December 2011
7 posts
2 tags
A Date with Dahmer
These are my bodies.
This is my skull.
Hair and flesh boiled away,
painted grey and on display for you.
This is my skull.
Touch it. Feel the ridges.
I painted it grey and put it on display for you.
Don’t be afraid.
Touch this. Feel the ridges.
Formaldehyde keeps male power preserved.
Don’t be afraid.
Take this. Drink it. It’s good.
Triazolam keeps male power preserved.
You see, only warm...
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Straphanger Solidarity by Jess Spinosa
I board the Q59 smiling, and greet the bus driver with a hello, ignoring the sign that says to leave him alone while the wheels are in motion. His eyes betray his composed posture. Meeting mine, he explains, You are the first person to talk to me today.
An eight hour shift:
forty-four mute passengers
on a crowded bus.
His sigh says, City people only exist within the limits of their seats, they...
2 tags
Whatever Doesn't Kill You... by Jess Spinosa
Sometimes, I find even the word hard to hear or say: “mother,”
because it awakens the memory of cancer eating away at my mother.
Hollow doctors telling trite truths without the glaze of the personal —
but terminal, palliative never pierced through the naiveté of my mother.
Bone, lung, the bump she found near her underarm and broke down —
but I never cried. They will fix you, I lied every day...
1 tag
Moisturizing My Mother's Hands by Jess Spinosa
Wyckoff Hospital, May 2009 My mother’s hands crack
dry and red with eczema
and decades of dutiful work
with her household’s chemicals.
She spent her life cleaning
that spacious apartment, empty
except for the cat hiding
under the bed her husband sleeps on
alone, brimming with the Budweiser
he hid in their pristine kitchen.
Maybe she thought bleach would wash away
the stains of...
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New York, I Love You (But Not Today) by Jess...
A reckless tagger receives just punishment via D train
causing a two hour delay on the Brooklyn bound R:
this is no more than just another news report.
A crowd of New Yorkers making signifying watch glances,
cursing “tunnel traffic:” the MTA monicker
for graffiti vandal run down by braking D train.
The law-abiding on news blogs call it “poetic justice,”
this blending of sprayed blood and...
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Hoping They Learned Consent by Jess Spinosa
My eighth graders stare at me
with question mark eyes
and heads put off
to the side:
Rape happens
in relationships?
***
We laid there on the floor
behind his couch. Shirts
on. Pants ripped
down low enough
for easy
entry.
It was like we were hiding,
though there was no one there
to speak
out about his jackhammer
thrusts, piercing through
and breaking down the sacred earth
-ly...
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A Hard Lesson by Jess Spinosa
I want my students to understand slavery: to feel it’s burden on their backs and minds, to see the scars it left behind on their “democratic” country.
The Slave Narratives:
Voices telling black stories
of their oppression.
Students hate documentaries that tell, so I find one that shows the damage done. It tells, as well, but looking straight at them with passionate...
August 2011
3 posts
2 tags
City People by Jess Spinosa
The tree house in El Hato had no bathroom except for a communal one, of sorts, about a city block away. There the water was no warmer than the rain and the toilet was no more than a lidded hole in the Guatemalan soil. We didn’t mind the latter but I couldn’t stand the water washing my warmth down the drain. So, I begged him to climb the hill with me to find the hidden hot shower in...
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This Love Song by Wesley McNair
He is such an unlikely lover, wearing sneakers someone has dressed him in, his old floppy legs hanging down from the bed they have sold his house for. What he loves is not even here, and when he rocks this way, his head thrown back, holding only himself, he is not much more than a chest heaving and a few teeth you can almost see right through. It is the clear refusal to open his eyes and be where...
1 tag
The Poem Project
So, I haven’t been on this thing in a while. It’s been a crazy summer, and I really haven’t even taken a second to log on once I got my new MacBook Pro. This is all going to change in 3…2…1!
From now until who knows when in the (un)foreseeable future, I will be using this space to post poems and songs that inspire me, as well as (of course) any poems that might come...
May 2011
3 posts
1 tag
Laid. by Jess Spinosa
When you returned she tasted a mixture of gin and whiskey on your itinerant tongue.
When you pushed her sick body up against the empty fridge, she heard even her kidneys scream stop. Yet you compelled her through what was once your apartment, carefully discarding her rigid resistance onto the four-poster bed now reserved indefinitely for someone else. Still, you tore off your usual v-neck, black...
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Washing the Fight Away by Jess Spinosa
Your hair fights the faucet’s falling bursts of clean unyielding to the lavender shampoo my fingers covet to caress into the stiff blue-silver blackness, the friction urging my body closer closer closer to the racing, running water, the tender toughness of your arms.
My hair knots rough around your struggle to clean the suds from my stubborn strands but still you smile...
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Parents' Weekend by Jess Spinosa
Sabrina stands behind candlelight with her sorority sisters in the unfinished basement of the mansion she lives in now, not a girl anymore and three hundred and fifty miles away from the kitchen table we’ve both lost. Her words are dedicated to her sisters’ fathers standing around in a circle with straight backs and clean nails – the providers and new car buyers, the white businessmen...
April 2011
2 posts
2 tags
“Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere… off there in...”
– Carl Linstrum in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913)
March 2011
7 posts
3 tags
I bet you didn't know Shakespeare invented-
Many un-words:
unnerving unaware uncomfortable unearthly undress unclog unreal
Many word-smashes:
mad cap lady bird eye drops eye sore eye ball Many phrases:
What’s done is done Dead as a doornail In my mind’s eye In my heart of hearts All’s well that ends well Forever and a day In a pickle Love is blind
And, believe it or not: Knock, knock - Who’s there?
Be sure to...
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Reunion by Jess Spinosa
We’ve let awkward silences punctuate our sentences, sips of coffee compensating for this slow drift into talking about this winter’s weather.
Without realizing it, we’ve become the busy people meeting at cafes and bookstores for no more than an hour -long break from the lives we’ve let strain our spines.
Changes become more apparent when you haven’t met for weeks...
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Filial Piety by Jess Spinosa
I am haunted by memories of my mythomaniacal mother talking to the dial tone about how her daughter is never home, hiding a can named Sam or Bud behind the top-of-the line fridge she insisted on saving up for, slamming the door behind me, as I walked away, screaming, from the home I never had.
There were half-happy memories, like that New Years Eve we spent ironically eating his last name,...
1 tag
“In each man’s heart there’s a secret sorrow that the world knows...”
– Lillian Roth
February 2011
2 posts
2 tags
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Precautionary Poem by Jess Spinosa
Baby you better run from me ‘cause I’ve got a tendency to love real hard like the ice that makes you fall to fast to catch that last grammatical error. See, baby, I’ll trip you up.
I’ll say I love you when you lose your socks ‘cause I’ve got ‘em on my feet and they’re comfy. So I’m keeping them.
And I’ll never give up fighting for the...
January 2011
5 posts
2 tags
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Why You Should Read Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell...
“You have killed?” Robert Jordan asked in the intimacy of the dark of their day together. “Yes. Several times. But not with pleasure. To me it is a sin to kill a man. Even Fascists whom we must kill. No. I am against the killing of men.” “Yet you have killed.” “Yes. And will again. But if I live later, I will try to live in...
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Reprehensible, or What Sarah Palin Means to Me by...
We’ve diagnosed the problem… help us prescribe the solution. Who could have misinterpreted that as a call to arms- the tolling of an alarm to cause harm to those daring to drag big government to you, Congress on Your Corner…? Don’t let the liberals lure you into their delusions of a unity of responsibility. We, the people of these predominately Republican states say it is...
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December 2010
16 posts
1 tag
The Enemy by Jess Spinosa
She stands at the check out, counting pennies, checking the crevices of her coin-purse, frantically looking for change. The shoppers standing behind her shift their stances, staring defiantly ahead of her. They have somewhere else to be, she is costing them - they don’t have this time to spend on her. She is wasting it, their time. She is the enemy. Some stalk off, but the ones right behind...
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I Am the People, the Mob by Carl Sandburg
I AM the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes. I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns. ...
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And They Obey by Carl Sandburg
Smash down the cities. Knock the walls to pieces. Break the factories and cathedrals, warehouses and homes Into loose piles of stone and lumber and black burnt wood: You are the soldiers and we command you. Build up the cities. Set up the walls again. Put together once more the factories and cathedrals, warehouses and homes Into buildings for life and labor: You are...
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Poem because if you remove a part from infinity......
My skin drinks the ink permanent, the bold symbol contrasting the milk infinitely like the scar of a star poking through the sky.
This black on my wrist strives to keep him tangible.
But sometimes this black is
the color still clinging to your hair once the coffin closed, your body unprepared to be absorbed by the light.
what stained my fingers once we bore your ash to the wind, imploring it...
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From The People, Yes by Carl Sandburg
The people yes The people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on. They will be tricked and sold and again sold And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds, The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback, You can't laugh off their capacity to take it. The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas. The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic, is a vast...
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Gravity by Jess Spinosa
This attraction enticing me next to you was inevitable, but we never expected this swell of passion. My happiness was overdue and your love for her continued to lose value, yet you couldn’t feel, after being so long disaffected, the attraction enticing me next to you. I never thought I’d have the courage to pursue your vexing perfection for fear of being rejected in a swell of...
3 tags
Woman is the Nigger of the World
In a response supporting this controversial John Lennon lyric recorded in 1972, Congressman Ron Dellums stated:
“If you define ‘nigger’ as someone whose lifestyle is defined by others, whose opportunities are defined by others, whose role in society is defined by others, the good news is that you don’t have to be black to be a nigger in this society. Most of the people in America are ...
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Interesting...
Avocado
In pre-Columbian times, this fruit was considered an aphrodisiac.
For this reason, one Aztec language named it āhuacatl.
Āhuacatl is short for āhuacacuahuitl, which means “testicle tree” (āhuacatl “testicle” + cuahuitl “tree”).
From Merriam-Webster
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Poem for My Pretty Man, by June Jordan
the complexity is like your legs around me simple an entanglement and strong the ready curling hair the brownskin tones of action quiet temporarily like listening serene and passionate and slowly closer slowly closer kissing inch by inch
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Poemicide by Jess Spinosa
There are no words. There is just this: Your arms holding my tired body, bearing the weight of all the tragedy and fighting a gravity amplified by my need to be okay independent of these earnest embraces; Your hands brushing every trace of hair and resignation away from my face; Your lips kissing my cheekbone, focusing my attention on this moment; Your eyes seeing only mine, making my mind slow ...
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Poetry, as Defined by June Jordan
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth. In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way. Our culture does not encourage us to undertake that attunement. Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people’s formulations of what’s important....
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Bomb this Excerpt.
“ One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear ...
November 2010
4 posts
2 tags
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Relativity by June Jordan
It’s 5 after 4 a.m. And nothing but my own motion stirs throughout the waiting air the rain completely purged earlier and all day long. I could call you now but that would join you to this restless lying down and getting up to list still another act I must commit tomorrow if I ever sleep if I ever stop sleeping long enough to act upon the space between this comatose commotion and the next...
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October 2010
9 posts
1 tag
In Waves by Jess Spinosa
I cannot help but to ebb and flow.
To most, it may seem as though
I’m relatively stable, but relativity
has never been a friend to me.
Time has proved to be just as absolute
as was my place in the space around you.
Newton was wrong, I’ve tried every force
in an unbalanced attempt to divorce
you from your permanent...