day 5 - shrine, day 6 - 16 bars

shrine
(for Doreen Ojurongbe)

Without something specific to call
you, I call you, mother – who looks
so much like my own, your images
stutter over each other like those who
have known you stutter when they meet
my mother. Mother, my grandmother
i have no way, no tradition by which
to speak with you. I have no history
that involves your hands on my feverish
head – or hot baked bread from your
ovens, or an old song, sung down
from your mother and hers. But i have
this – that you loved to dance,
that your limbs were gazelle and
leather; your spirit made of so much
dirt and leap – you were Africa before
you met your husband. You were always
going home.

Mother, my grandmother, I love the club;
the thump, thump of music coming
from speakers bigger than your whole
body. I love the rum. I love the way
I can anoint myself in it and become
one with all I believe and am blooded
by. You should see me leap and spin
in this. My steps are all pound and muscle
and swagger. You should have met me.
I’m a big, square boy, grandmother
and nothing cleanses me so like my body
stretching itself into kite and wing – nothing
prayers me so much as sweat, so much
as the dirt splashing into mud around
my feet. It has taken me much too long
to return to you. I offer you river and candle,
fruit and psalm – but because you did, because
my other, couldn’t – here is dance, dance, dance.
I love your feet. I have been too long waiting
to anoint them; to commit my own, to Africa
to dust.




16 bars of funk
(for Erica Hunt and Erica Miriam Fabri)

I’m gripping a notebook thick like leather,
pen-flipping a cold metaphoric trick
- no sweater – intellectual effects in form
rhyme poems. no mime poems. I stack tomes;
pantoum, villanelle, ghazal – drop dime on grime
poems. 16 bars put a dent right in ya – check
your whack rap – it gets hot in this rhyme room
who slit your neck, red blood slick, iambic
pentameter, language poetry trick, 2 poets
named Erica – bet ya dictionary set trip
when you check this, get help from your
thesaurus – read a book trick if you wanna get better