“Black Madonna” by Crystal Valentine is the winning poem for the 2021 Emerging Poet Prize, selected by Kelli Russell Agodon.
From the opening line, I learned hunger from my mother, “Black Madonna” is a meditation on beauty and motherhood bringing in elements of nature, spirituality, and the two distinct and different perspectives. From the breathless moments I had as a reader of this poem, Yesterday a silk, flared dove landed/like a piece of air on our back porch.//She stared at it for so long, its world soured red, to the speaker’s tender voice feeling as if she was talking directly to me, I was completely taken into the world of this poem and did not want to leave. Beautiful and tender in every way, an absolutely stunning poem in every way. —Kelli Russell Agodon
Daughter’s testimony
I learned hunger from my mother.
Sunday’s feast spread out like a drying
prayer on the dining room table:
cow’s neck, pig feet, a garnish of
shaved lamb. Different creatures of God’s genesis strangled
into sleep, steamed out of their innard pink just to calm my
immaculate need. This is how she mothered.
Spooning me whatever her bare, blessed hands
killed was her favorite form of worship; a stinging
ritual she returned to no matter the cost or season.
Yesterday a silk, flared dove landed
like a piece of air on our back porch.
She stared at it for so long, its world soured red.
My mother doesn’t understand the purpose of
beauty, doesn’t know where to make the first
incision, or how to feel for the base of beauty’s
skull. In the book where she’s from, every
thing has a command. Hers is to open.
I watched silverware squirm in her grasp, set
in a firm heat of knowing. On her plate, fish
grew soggy from their own fluids. Hunger is a
kind of sermon; to see a lonely thing and want
to make it a part of yourself. At her worst,
my mother is merely a child of God.
In Knee Length, poet and journalist Khalisa Rae navigates the nuances of an inherited conservative legacy. Pulling from memories of her religious upbringing and education, family history, and matrilineal teachings, Knee Length is a history reimagined and excavated—a rebellious relearning of desire and respectability, family and faith.
My Grandmother Never Spoke of Her Body
In my dream, she is under a man that knows about satisfaction and indulgence. A giver and pleaser—one that doesn’t hand over the chocolate, but rubs the morsel on your lips, leans his limbs down to the center of her mouth, and says, Here, take. In my dream, I came from pleasure, from men that believe the arch in her back was medicine for aging hands, that foreplay cures cataracts better than THC, and all good pipes burst when tapped at the right place. In my dream, she is body-embraced and thirsting for more. She is gushing, knows dying in ecstasy would be a sweet death, that anticipation is the realest form of feminism there is.
7:34 am:My mother is texting about my grandmother again and how her mind is slipping. She says my grandmother has repeated the same incomprehensible thing after incomprehensible thing. She’s at the end. So, I force myself to remember her when she was young and free. I think about how much of the world I think she’s missed out on being the God-fearing matriarch. How much pressure and weight comes with carrying that title. So, I am creating a sort of revisionist history in hopes of finding freedom- from shame, trauma, repression, and so much useless baggage.
I want to remember her with her lover in flowy skirts, smoking cigarettes, and dancing in the juke joints. Grinding and having fun, because they never share that with you until it’s too late—until you’ve already made the horrible mistakes and fallen for the toxic boy who never called after you’ve had sex. After you let him get to second base before you were ready, after the girls made fun of your breasts for coming in at eleven and you tried to tape them down. You’d already covered your hips with sweaters because they started to expand and bow out at nine. They wait to tell you this doesn’t get easier with age.
I have to believe my grandmother had desires once, too.She flirted and fell in love. Had one-night stands. And even if she didn’t, I want to imagine she did. Recently my mother said my grandmother’s dementia is unearthing old telling stories of her youthful indiscretions and colorful past, and we can’t decipher whether they’re fact or fiction. Still, I’m enjoying this truth-telling and the signs that they gave over to their flesh.
You grow up thinking the matriarchs are flawless- innocent— “good girls” without spot or blemish, and then at the end of their life, they share stories of making out at the drive-in movie, getting caught with someone’s husband, or letting Carl Jenkins go up her skirt, and for some reason, that sharing of desire and want makes you feel a type of kindred. While my grandmother probably would have taken these secrets to her grave had she not been drawing closer to the end, even the slightest inkling of openness and honesty about desire, the body, and sex is a relief.
If you know anything about my writing and my poetry, you know I write a lot about growing up in a religious household. Still, more significant than what my mother taught me is the fact that I was born into a conservative legacy. Generations of women that were God-fearing, Bible totting, and chaste Christians that believed in modesty and waiting until marriage.
Each morning my grandma rises
to find her Bible, still breathing, belting
her favorite aria. A lion,
a well, a sacrifice. Crack-of-dawn,
coffee-stained,
scrolls making music at 6 am.
Each page turns a chord
she knows better than hot water cornbread
and collard greens. Wailing Blessed Assurance
But there are moments when I’d watch my mom and my grandmother dance, that I saw more—glimmers of uninhibited sensuality underneath their unyielding faith. I’ve always wanted to dive deeper into when they lost that. The sway of their hips, head back, eyes closed— the freedom. What were the things they were told about their sexual power and what did they pass down to me? Before we go there, let’s go back to when it began.
We start with knee-length skirts. I was seven years old when I first put on the maroon and black uniform for Family Christina Academy and stepped on school grounds for the first time. I could feel the loss of individuality with the buttoning of each button on my jumper. My mom had scoured the phone book for elementary schools that were the farthest from where I lived in Gary, Indiana. In 1996, my mom had just accepted a position as a Social Worker in the Gary Public School System and wanted to give me the life she never had. At the time, Gary had received the notable title of being the “Murder Capital of the World,” and my mom was determined to shield me from the gunshots, pregnancy, drugs, and gang violence that was so rampant.“I searched and searched for a school with access to an exceptional curriculum, highly rated teachers, technology, and opportunity to go far beyond this place,” she said.
Like Rory Gilmore, I lived in two worlds. One in Gary, where amidst the violence, run-down buildings, and poverty, my home life was filled with choir practice, and show tunes, tree houses, secret handshakes, dancing, and acting out stories with my sibling and family in the living room. My other life was made of private school rules and restrictions, plaid uniforms and knee-length skirts, Bible verses, abstinence, and just say no. What I remember is learning to love the plaid jumper over time, the feel of the crisp white socks and white loafers. I felt intelligent and important. I knew going to private school was a big deal as a Black girl from Gary. “They have computers, technology, a great theater program, and lots of opportunities to learn about the world,” I remember my mom saying.
But what intrigues me now is what I never learned about my body and how I existed in the world at the crucial time of puberty. Today, my mom reminded me that I was so “pretty” in middle school, and “everyone could see it.” She reminded me they called me “token Black girl.”“You were special,” she said.But like Rory, being just a pretty, sheltered girl left me with very little autonomy or agency. There were many elements of my identity I wish I’d embraced, so many mistakes I wish I could erase. All those missing pieces and scarce conversations had me fumbling through middle school like a slippery-handed wide receiver.
It’s the things the matriarchs leave out.
All the things never said. The “talk” before heading off to middle school left much to be desired. How I knew so little about boys and the way my body worked.
When I talk to my mom now, she stresses that she gave me this wonderful life and that our home was filled with music, dancing, games, and fun. And while she’s right, there’s so much about my identity and body that was missing. She tells me to “reframe my thinking.”Now I see the danger in the idyllic Stars Hollow life that at the time, I so longed for. As a kid, I thought I wanted to be the doe-eyed, protected girl with town holiday celebrations, picnics, diner gossip, and quirky townspeople.
There’s a moment in Gilmore Girls where Rory yells at her mother and says, “Why did you tell me I could do anything and be anything? You didn’t prepare me.” And like Rory, there I was. With loads of book smarts and opportunity and little knowledge about want, desire, and consent. The funny sayings from the elder women in my family, the old wives’ tales, and myths about the body from my mother, things I later in life had to debunk, and misconceptions I carried for years. So, I’m going back, with the help of my mom, and uncovering what sage words of advice shaped what I know about sex, puberty, and my body. I’m imagining a new history, where I have access to all the hidden truths the matriarchs concealed.
Goatwater is a column which explores the mystifying, joyous and liberating concept of Carnival through the New York born and raised, Caribbean-American perspective of poet and artist Tiffany Osedra Miller.
Literature, Like Music, Is a Soundtrack
I was visiting the island of St. Lucia while on my third reading of Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier. I read the novel, years prior, in an English literature class at my Bronx, NY, Catholic high school, an institution with ominous catacombs, a chapel and wide, old-fashioned staircases – which made it a fitting location to first encounter the romantic, Gothic tale. I felt so sad vacationing in lush, gorgeous, St. Lucia, rabidly re-reading Rebecca, while mourning the end of a relationship.
Wild, tropical birds flew throughout the house I stayed in, frightening me, making me duck and sway dramatically to avoid their sudden presence at breakfast, lunch or dinner. My reaction amused my hosts, relentlessly, as I, a city girl, morphed into a Caribbean-American, Tippi Hedren, fighting off scores of winged beasts in Hitchcock’s film, The Birds. Heartbroken, I felt as foolish and forlorn as the second Mrs. De Winter – living in the shadows of her new husband’s deceased wife, Rebecca – instead of myself. Who did I want to be? What masque did I want to play? Or wear? Perhaps, the mythic, ever-desirable, Helen, in Derek Walcott’s epic poem, Omeros, largely set in St. Lucia.
Santa Lucia, though her name means, light, is the patron saint of blindness. Despite many attempts to claim her virginity or marry her off to various suitors, she remained steadfast in her devotion to God. I recall the churches of St. Lucia, the emptiness of the schoolyards, where I sensed the ghosts of children running and singing, wearing clean, well-ironed uniforms, hair ribbons and bow ties blowing in the wind.
I washed my hair outside, in the heat, caressing pearls of mango conditioner throughout each strand. Behind me, an unfinished cottage, where inside one of the rooms, a hanging crucifix repeatedly tapped against a black wall. Out of place and down the road, was a popular Italian restaurant called Capone’s. I was struck by how cool the air felt near the rainforest. Paradise? Yes. I couldn’t wait to leave.
I left and awoke in the dark, alone, inside a small hotel in Paris near the Rue De Strasbourg. I finished reading Jean Rhys,’ Good Morning, Midnight, a novel about a melancholy woman meeting men in cafés and hotels throughout Paris while reflecting on her complicated liaisons. Reading this book was akin to listening to Billie Holiday sing, Good Morning, Heartache.
Literature, like music, is a soundtrack.
The comely, Creole concierge, who sat behind the front desk, invited me to dance with him after I returned from wandering the Parisian streets, perusing the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop near Notre Dame, dining at Brasseries in the Latin Quarter and praying at the Sacre Couer Basilica in Montmartre. At the hotel, whenever you left for the day, you were required to leave your keys with the concierge. You retrieved your keys when you returned. I felt uneasy about this as maids from Monserrat to Martinique, would let themselves into my room at will, ignoring the ‘do not disturb’ sign. One morning, I found two French maids, vigorously cleaning my room, as I exited the bathroom after a shower. I was so frightened, I screamed: Why have locks at all?
Before I left, I gave my keys to the concierge. I returned later, and we danced, at his insistence, in the empty lobby near the window, revealing the rooftops and shiny streets of late-night Paris. First, he served me warm, sweet, buttered bread, tea and Port wine on a platter. He spoke a little English – while he fed me – and I, a little French. He put on jazz music, embraced me and we danced, close. It was highly inappropriate, this lack of boundaries. It felt so good and so bad, that I feared he might enter into my room – as the maids did, at will – sometime during the night. I wanted him to. I didn’t want him to. Wait. Did I want him to? Another guest arrived. The concierge, suddenly professional, pulled away and returned my key. Shaken, I went to my room with the unfinished Port wine.
Every sound that night terrified me. I imagined the doorknob turning, the concierge entering my room and whispering, More sugar for your tea, Mademoiselle? Sweet, tender love? Then, a real sound. Another key in the door? Hello? Go away! No, don’t leave. Come here. Oh yes! No! Goodbye? Hello, heartache.
After reading Carson McCullers’s novel, The Member of the Wedding, I watched the film adaptation, which starred Ethel Waters. In the film, Waters comforts her two charges – the restless Frankie who wants to attend her brother’s wedding, and her doomed cousin, John Henry – while she holds them close and they all sing, His Eye is On the Sparrow, together.
Literature, like music, is a soundtrack.
I had just arrived, via ‘A’ Train, at Sugar Hill in Harlem, on my way to meet a funny valentine of a man – a Jekyll and Hyde – at St. Nick’s Jazz Pub, to hear live music. I was about to exit the 145th Street Station, when I heard a woman singing into a microphone. Her back against a filthy wall, she wore an off-white dress. Speakers at her feet.
She was singing, gospel, the good news, with her whole heart. I was so riveted and moved – I couldn’t move. I caught the spirit and swayed to her soulful music as she sang to the place inside me, never in want of anything. Reader, I should have gone straight to church and lit a candle for Santa Lucia. I was destined to go to St. Nick’s.
I arrived at the pub with a lump of coal in my throat, vultures in my chest and greeted my angel-faced companion where he waited at our table – his face lit up like a delighted devil. He was reading Tolstoy’s, War and Peace – of all things – in the thick, smoky, bluesy, Dark. Hello? Hello. Then, a long, slow, harrowing, Goodbye, as we both reached for the Light.
Goatwater is a column which explores the mystifying, joyous and liberating concept of Carnival through the New York born and raised, Caribbean-American perspective of poet and artist Tiffany Osedra Miller.
Some of the Sons of God
It is 5:00 in the evening when I bear witness to the preacher’s son banging on the locked door of a Dive Bar in Mount Vernon, New York. Despite this indiscretion, and the years that have passed, he looks good – tall, wiry frame, high yellow skin, clear green eyes. He maintains a pleasant disposition even though the locked door to the Dive Bar had to frustrate him. His father is also dead like mine. He is also now bald like my father was. Is he married? Did his marriage end in divorce? Does he, a choir boy, still sing Ave Maria? Is his mother still alive? I remember him sitting with his brother and sister in the back of his father’s church, their faces full of resentment, mischief and forced piety. Am I sitting in a car that my father is driving, while staring through the window at the preacher’s son, banging on the locked door of a Dive Bar? My father is far from dead in this reverie and because my father knew the preacher’s son, too, I would have said, hey daddy, look at what the preacher’s son is up to! Am I judging him because I didn’t know what I could’ve done, when we were children, he a few years older, to get him to want me? Before you judge me: he is a man before he is the son of a preacher, and therefore not the Son of God, and ain’t I a woman?
You wake up behind the wheel of a car driving around a cliff in near darkness. You took a detour after seeing a play about West Indian Shamans and Dahomey Dream Preachers at the Community Theater. You aren’t licensed to drive, however and don’t really know how. There is a man covered in shadows, sitting in the back seat. You do not recognize him.
I run up the same steep staircase, years before Joaquin Phoenix in the film, The Joker, would dance down them. I am on my way to see a man – perhaps another Joker – the son of a family friend from church. He had sent me a picture of himself wearing only red speedos and posing with his legs spread wide open on top of a car’s hood on a hill overlooking a beach. He works at the airport and over the telephone promised me free airplane tickets out of the Bronx past the Edenwald Projects, where a mother threw her children off of the roof of her building and then jumped down to join them, past where I would later be mugged, past the public library where my cousin and I read books and giggled in the aisles and watched brutal pet shows in the Activity Room where men would feed large, live, white rats to boa constrictors, past the forbidden Seton Falls Park, Cardinal Spellman High School’s track and football field, the nursing home where my father received physical therapy, past the Baychester Avenue train station and just over the horizon. I am wearing biking shorts and a waist length, floral, tribal top. When I arrive at the man’s apartment, he embraces me and tells me that he loves me and wants us to travel together. I am a teenager. He is not.
There is a woman beside you who looks just like the man sitting behind you. She is dressed in black and wears a veil. In her lap is a Bible and on top of the Bible is the scale model of a church. You decide not to say anything and just drive, carefully, around the cliffs which you are surprised you can do since the last time you drove anything was the Bumper Cars at Playland and you only had a learner’s permit which you let expire. Yet, you would go joy riding with a friend who owned a BMW and drive around affluent parts of Westchester County, following people to their Post-colonial Palaces and Tudor Homes, making up stories about their lives.
I meet a Country Preacher about 5 hours North of New Orleans. He is a big, ostentatious man, who confesses that he doesn’t like me because my skin is lighter than his. He calls me the Bright Girl. This isn’t a comment on my intelligence. I don’t care for him either because he pretends to ignore me. Once, while he is driving and I am on a walk, he attempts to run me off of the road, calling me, road-kill. He appears to hate every single one of my guts until he calls my room, late at night, pleading with me to come over. He’d pick me up, he says, and take me like a dirty debutante to his bed, located in a trailer park overrun by possum and raccoons. You don’t even need to get dressed, Road-Kill,just put on a robe. I decline his invitation. At church, he preaches on the Ferals and Fitfalls of Pornification.
One of your first loves was Richard Chamberlain as Father de Bricassart in the made-for TV- miniseries, “The Thorn Birds.” In it, a very young Rachel Ward and an aging Barbara Stanwyck fall in love with the Priest. You are Rachel Ward, in love your whole life with a man you can’t have because he is devoted to God. You are Barbara Stanwyck, hair completely white and in love with the same man. Who could compete with God? So strong and destructive your desires, you wish you could win this Holy Man over, and you do, sort of. When you are Rachel Ward, he falls from grace every time he sees you. This was the earthly, supernatural power you had, to acquire a weak, semi-precious piece of what you desired in this world. Unlike God, you possessed sweet, tender flesh that De Bricassart could feel in his hands. You had breasts, a fine nose and a striking waistline. How terrible this was for you. How wonderful this was for you.
Every middle of the month: new deadlines, new contests, and new opportunities for your voice to find the world. The next four weeks include: our own Previously Published Prize, Crazyhorse Prizes, The Amistad, Public Space Fellowships, The Rumpus so many great book prizes, and more. This list is a small selection from Literistic’s deadline newsletter!
Our landscape has exploded with presses and magazines over the last few decades with the advent of digital publications—so many good poems have been found, celebrated, and, unfortunately, forgotten. We want to bring light to those lost pieces of poetry, the work that you love but no longer receives the attention it deserves. Send us your favorite previously published poems! There is no page requirement, but submission must be no more than 3 poems. Please submit all your poems in ONE document. The poems must have been previously published online or in print to be eligible. The poems must not have won any previous awards of $100 or more.
The winning manuscript will be published and its author will receive $1,500 and 25 copies. Manuscripts should be at least 48 pages, but there is no maximum length. All forms and styles of poetry are welcome.
We aim to be the print literary arts journal on your shelf that starts a lasting conversation. Please submit either 1 short story or novel excerpt, up to ~3500 words; 1-3 short pieces of flash fiction, up to ~1000 words each; 3-5 poems; 1 essay or memoir excerpt, up to ~4000 words; or up to 3 short pieces of flash non-fiction, up to ~1000 words each.
The HWF grants rent-free and utility-paid housing on the foundation campus, providing artists with their own fully furnished home and a peaceful setting in which to pursue their creative endeavours. The HWF places no expectations or requirements on the artists in residence; it is the gift of time and space. There is an application fee of $25.00. If you are selected to receive a residency you are required to pay a deposit of $300, half of which is retained for maintaining your casita, the other half being held as a refundable damage deposit. Residencies run from 10-12 weeks.
Writers who are also parents have increased difficulties in making time for their writing. Our Parent-Writer Fellowships are intended to give parents the time and financial support to devote a week to themselves and their writing at MVICW. The fellowships are open to anyone who has a child age 16 or younger living with them. Four recipients (two in poetry, two in fiction/CNF) will receive the full retreat package, covering tuition and lodging. Two runners-up (one in each genre) will receive $500 credit toward the cost of tuition. Poetry: (1-3 pages) Submit your single best poem AND letter of interest. Prose: (up to 3,000 words) Submit ONE short story OR one flash fiction piece OR novel excerpt OR creative non-fiction entry AND letter of interest Letter of Interest (approx. 750 words): Please tell us about yourself as a person, an artist, and a parent. We’d like to hear how your family life inspires or challenges your artistic career and how parenthood plays a role in your creative work. If you have specific needs (financial or creative) which would be met by this award please outline them in your letter.
We accept unsolicited submissions of poetry (4-6 poems per submission), fiction (manuscripts up to 25 pages), flash fiction (1-3 pieces per submission up to 1,000 words each), and creative nonfiction (manuscripts up to 25 pages). Send only one submission per genre at any one time. Simultaneous submissions are fine; just please let us know right away if your work is accepted elsewhere. Payment: $10 per printed page (minimum payment: $50), and one contributor copy, plus a one year subscription. Arts & Letters is published twice a year, in Spring and Fall.
Submit up to five pages of previously unpublished work. We’re open to free verse and formal poems, experimental and conceptual poems, concrete and visual (VisPo) poems. We like weird and feral poems. We like short poems and funny poems. We like poems that take risks. We like poems that take their craft seriously. We like poems that invest in and are aware of word choice, language’s music, and content’s relationship to form.
POETRY submissions, considered by editor Lesley Wheeler, should contain up to five pieces and not more than ten pages total. We believe your work has incredible value. We pay our contributors at the rate of $100 per poem, $100 per 1000 words of prose up to $500, and $50 per page of comics up to $500.
A Public Space offers three writing fellowships annually to fiction and nonfiction writers who have not yet published a book-length work. Fellows are selected through an open application. Compensation: $10,000 stipend, to be paid bi-weekly Eligibility: A strong interest in literary publishing and a commitment to promoting literature are the only prerequisites. Preference will be given to aspiring editors who have not worked extensively in literary publishing, and who may have limited access to career opportunities in the industry. Candidates outside of New York City are encouraged to apply, but A Public Space cannot fund relocation expenses.
Theme issue: We would like to acknowledge and hold space for diverse experiences of Indigeneity, but specifically that of Black Indigenous/Afro-Indigenous descent, as we acknowledge that our history includes Indigenous communities being complacent and often perpetuating anti-Black violence. We hope this Indigenous Brilliance special issue brings light to the entanglements of these histories and outlines a liberatory future. Fiction and creative non-fiction: up to 3500 words.Poetry: up to 5 poems. Art: up to 5 images. Submit all work in Times New Roman 12-point font. Double-space all prose submissions. All contributors will be paid upon publication: $50 CAD for one page, $60 for two pages, $90 for three pages, $120 for four pages, $150 for five or more pages.
Named in honor of the first Irish poet to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, the Yeats Poetry prize has been awarded to poets of all ages and backgrounds since 1994 by the WB Yeats Society of NY. Unpublished poems in English up to 60 lines on any subject and style. Each poem will be judged separately and read anonymously. There are no limits on the number of poems that can be submitted. $1000 first prize, $500 second prize.
The Malahat Review invites entries for its biennial Long Poem Prize, for which one award of $2,500 CAD is given. The contest is open to Canadian and international writers anywhere in the world. Each entry must be a single poem or cycle of poems that will occupy between 10 and 20 printed pages when published in The Malahat Review.
Washington Square Review is published biannually by the students and faculty of the NYU Graduate Creative Writing Program. Poetry submissions should not exceed five poems. Fiction and nonfiction submissions should not exceed 5,000 words. Please submit one piece per submission, and one piece per submission period. For translations, please submit both the original and the translation whenever possible.
Lost Balloon publishes flash fiction, flash nonfiction, and prose poetry (all 1,000 words or less). We publish one new piece every Wednesday. There are no theme or genre restrictions, but we want your best. Give us work that entertains and challenges, that pushes boundaries and breaks hearts.
No theme, no rules, except for one: send us your best poems. Cordite accepts submissions from any place on earth. Our funding partners allow Cordite to offer payments to Australian citizen or permanent resident contributors. Cordite maintains a hybrid submissions policy. This means that the guest editor may invite five (5) Australian and five (5) overseas authors directly to submit to the issue. In addition, the guest-editor will anonymously select an additional 30-35 works from Australian authors and use their discretion to select further overseas works.
The Amistad is Howard University’s literary arts journal. Our goal is to elevate the creative voices of the Black diaspora through poetry, fiction, interviews, and art. We strive to publish the best up-and-coming voices in conjunction with local and established writers to create a journal that speaks directly to the black community. Poetry: 3-5 poems (more more than seven pages)
Goatwater is a column which explores the mystifying, joyous and liberating concept of Carnival through the New York born and raised, Caribbean-American perspective of poet and artist Tiffany Osedra Miller.
Fruit of the Concrete
Though, in truth, we never walk alone, she walked alone
along a seashore illuminated by starfish.
When the church bell down the beach chimed two in the morning,
she encountered a large rope floating like a boa constrictor
on top of the dark, moody, blue green waters.
She knew, right then – as it had been prophesied – that for the first time in her life,
she would meet her Grandfather.
She waded into the water and pulled on the rope three times and out from the sea came
a broken Grandfather clock – an elegant morass of wood and metal – that her father told her he had miraculously fixed at age six, as it could no longer tell the correct time.
She pulled the Grandfather clock out of the water, onto the beach, and studied it.
Indeed, in the sea, it had once again become undone.
The Roman numerals, like Rome, had fallen
and the clock hands had settled out of place.
By the time the church bells chimed three o’clock, she had managed
to open up the Grandfather clock like a sarcophagus, to look inside.
She found her Grandfather, mummified,
his hands crossed in front of his chest. His skin, hard like concrete.
She recognized him from old photographs
as the mad, maudlin, light-skinned king, cultivator of chaos and cane.
In one high yellow hand, a lump of cotton.
In the other, a lump of coal.
Dangling from a bronze chain around his neck, a crucifix and a flask.
Hello, Grandfather!
good-looking lover of wanderlust.
At these sweet words he opened his ancient eyes
and his eyes fell into her hand.
She gently placed them back in their sockets.
This act of grace, he told her later, turned on their lights.
And he moved his stiffened arms down to his sides.
He dropped the cotton
He dropped the coal and
stepped out of the Grandfather clock,
turned away, immediately
and with deep apology,
took his first long piss of freedom.
The church bells chimed four o’clock.
He knelt in the sand, wept, and kissed each grain.
Grandfather, who are you? How are you? Where have you been?
Child of my child,
I’ve been to the east of time
I’ve been through the west of time.
I don’t understand.
I am a troglodyte. At least, I feel so.
Speak plainly, please, Grandfather!
Mademoiselle, a brief portrait of me
for some history:
I was born inside the echo of a misty morning
on an island located beneath the evergreen umbrella
of a gutted watermelon
raining its black, beneficent seeds
into Somnolenta Sea.
My father, your great-Grandfather, so moved at my birth,
played his conch-horn like a crestfallen angel:
Bee Dee Dee Bee Dee Dee Bee Dee Dee Dee Nuu Nooo!
Father, ran away from me into the mist, then came back into the fog.
My mother, after placing me – her Likkle Barefaced Bamboozle, as she called me –
inside a basin, said:
A-man, I mean, A-men Amen!
then commenced to continue her Search-A-Word puzzle which she hid deep inside The Book of Job in the Bible.
Bee Dee Dee Bee Dee Dee Dee Nuu…
Every single watermelon seed that fell down into the sea on the day of my birth grew into a dusky, diaphanous washerwoman rising up from the waters, carrying baskets of coconuts, bakes and freshly washed costumes on their heads. These were my angels. In my father’s house, your Great-Grandfather’s plantation house –
the house was yellow
the floors were bronze
the goats were white
my young grandmother was black.
And she sat in a corner of the living room, in a rocking chair
fanning herself all day while doing her Crossword Puzzles.
In place of her head was a basket of erect bananas attached to her supple neck. Each shoulder a hardened loaf of coconut bread. Her tits, two, round, royal, wrinkled, semiprecious plums. She called her two, timeless tits, macatampas, and often walked topless. I distinctly recall her, instead of my mother, breastfeeding me. Yet, she reassured God, that her breasts were milk-less, innocent, aging, bulbous, dangling believers in Christ’s eternal love. And God said, Amen. I heard Him!
Then she would play, Pass the Parcel with me until she opened the parcel, retrieved another Jigsaw Puzzle, Crossword Puzzle and Search-A-Word – the latter she gave to my mother. Grandmother took the Crossword. I was rewarded the jigsaw – a jumble of Edgar Degas’ pencil drawn horses, which fascinated me, as the horses – so crudely drawn – seemed so alive.
My father, after work, often blew his conch-horn, outside, alone, in front of the Guinep tree while drinking Guinness after Guinness.
Bee Dee Dee Bam Bee Zee Bee Hoo Hoo The Grandfather, studied his Granddaughter, solemnly.
What is it, Grandfather?
You have the face of your father
except feminine, fortunately.
The face of a siren.
Where is your husband?
Next question.
Lovely Granddaughter,
all this time that I was adrift
in that sarcophagus –
tell me, where were you born?
Why are you alone?
Where have you been?
As you don’t sound too island.
But I’m still hearing echoes of
shark fin, marlin and dolphin
to pick up on your accent.
My dear, fill me in.
Your son raised me in the Big Apple
Called me The Fruit of the Concrete
I grew bitter, Grandfather.
Now, I grow sweet.
Why did you grow bitter, first?
Tell me or my heart will burst.
Was it because of what happened to me and the family?
Grandfather, set yourself free.
What is most true
is that I’ve always wanted to meet you.
The sun rose and set
and she felt protected
as they both spoke uninterrupted
until Grandfather’s long-lost horse, Quincy
rose up through the sand.
Grandfather kissed the stallion, and they climbed onto his back.
Granddaughter, Grandfather and Quincy, formed a trinity
and right by the sea made a pact of unity May we experience the beauty of infinite pleasure
then took their first pilgrimage together.
Index of Catastrophic Failures in the 21st Century
i.
In the language used to describe how people died:
the bodies were found buried after the buildings fell
a series of sniper-style shootings occurred in Washington DC
war was launched in Iraq
a tsunami claimed hundreds of thousands of bodies that were washed to sea after earthquake [after being overcome by water & the necessity of breathing]
New Orleans. Buried below sea level. Upended by the storm. (See: Hurricane Katrina)(See: emergency response failure)(See: devastation)(See: over 1800 people dead)(See: the costliest storm in US history)
based on a miscommunication: a dark mine, 12 men, 41 hours underground, no survivors.
despite warning signs, the worst financial crisis in eight decades engulfs the global financial system
the economy continues to lose hundreds of thousands of jobs; a devastating year for natural disasters; over 200,000 lives were claimed;
looking back at a tumultuous decade, catastrophic events can reshape the emergency response system, [but]
a litany of natural catastrophes strike again this year; lives were lost
at least 80 dead in Norway massacre, police say
authorities say 27 people are dead, including a gunman, after a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
during the Boston Marathon, two homemade bombs were detonated 14 seconds and 210 yards apart at 2:49pm; stand your ground law translates to: a death, an indictment, an acquittal
a months-long uprising in a Missouri city reverberated around the country, spotlighting racial inequality and police brutality
a group of men with ties to terrorist organizations targeted the offices of a famed satirical newspaper [gun/shots not specified]; on-air shooting in North Carolina left an anchor dead; shooting at a church in Charleston caused the deaths of—; shooting of; shot to death is—; shot down [their names were said some say]
authorities have started to name the victims of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, which left 49 dead [photo: cell phones, ringing the quiet]
more than 50 people were killed on the Las Vegas strip; 17 people were killed and 17 others wounded at Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School in Parkland
human landfall: there was more gun violence, this time at The Tree of Life Synagogue
national emergencies: to allocate funds for a border wall; [not the shooting; shooting; mass shooting; bludgeoning; stabbing; strangling; police brutality; assault]
March: the world closes to all but thoughts and prayers; the president of the United States calls a global pandemic a hoax; over 200,000 dead in the US to-date; today, there are deaths; there, the dead
lie;
*Omissions: active voice, the perpetrators, the names, the human cost.
ii.
Therein lies the poverty of logic.
Therein lies the poverty of truth.-Jane Mead
iii.
Jean-Luc Nancy, from Noli me frangere:
Fragment: the text is fragile. It’s nothing but. It breaks and yet it doesn’t break, in the same place. Where? Someplace, always someplace, an unassignable, incalculable place.
What I mean is: I’ve been writing in fragments because the text requires it. Because history requires it. Because memory requires it. Because truth is subjective, but honesty is not. Because all is separate and all is whole, at once.
What I mean is: I love the sound of rain today. How it falls. Apart. A-part of.
iv.
The Misinformation Effect: refers to the tendency for post-event information to interfere with the memory of the original event.
In other words, a change in narrative. Spin. Unreliable narrators.
“I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.”—June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die
What force is acting upon us now? There is so little that I read that is true.
What is true: masses of people are dying and out of work and unable to see their loved ones, except through photographs. Not the words used to describe, deter, control the narrative after the fact. The fact is: people are in danger. There has never been a time when I have felt this more acutely, though I was scared four years ago. The uprising of factions or fragments of society that claim free speech for spewing hate, but bully others into silence for disagreeing, already existed in 2016. Permission was granted. And people are dying to say. And people are dying.
This is a pivotal time in history. I researched many events that have contributed to fear and disillusionment over the last twenty years, but the above list is by no means inclusive.
What I’m saying is: this permission to foster hate is not deterred by borders or seas. Where will it end? What does kindness and tolerance cost anyone?
What I’m saying is: the world is on fire. And the greatest commodity of this century has been information: who has it, who controls it, who spins it and how. What will the next years look like? I admit: I’ve lost hope some days. I don’t want to go on this way. This is not the world I want to leave to my kids.
I’m afraid that people are so invested in holding onto their hate, that hate will prevail. That violence will prevail. That suffering will prevail. My grandfather emigrated to North America from a country where he had no status, no ability to hold a job or property. Where holocaust trains whisked people into the night. And he was met with fear and hate and bigotry, eventually drinking himself to death. It is almost a hundred years later. What do we remember? And how are we honouring that memory?
How we squander our hours of pain. / How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration / to see if they have an end.—Rainer Maria Rilke
Goatwater is a column which explores the mystifying, joyous and liberating concept of Carnival through the New York born and raised, Caribbean-American perspective of poet and artist Tiffany Osedra Miller.
Dear Reveler,
Welcome to the ecstatic state of Goatwater, where Carnival always begins again the moment that Carnival ends!
This is my Caribbean-American Calypso
Watch me move my hips, so –
Look how I shake them from side to side
Ready for the carnival ride?
Whether you feelin’ massive joy or blasted pain
Hop on the carnival train.
Here, I invoke a Carnival train of images: from the floats on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn on Labor Day, down to the colorful, rum soaked, roads of St. John’s, Antigua and Kingston, Jamaica. Witness floats carrying ribald revelers grinding their backsides against frontsides, altars hosting true and false idols. All of them, all of us, cracked figurines on this sacred and profane altar called life, death and everything in between.
I am draped in the Jamaican, Antiguan and American flags. Some nights, in honor of my most sensual ancestors, I dress in artificial palm leaves and soak in the sweetness of mangoes and sugar apples imported from Martinique, Monserrat, Montego Bay and Miami. I am the patron saint of savory mixed blood pudding and Johnny cakes. I have broken plenty of breadfruit and eaten codfish with my family in the Bronx before traveling on the carnival train downtown towards the loose, lascivious belt of the equator to unveil the mysteries of my parent’s native islands – out of many, one people, my Jamaican father described his birthplace. Antigua me come from was my mother’s reply. And me, lounging on the white sands of the tropics as well as the dirty, high yellow sands of New York’s Orchard Beach. A girl born on Manhattan Island raised in the little Jamaica of the Northeast Bronx, drinking Goat Water, a stew of spices and goat meat.
You’ve disembarked the Carnival train
at your destination –
an abandoned sugar plantation.
Bang your steel pan drum
until restless spirits come
masked mourners and revelers, too
What they are celebrating is YOU.
Where do characters come from? Are they fantasies or entities? After my mother died, my consciousness opened up to the presence of characters who, I suspect, have always existed on the fringes of my consciousness, waiting to emerge from the bacchanal of my dreams. It was my despair that finally called them forth where they formed themselves into drawings accompanied by stories, poems and incantations. These characters played the masquerade of mourners and revelers who inhabited an island in a constant state of carnival. I declared this ecstatic state of consciousness, this patois in pictures – fraught with post-colonial joys and sorrows, Goatwater.
Inside of grief there is always cause for crude, subversive acts of celebration, as we bear witness to the beginning of an ancestor’s new afterlife shrouded in myth, mystery and magic. What did my mother mean when in her pain she cried out to God and sang Shubert’s version of AveMaria, calling for her Holy Mother to accompany her home? Where is Home? Or when deep in his spiritual struggle, my father, who was called red bone and high yellow his whole life, suddenly sang, Yellow Bird, high up in a Banana Tree! Where did my parents truly come from? They are as much dead as they are alive. We all are. My mother, a Calypsonian blues woman. My father, a yellow bird of paradise.
My aunt used to make blood pudding in our kitchen in New York. I watched her squeeze the blood out of cow intestines into a white bucket. I watched her dance to calypso holding a large boombox she called Buddha. I watched her celebrate life and family. I watched her suffer. Jesus Wept, she would say, then get up and shake her ailing backside, singing, Hold me! Hold me!
You can be dead or still somewhat alive
there’s no reason not to get up and shake ya backside.
Put on your costume and mask
Ring de bell,
Bang the chime,
it’s always Carnival time!
Before her funeral, I rode in the backseat of a jeep convertible toward Half Moon Bay, one of Antigua’s 365 beaches, one for every day of the year, between two women – friends of the family I had just met. One of my new friends pulled a bag of ganja out of her bikini bottom. Hallelujah! After we smoked, we posed like Jet Magazine models in mourning – primping and preening in our bikinis. I was the aggrieved, light-skinned Carnival Queen in the music video we were starring in inside my head. Yet, I became convinced that the girls despised me, my grief and my vulgar displays of vanity. In our rivalry and revelry, as we waited at the crossroads for a carnival train to pass by, we witnessed two rastamen, grab, hold steady and with a cutlass behead a goat as if the most natural thing for them to do. Oh, the look in the goat’s eyes! The horror. The horror.
Reveler, Goats fall apart. Their centers cannot hold.
Unbelievably high, I felt so unfathomably low.
My mother, at the time, unbeknownst to me, was dying. We held each other and wept, inconsolably, as two rastamen – were these the goat killers – covered over her sister’s casket with dirt to a chorus of hymns. Inside the casket, my Antiguan Auntie, lady of complicated carnivals, rested in sweet, dead comfort, draped in the American flag.
Then came the funeral march of a new cast of characters emerging from the Goatwaters of life – after swimming through the meat and spice, to walk on Goatwater. To drown in it. Then surface again – an officer and a missionary-Octoroon, a mysterious Missus, a runaway slave, pallbearers and the advent of the Moko Jumbies, stilt walkers, so solemn, friendly and frightening in their royal black suits.
That funeral night, and many nights thereafter, I would place cracked figurines of my ancestors on an altar and offer them goat water, rum, and bittersweet songs of myself, then proceed to shake up my backside and dance for them and a playful, merciful God, ‘til daylight.
