Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Grotz. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 12, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
here among them the dead the others the aliens
I see you without coke bottle glasses a wavy comb over
your nose buried inside a notebook over-
flowing with strange sightings men and women
without a homeland a library to shelve histories
dreams the names of rare flowers fruits baby names
exiled from their villages learning to say hello
with accents thick with nostalgia for their purple planets
here UFO sightings aren’t so spectacular
border crossing is quintessentially american universal
crowds gather in squalid ghettoes where every country is a city
every city is a verse & every verse echoes “Those Winter
Sundays”
where a New World opens up where all the martians are
welcome
at the writing table with their fountain pens & swollen digits &
you whispering
what took so long?
Copyright © 2015 by Abdul Ali. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 29, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
A young black girl stopped by the woods,
so young she knew only one man: Jim Crow
but she wasn’t allowed to call him Mister.
The woods were his and she respected his boundaries
even in the absences of fence.
Of course she delighted in the filling up
of his woods, she so accustomed to emptiness,
to being taken at face value.
This face, her face eternally the brown
of declining autumn, watches snow inter the grass,
cling to bark making it seem indecisive
about race preference, a fast-to-melt idealism.
With the grass covered, black and white are the only options,
polarity is the only reality; corners aren’t neutral
but are on edge.
She shakes off snow, defiance wasted
on the limited audience of horse.
The snow does not hypnotize her as it wants to,
as the blond sun does in making too many prefer daylight.
She has promises to keep,
the promise that she bear Jim no bastards,
the promise that she ride the horse only as long
as it is willing to accept riders,
the promise that she bear Jim no bastards,
the promise to her face that it not be mistaken as shadow,
and miles to go, more than the distance from Africa to Andover
more than the distance from black to white
before she sleeps with Jim.
Thylias Moss, "Interpretation of a Poem by Frost" from Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities' Red Dress Code: New & Selected Poems. Copyright © 2003 by Thylias Moss. Reprinted with the permission of Persea Books, Inc. (New York). www.perseabooks.com.