This is not a small voice
you hear               this is a large
voice coming out of these cities.
This is the voice of LaTanya.
Kadesha. Shaniqua. This
is the voice of Antoine.
Darryl. Shaquille.
Running over waters
navigating the hallways
of our schools spilling out
on the corners of our cities and
no epitaphs spill out of their river mouths.

This is not a small love
you hear               this is a large
love, a passion for kissing learning
on its face.
This is a love that crowns the feet with hands
that nourishes, conceives, feels the water sails
mends the children,
folds them inside our history where they
toast more than the flesh
where they suck the bones of the alphabet
and spit out closed vowels.
This is a love colored with iron and lace.
This is a love initialed Black Genius.

This is not a small voice
you hear.

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear you body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again. 

if i believe 
in death be sure 
of this 
it is 

because you have loved me, 
moon and sunset 
stars and flowers 
gold crescendo and silver muting 

of seatides 
i trusted not, 
                        one night 
when in my fingers 

drooped your shining body 
when my heart 
sang between your perfect 
breasts 

darkness and beauty of stars 
was on my mouth petals danced 
against my eyes 
and down 

the singing reaches of 
my soul 
spoke 
the green-

greeting pale-
departing irrevocable 
sea 
i knew thee death. 

                                  and when 
i have offered up each fragrant 
night,when all my days 
shall have before a certain 

face become 
white 
perfume 
only, 

         from the ashes 
then 
thou wilt rise and thou 
wilt come to her and brush 

the mischief from her eyes and fold 
her 
mouth the new 
flower with 

thy unimaginable 
wings,where dwells the breath 
of all persisting stars

I think a lot about the character everybody wanted to put babies inside of
a lot about cracked statues recovered satellites

I think a lot about voyager
I think a lot about gold
I think a lot about that thing the fork is going into

Are you ever the thing the fork is going into?
Are you ever driving through cotton fields at night
and everything around you is a pillow?

What words are you whispering into my pillow?
What words cast the spell that puts the babies inside of me?
What words make the moon just something good to look at but no place to go?

If I’m looking at my window and hear the hawk, is that the signal?
I think a lot about the longer my hair grows, the farther you are
about your face in my hair

I think a lot about becoming a pill you can swallow
I think a lot about growing my hair into a tent

Oh, solitude, where is the sting,
    That men ascribe to thee?
Where is the terror in thy mien?
    I look, but cannot see.

Where hidest thou, that loneliness
    The world pretends to fear?
While lying on thy loving breast
    I find my sweetest cheer.

They do not understand thee, no,
    They are but knaves or fools,
Or else they must discern in thee
    Dame Nature’s queen of schools.

For in thy care, with naught but books,
    The bards and saints of old,
Become my friends and to mine ear
    Their mystic truths unfold.

When problems and perplexities
    Of life becloud my mind,
I know in thee, oh, solitude,
    The answer I can find.

When grief and sorrow crowd my heart
    To breaking, with their fears
Within thy arms, oh, solitude,
    I find relief in tears.

And when I weary of the world’s
    Deceits and cares and strife,
I find in thee sweet rest and peace
    And vigorous new life.

My garden never is complete
    Without a blooming rose,
Nor is my life, oh, solitude,
    Without thy sweet repose.

What is water but rain but cloud but river but ocean 
but ice but tear.

What is tear but torn what is worn as skin as in as out
as out.

Exodus. I am trying to tell a tale that shifts like a gale
that hurricanes and casts a line

that buckles in wind that is reborn a kite a wing. 
I am far

from the passage far from the plane of descending
them,

suitcases passports degrees of mobility like heat 
like heat on their backs. 

This cluster of fine grapes Haitian purple beige
black brown.

^{translated by Alejandro Cáceres Joseph}

In the bosom of the sad evening
I called upon your sorrow… Feeling it was
Feeling your heart as well. You were pale
Even your voice, your waxen eyelids,

Lowered… and remained silent… You seemed
To hear death passing by… I who had opened
Your wound bit on it—did you feel me?—
As into the gold of a honeycomb I bit!

I squeezed even more treacherously, sweetly
Your heart mortally wounded,
By the cruel dagger, rare and exquisite,
Of a nameless illness, until making it bleed in sobs!
And the thousand mouths of my damned thirst
I offered to that open fountain in your suffering.
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  

Why was I your vampire of bitterness?
Am I a flower or a breed of an obscure species
That devours sores and gulps tears?

El vampiro

En el regazo de la tarde triste
Yo invoqué tu dolor… Sentirlo era
Sentirte el corazón! Palideciste
Hasta la voz, tus párpados de cera,

Bajaron… y callaste… y pareciste
Oír pasar la Muerte… Yo que abriera
Tu herida mordí en ella —¿me sentiste? —
Como en el oro de un panal mordiera!

Y exprimí más, traidora, dulcemente
Tu corazón herido mortalmente,
Por la cruel daga rara y exquisita
De un mal sin nombre, hasta sangrarlo en llanto!
Y las mil bocas de mi sed maldita
Tendí á esa fuente abierta en tu quebranto.
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  

¿Por qué fui tu vampiro de amargura?…
¿Soy flor ó estirpe de una especie obscura
Que come llagas y que bebe el llanto?

^{In honor of Earth Day, we invited four poets to collaborate on a new poem that conveys our interconnected struggle for environmental justice. The collaborative poem is inspired by Cecilia Vicuña's ongoing “Quipu of Encounters” workshop series and her poem "Three Fragments of Instan." This collaborative poem project is presented in partnership with the Guggenheim Museum.}

When the wind frenzied up a snow globe
of petals, I was picnic-blanket easy, delighted
by a congregation of trees celebrating the newlyweds of spring,
delighted by life’s parade throwing its confetti down. But you know
I knew what was coming. We all did. Forgive us:
we were entwined, we were betwixt, time was not yet bent.
Nevertheless, I was unable to resist tipping my head back to catch those petals
on my tongue, to catch those petals as if they were snowflakes
though I knew they were not snowflakes, not at all, but blossoms
blasted apart far too soon in a season that had forgotten how to be cold.

—Nickole Brown

/ / /

Can seasons forget? Do trees celebrate?—It’s the eternal problem, isn’t it,
how ego blossoms in paraphrase, propagates our deep, deciduous need

to seed the severed world of object-things with our image? To spread
out gingham sheets and claim the cast of green shade for ourselves,

to think green thoughts under? To delight in the swan-shaped pedal
boats drifting by, aimlessly? But who among us, in the blank face

of certain unknowns, hasn’t cleaved to what they know they know?
To self-likeness, taxonomy, to god, guilt, or grace, to hands forced

forward by the mainspring’s spiral torsion? Wait long enough
and white petals, even, will melt on your tongue. But patience is so difficult.

—J.P. Grasser

/ / /

I have cleaved to what I know: the tempered regularity
of falling leaves, the speed with which bulbs blast,

or cicadas, buzzing, spring from the dampened earth.
This year, though, tulips came early. Already the daffodils

bury their heads in the dirt. But here I am, in a winter
of the mind, surrounded by surplus capital, an excess

of heat, which lifts green things from their beds.
Between one settled reality, then, and the blossoming

possibility of another, I bask in eddies of unseasonal light,
eying the spiral turn of the plum tree’s gentle confetti. 

—John James

/ / /

Truth is a leviathan:
even its monstrous size
can be buried in dark waters
until we learn to doubt its existence.

Still, I open my eyes
to the husk of morning,
draw my name in the sand
and defy the rising tide.

—Ariel Francisco

^{translated from the Spanish by William George Williams
              To Luis G. Monge}

I come from the remote borders
of the land of oblivion. My songs
will not sound beneath your balconies,
I am the singer of the broken sanctuaries.

Artist, dreamer, sensitive and tender,
my music is a voice of affirmation . . .
I am like a winter twilight
in love’s garden.

I love the fire of the sun. My delights are
the flaming rose, the bleeding pink,
and I love the white swans on the lakes
and the blue clouds in the wind. 

I love the sad—for life is Pain—
I love your black half-opened eyes
fixed in an unknown direction
where dead loves are forgotten.

I know full well that love is sleep . . .
and my soul sleepless. You are not
to blame for my sorrow. You are a dream . . .
I call you when I wake and you do not come!

You can come only as does death,
silent and fatal. You are anxiety,
no matter, come; my heart is strong . . .
Shed your petals in my hands, faded rose. 

I knew in my dreams that love is good
and today, impenitent, a rebel against love,
I weep upon the lilies of your breast
and kiss you on the forehead.

Students of movement play in front of mirrors all day
Students of movement revel in tranquil river babblings daydreaming how they can make those patterns their own
Students of movement have a love-hate relationship with floors, walls, and gravity 
Students of movement study pigeons, worms, dogs, turtles, fishes, snakes, swans...
Students of movement strive to understand their bodies and how their muscles and limbs can transform raw emotion into physical expression
Students of movement respect all genres of dance, martial arts, meditations, and interpretations

Students of movement
Nod to rhythms echoing through hollow stairways
envisioning
fluid patterns
and gravity-defying poses...
...training to each
Subway bus passing
Leaves rattling
Book pages flapping
Audience clapping...
Searching their souls
for the spontaneous
sequence that will
set them free
subsequently
freeing others
fascinating in
the freedom set forth
By
syncopated high-hats
stage shaking stomps
three-second jumps
frictionless spins
and the sheer
beauty of
pure
Movement... 
 

Your love was like moonlight
turning harsh things to beauty,
so that little wry souls
reflecting each other obliquely
as in cracked mirrors . . .
beheld in your luminous spirit
their own reflection,
transfigured as in a shining stream,
and loved you for what they are not.

You are less an image in my mind
than a luster
I see you in gleams
pale as star-light on a gray wall . . .
evanescent as the reflection of a white swan
shimmering in broken water.

Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,
    And all the flowers that in the springtime grow,
    And dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow
Rising of the round moon, all throats that sing
The summer through, and each departing wing,
    And all the nests that the bared branches show,
    And all winds that in any weather blow,
And all the storms that the four seasons bring.

You go no more on your exultant feet
    Up paths that only mist and morning knew,
Or watch the wind, or listen to the beat
    Of a bird’s wings too high in air to view,—
But you were something more than young and sweet
    And fair,—and the long year remembers you.