Poetry

The rumble of drums
The riddle of the fiddle
The clean whistle
Of bamboo pipe
Mento music like news
Bessie Smith singing the blues

FORGOTTEN STELAE

MCDONALD DIXON

A kind of self blessing spawns in the glare,
torn from reflections across a drain where
raindrops gather to feed water hyacinths.

IX—OR ON THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE

WINSTON O. FARRELL

I got stuck on the Brooklyn Bridge
and my driver just sat like stone
to the honks and heckles of the horn-head motorist
strapped into his humid summer ride

UNFETTERED

ANNAN BOODRAM

don’t enclose me
within the palisades of time.
don’t imprison me
within the barricades of your mind.
the constriction
of your limiting web

IF I WOZ A TAP-NATCH POET

LINTON KWESI JOHNSON

“dub poetry has been described as...‘over-compensation for deprivation’”
Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry

WATCH DE OL’ MAN

KELLY PHOENIX CHASE

Wunna tink ol’ man ain’t special like he don’t got stars in he back pocket, too

IT IS NOT HERE

C.M. Harclyde Walcott

they say

it is not here

at this chance meeting

exhausted

in leaky craft.

they say it

is not here

THE LECTURER LADY

Jane King

She says, assuming all of us Miami-ites as well as
Anglicans, that those of us

who were in church on Sunday August 23rd and not at

WOMAN WITH GOLDEN APPLE (NO ORDINARY FRUIT) AFTER LOTTE KRAMER’S “BOY WITH ORANGE (OUT OF KOSOVO)”

DOROTHEA SMARTT

A woman holding a golden apple in her palms
has crossed the boundary, uncertain yet hopeful.

CON-FICTIONS AND CON-VERSE-ZIONS

A-dZiko Simba Gegele

Like the cruelty of clothes
belted
strapped
buttoned down
zipped up
these flat
pressed women
ironed hard
metal smoothed

Poetry

Pages