Monthly Archives: February 2022

“One Love” Post #24: “Black Wings”

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SOPHIA SIMS

Black Wings

I live simultaneously through you
Kiss my love for me too
Where can I hide?
With a riot within
And fighting outside
He let himself go
Thinking he saw the light
He down a hole
Blinded by the sight.
Sweat drenched and bare,
Bare your soul to the world
But brother you have to wait,
You’ve already felt the cold.
Hand in hand we go through this field
Where all the troubled souls walked
The dark angel in the sky,
With her black wings spread out
So gracefully she talked
As tears fell from her eyes
I climbed to hug her
But the stairs weren’t strong enough
I had to try again.
She is the mother of love
And it seems I’ve found
My brother from above—
Soul siblings delivered by doves.
They promised you love and you gave me grace
All the dark days have been washed from my face
The pain that is my love and my rain
Here we are, we’ve waited in vain
For so long, for so long
We shall walk through
Until we reach the end.

“One Love” Post #23: “Love”

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MAKENA BUCK

LoveHow do you know you’re in love?
Is it an overwhelming feeling,
or a small underlying pulse?
Do you realize what you’ve gotten into
before the actual word pops into your mind?
Is it a fall or a beautiful glide?Love is incomprehensible.
It is something Webster can’t truly define.Look it up.
Love is a noun.1. An intense feeling of affection.
2. A great interest or pleasure in something.Love is a verb
1. Feel deep affection for (someone).
2. Like or enjoy very much.But what is love?
I guess we have to find out for ourselves.

“One Love” Post #22: “Unconditional Love”

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CHRISTINE MARTINEZ

Unconditional Love

1 John 4:18:
“There is no fear in love”
My God declares it so
I cling to these words
Walking hand in hand
With the woman I love
All to the tunes of ignorance
Buzzing like hordes of locusts
Those eyes that shine brighter
Than stars on the isle Saphos
A smile lit from both ends
By the torches at Westboro
When they prepare for battle
She rides in to defeat the foe
And wonders why I stand on the sideline alone
But this battlefield used to feel like home

“One Love” Post #21: “Emerald and Umbilical”

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ALEXANDER AGGISON

Emerald and Umbilical

Love stands still among the stars.
When I was a small child I
was seduced by images of love. Images that turned
feelings swept, via music and occult.
Roller pin… try try try… The kitchen is shiny. My loss,
my love, leave tears
on this marble counter bothered not by ignorance.
I am a pirate lost. Lost my third eye to love addiction…
Symptoms like a scurvy.
The spyglass reads
depression and intellect and unease.
Paralysis is the only eyepatch I could afford.

“One Love” Post #20: “Silent Majority”

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ALEXANDER AGGISON

Silent Majority

Inspired by the inner-city penology of Anslinger Drug Law discussed in the book Black Silent Majority by Michael Javen Fortner.

She is black, like hearts that refuse to refute.
Calling of what wrought with resolve,
a prophecy a dream, a nail, a string.
Force to whim and seam: She is black.
Black Mamba? Wait for the growing pains to proclaim societal grief.
Patrol cars whisper unfound sermons into one ear of the favella. A favella made
to have it come out the other
with terrors I can’t see and still I listen. Met the motherland in the roots and something wholesome like a life of love, yet distant and more peaceful. I held this fear and think of positives.
A bird in flight, flock of a big white cloud. Preserve
a skin tone and like that, the Jitterbug and Sharecrops stretch like roots into two. I resist because I could song and dance making no advance in chorus chants of dense.
Siblings, siblings.
Holistic vigor on the backroads. Downtrodden actions take vision where hearts grieve
over sand and heat climbing wind and catching sail.
Throw my hands up at the abundance of the world’s work.
Disable my punishment. Learned my lesson. Disarm any doubt that your skin took part in Ghetto Necrophilia.
Like the dead ocean tide see to it that; the moment I return to where memory likes to dissolve to next of kin.
Are we all on novelty over nuance?
“What’s genocidal?” an attempt at rhythm to match Samba. Sleep: an abomination not granted
to works of art that take up arms in a place between “Black” and “Satan”.

“One Love” Post #19: “Baby Fever”

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MARYAM BARRIE

Baby Fever

Long ago, I was drastic with baby fever.
I won – got to have two babies, watch them
grow and change. They are now women.
They said and did things that I rewind
and play regularly. I miss being essential,
though I am glad to have my hands free.

My memories have filtered the past.
I don’t think of the nights without sleep,
the perpetually messy house. I don’t think
about being the one who did the bills,
who created whatever sort of order there was.
I edit out crumbling under that weight, finding
refuge in multiple pneumonias and surgeries.
I hardly remember driving home from graduate
school after teaching all day, thinking
it would be so easy to swerve into those trees.

These days, I keep my grandbaby fever
to myself. It helps no one, and my envy
for those whose children feel this is a safe place
to bring people dries up for lack of tears.
Oh, I still am on the hunt for gorgeously
edible babies. My nose quivers at the sight
of a fresh one in the grocery store.

I confess to buying onesies destined for no one.
I still have the first onesie meant for my girls,
the one that made me cry with its darling bug
on the butt. I remember being at the zoo
with my husband before the magic worked,
grousing about all the women there who got
to be pregnant, though they didn’t deserve it
with their high heels and cigarettes.

With each birth I remember the moment when
I stopped pushing, and they handed her over –
the dark golden comfort of holding my girl
to my breast, her smell sizzling in my brain.
I hoarded my girls in my arms.
And I’m still whispering to myself
what I heard myself say at the first birth –
Oh, do I really get to have a baby?