trying to learn to play the tin whistle.

****

Cyd Charisse Fulton (photo provided)

HOLY SLICK

The 60s --  Blacks prepare for slippery dignity

like when mom rubs slob

on the side of earlobes before going to church

tracing dry sleep dancing on cheeks

Gotta get that ash off

Gotta press clothes and hair

Gotta sit up straight on downtown bus

Gotta be damn near invisible

and don’t even expect respect

just burst through subjugation barriers

like bulls out the gate

Nowadays -- desirable slip is hair conditioner for

flat twists

bantu knots

unhinged locks

and protective hair styles under lace front wigs

and caps

Easy slip-on apparel such as sweat suits

and sneakers 

are civilian tactical outfits

Gotta march for the millionth time

Gotta say names of murdered innocence

Gotta stop being damn near invisible

Riot fear spits tear gas clouds

Police wear active shooter gear

Bullets blow

Body fluid ruins the lie

Cell phones are fed up bystanders

Hit record and curse God

for withholding role reversal

Time for some Black privilege

Christian metaphors don’t

mount on sheet-rocked mids

Emmett Till does

Nina Simone did

but brain holes are heathens

believing shadows on walls are mirrors

reflecting Go Down Moses bodies

Break out some street justice instead of gospel hymns

Civil war for civil rights is revolution

Cyd Charisse Fulton ©2018                                                               

Over My Head, I Hear Maya

Feathers are swimming in wind.

They musically whistle wisdom
and paintbrush our skies.
Wisdom, colorful words 
that woo, ensue and transform.

Journalism,
books,
plays,
essays, and poetry
juggle all that life releases
and living tries to snatch.
They toe tap liberation
while singing Calypso.
Wisdom caresses
ill-repute 
with the same grace
royalty is embraced.
Winds wipe feathers
over places where abused
have scratches
on their hearts.
The caged bird sings 
un-muted, St. Louis style
all the while, feathers stroke
the world’s core
as a song is flung up to heaven

Cyd Charisse Fulton ©2014

BONUS POEM: Our reconciliation for being tardy last week.

LIVIN WHAT MATTERS   by Cyd Charisse Fulton (first published in WordPeace journal, Vol. 1.1 issue)   

81 seconds of video

56 baton blows

a Black man shrinks

beaten to the brink of Jim Crow

Black lives matter… to whom

red devil in blue

still hidin behind linen hoods

tazin skin

tattered bones battered

scattered over 246 years

since birth mattered

voter law

oppression guidelines

might as well re-establish “white only” signs

tug on neck snappin twine

I can’t breathe don’t rhyme

get outta here

with that serve and protect trash

it’s rubble

like brick from

16^th Street Baptist Church blast

education for Blacks

a schism

better known as pipeline

to prison

not to mention

denationalization

of Dominican

Black Africans

Black lives

dressed in tabloid fodder

talk shows juxtapose who’s the father

don’t let Dr. Huxtable near your daughter

even before all this media commotion

Black lives arrived over the ocean

yet mainstream’s notion of good TV

is scandal and hip hop minus culture

numbin pain creation

viral images from Staten Island

and Fruitvale Station

supremacist self-righteous power

master’s brandin iron

don’t cool off in April showers

network noose

urgin killin

lockin

cold cockin

pacin

skittle chasin

life erasin

world bracin horror

protestors troublin Black middle class

busy worryin ‘bout pants hangin off ass

gun ‘em down

hunt ‘em down

leave ‘em danglin

for families to cut ‘em down

gunshots at Obama White House

Medgar Evers shot in front of his house

no place safe

Mississippi

Emmett Till

Georgia

Kendrick Johnson

woman the family nucleus

America’s snaggletoothin her

tyin ropes tight and slammin doors

Marissa Alexander

Assata Shakur

Scottsboro Boys

Central Park 5

keep hope alive

Marion Barry is dead

live by any means necessary

who shot Malcolm X

truth ain’t in no textbook

educate or retaliate

oppressive air suffocates

and resuscitates

day to day repression

in succession

some say Blacks come a long way

short lived fame

maimed with toota’s root

genital selfies on Instagram

that crap ain’t cute

brute banishes Blacks

for standin ground

by the way where’s H Rap Brown

where’s community centers

and comical camaraderie

economical and social hang ups

thugs gang up on twins

same skin

same tyranny

kill for designer jacket

crime on crime ain’t stop being Black yet

5am line up to buy sneakers

gun-to-the-head finders keepers

2Pac say

you ask why

don’t matter

my pockets got fatter

now everybody’s lookin for the latter

Sekou says

all depends, all depends on the skin,

all depends on the skin you're living in

Cyd Charisse Fulton hails from Brooklyn, NY as a writer and also founder and editor of Emphat!c Press. She is a graduate of New York University and is a 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work is featured in Stand Our Ground, I Want My Poetry To…, and Dovetail anthologies, aaduna, an online literary journal, as well as journals Author’s Den and WordPeace.  Cyd featured her poems during Summerstage 2016 in Brooklyn, NY, 2016 Black History Month Say It Loud program at NYU Gallatin, Remembering the Harlem Renaissance 2015 at Theater Mack in Auburn, NY, the 2015 People’s State of the Union Poetic Address to the Nation, 2014 Washington, DC celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Mariposa Retreat Reunion at The Writer’s Center in Maryland, Louder Arts, Cave Canem, Nuyorican Poets Café, Bowery Poetry Club, and the 100th Anniversary of the death of Harriet Tubman recognition gala in Auburn, NY.  Ms. Fulton produced, directed and hosted the 2014 poetry event for the Black Theater Network conference at the National Black Theater in Harlem. In 2016, she produced and directed Amiri Barka: Black Love, a poetic and musical tribute at the Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts at NYU Gallatin.  Cyd is a 2016 Downtown Urban Arts Festival finalist who produced and directed her play Educated and Still Trapped presented at the Cherry Hill Theater in New York.   Her chapbooks Feeding Off of the North Star and Emphatic Radical are tools for social change.

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