-@Lovatron-

-Dante Terrell Smith-Bey-

The fire went running
down the steps,
a naked lunatic,
calling the names
of the neighbors,
cackling in the hall.

The immigrants
ate terror with their hands
and prayed to Catholic statues
as the fire company
pumped a million gallons in
and burst the roof,
as an old man
on the top floor
with no name known
to authorities
strangled on the smoke
and stopped breathing.

Some of the people left.
There’s a room on the third floor:
high-heeled shoes kicked off,
a broken dresser,
the saint’s portrait
hanging where it looked on
shrugging shoulders for years,
soot, trash, burnt tile,
a perfect black light bulb
to remember everything.

And some stayed. The old men
barechested, squatting
on the milk crates to play dominoes
in the front-stoop sun;
the younger ones, the tigres,
watching the block with unemployed faces
bitter as bad liquor;
Mrs. Báez, who serves coffee
on the third floor
from tiny porcelain cups,
insisting that we stay;
the children who live
between narrow kitchens
and charred metal doors
and laugh anyway;
the skinny man, the one
just arrived from Santo Domingo,
who cannot read or write,
with no hot water
for six weeks,
telling us in the hallway
that the landlord set the fire
and everyone knows it,
the building’s worth more empty.

The street organizer said it:
burn the building out,
blacken an old Dominicano’s lungs
and sell
so that the money-people
can renovate
and live here
where an old Dominicano died,
over the objections
of his choking spirit.

But some have stayed.
Stayed for the malicious winter,
stayed frightened of the white man who comes
to collect rent
and borrowing from cousins
to pay it,
stayed waiting for the next fire,
and the siren,
hysterical and late.

Someone poured gasoline
on the steps outside her door,
but Mrs. Báez
still serves coffee
in porcelain cups
to strangers,
coffee the color
of a young girl’s skin
in Santo Domingo.

-Martin Espada-

-Adrienne Rich-

But to be perfectly clear,
my enemies are not hungry.
They are not standing in lines
for food, or stretching rations,
or waiting at the airports
to claim the pieces
of the bodies of their dead.
My enemies ride jets to parties.
They are not tied up in pens
in Guantanamo Bay. They are not
young children throwing rocks. My enemies eat
meats & vegetables at tables
in white houses where candles blaze, cast
shadows of crosses, & flowers.
They wear ball gowns & suits & rings
to talk of war in neat & folded languages
that will not stain their formal dinner clothes
or tousle their hair. They use words like “casualties”
to speak of murder. They are not stripped down to skin
& made to stand barefoot in the cold or hot.
They do not lose their children to this war.
They do not lose their houses & their streets. They do not
come home to find their lamps broken.
They do not ever come home to find their families murdered
or disappeared or guns put at their faces.
Their children are not made to walk
a field of mines, exploding.

This is no wedding.
This is no feast.
I will not send George Bush rice, worked for rice
from my own kitchen
where it sits in a glass jar & I am transfixed
by the thousands of beautiful pieces
like a watcher at some homemade & dry
aquarium of grains, while the radio calls out
the local names of 2,000
US soldiers counted dead since March.
&, we all know it, there will always be more than
what’s been counted. They will not say the names
of an Iraqi family trying to pass a checkpoint
in an old white van. A teenager caught out on some road
after curfew. The radio will go on, shouting
the names &, I promise you,
they will not call your name, Hassna
Ali Sabah, age 30, killed by a missile in Al-Bassra, or you,
Ibrahim Al-Yussuf, or the sons of Sa’id Shahish
on a farm outside of Baghdad, or Ibrahim, age 12,
as if your blood were any less red, as if the skins
that melted were any less skin, & the bones
that broke were any less bone,
as if your eradication were any less absolute, any less
eradication from this earth where you were
not a president or a military soldier.
& you will not ever walk home
again, or smell your mother’s hair again,
or shake the date palm tree
or smell the sea
or hear the people singing at your wedding
or become old
or dream or breathe, or even pray or whistle,
& your tongue will be all gone or useless
& it will not ever say again or ask a question,
you, who were birthed once, & given milk,
& given names that mean: she is born at night,
happy, favorite daughter,
morning, heart, father of
a multitude.

Your name, I will have noticed
on a list collected by an Iraqi census of the dead,
because your name is the name of my own brother,
because your name is the Tigrinya word for “tomorrow,”
because all my life I have wanted a farm,
because my students are 12, because I remember
when my sisters were 12. & I will not
have ever seen your eyes, & you will not
have ever seen my eyes
or the eyes of the ones who dropped the missiles,
or the eyes of the ones who ordered the missiles,
& the missiles have no eyes. You had no chance,
the way they fell on avenues & farms
& clocks & schoolchildren. There was no place for you
& so you burned. A bag of rice will not bring you back.
A poem cannot bring you. & although it is my promise here
to try to open every one of my windows, I cannot
imagine the intimacy with which
a life leaves its body, even then,
in detonation, when the skull is burst,
& the body’s country of indivisible organs
flames into the everything. & even in
that quick departure as the life rushes on,
headlong or backwards, there must, must
be some singing as the hand waves “be well”
to its other hand, goodbye;
& the ear belongs to the field now.
& we cannot separate the roof from the heart
from the trees that were there, standing.
& so it is, when I say “night,”
it is your name I am calling,
when I say “field,”
your thousand, thousand names,
your million names.

-Aracelis Girmay-
a selection from TEETH

I was enamored.  Instead of cats and dogs,
I pictured donkey corpses falling from
the sky, clogging the gutters.
That’s some “serious” rain.

The song on the radio said that the po-po was:
“tryna to catch me ridin’ dirty.”  I imagined
Chamillionaire wearing a 20 lb. gold chain
with mud dripping off Jesus’ shiny toes,
Krayzie Bone in four-hundred-dollar jeans,
with grass stains on the knees.

In Oakland, the sound there is “hyphy.” To me,
that alien word means gooney-goo-goo.
To me, that word is my dead father’s kiss.
But to thousands of youngsters whose trousers sink
below the Plimsoll line of their asses, hyphy
music makes their bodies dip up and down
like oil drills.

These words make me feel old, and alabaster.
When I hear something new, it’s like I discovered it
for the first time, like I excavated it from the mouth
of a teenager.  So I dust it off with my fossil brush
and try to jam it into the keyhole of academia.

Words like,
Fo’ shizzle, crunk, hella: I place in glass jars like rare moths.
I want to hang them on the doors of sonnets
like a welcome sign to an apartment
I don’t live in.

-Michael Cirelli-

she told me
her grandmother
let her
cook crack
on the kitchen stove
as she squeezed the blunt between midnight lips
exhaling a cloud of hoola-hoops twirling in
the air.

the space between us captured our longing
to understand eachother
it’s amazing how all of our worlds co-exist
with one another
how separate we’d like to think of them

Biggie played on the radio
and we both nodded our heads
cult-like
to the beat
bobbing our bodies
jerking our joints

“You my bitch, Aja”
crept off the smoke in her throat.

i felt honored.
how spiritual we are–
the way we wound and heal,

in the caves of our hoods
how black and brown girls
gather and peel
comparing stretch marks
and playground scars.
how close we come to eachother
never touching
and when we do touch
–the moment we become physical beings to eachother–

it is then that we stand still in our selves
how the soul tap dances and gossips

the secrets
we hide
under our tongues
quiver and creak
like the cockaroaches
we chased together

-Aja Monet-

Let me be a memory,
He will tell grandchildren about,
As he becomes the wrinkles at the corners of my eyes,
Proof of smiles and sunlight

I want to be his un-chartered, un-finished city
But only if he’ll be my architect
Kissing blueprints onto my spine
I want him to be a town I’ve never visited
And I refuse to be a tourist in,
One, that one day, I will call home

Let him be fire, I will be air
So together we will be fire-breathers
Sun eaters, holding stars in our mouths,
Smoke speakers, teachers of interlocking elements.

-Elizabeth Acevedo-

the water remembers the torn torso
melting through a seashell’s portholes

the quadrangular tight-rope of death
disease    slaughtered women the trade
in gold and spirit of five hundred nations drifting

the water remembers   the water is clarity
the water remembers   offers back hurricane
the water remembers   hides its secrets

no wonder water remembers in tectonic shifts
and the angry expectorant of lava

no wonder water runs muddy   revolts
to flood and brackish

no wonder water stays still in the dark
the water is coming back home

-Roger Bonair-Agard-

-Jackson Brebnor-
from the Urban Word Connect.Politic.Ditto Youth Anthology