boooooooo. spooky ripplings of icy waves. this
umpteenth time she returns—this invisible woman
long on haunting short on ectoplasm
"you're a good man, sistuh," a lover sighed solongago.
"keep your oil slick and your motor running."
wretched stained mirrors within mirrors of
fractured webbings like nests of manic spiders
reflect her ruined mien (rue wiggles remorse
squiggles woe jiggles bestride her). oozy Manes spill
out yonder spooling in night's lofty hour exudes
her gloom and spew in rankling odor of heady dour
as she strives to retrieve flesh to cloak her bones
again to thrive to keep her poisoned id alive
usta be young usta be gifted—still black
Copyright © 1998 by Wanda Coleman. Reprinted from Bathwater Wine with permission of Black Sparrow Press.
after Lowell
our mothers wrung hell and hardtack from row
and boll. fenced others’
gardens with bones of lovers. embarking
from Africa in chains
reluctant pilgrims stolen by Jehovah’s light
planted here the bitter
seed of blight and here eternal torches mark
the shame of Moloch’s mansions
built in slavery’s name. our hungered eyes
do see/refuse the dark
illuminate the blood-soaked steps of each
historic gain. a yearning
yearning to avenge the raping of the womb
from which we spring
Copyright © 1993 by Wanda Coleman. Reprinted from Hand Dance with permission of Black Sparrow Press.
Laughing below, the unimagined room in unimagined mouths, a turning mood speaking itself the way a fulling should overspilling into something's dome, some moment's edging over into bloom. What is a happening but conscious cloud seeking its edge in a wound or word pellucidity describing term as boundary, body, violated bourne no sounding center, circumscription turn. Mother of mirrors, angel of the acts, do all the sighing breathing clicking wilds summon the same blue breadth the sense subtracts, the star suborning in its ruptured fields.
From Nomina by Karen Volkman. Copyright © 2008 by Karen Volkman. Reprinted by permission of B.O.A. Editions. All rights reserved.
Nothing was ever what it claimed to be, the earth, blue egg, in its seeping shell dispensing damage like a hollow hell inchling weeping for a minor sea ticking its tidelets, x and y and z. The blue beneficence we call and spell and call blue heaven, the whiteblue well of constant water, deepening a thee, a thou and who, touching every what— and in the or, a shudder in the cut— and that you are, blue mirror, only stare bluest blankness, whether in the where, sheen that bleeds blue beauty we are taught drowns and booms and vowels. I will not.
From Nomina by Karen Volkman. Copyright © 2008 by Karen Volkman. Reprinted by permission of B.O.A. Editions. All rights reserved.