Who Is a Bird
by
Found in: Issue 4, Poetry
Published in January, 2022
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:White-throated_Kingfisher-_Difficulty_in_managing_a_bigger_prey_I098.jpg#Licensing
I
am slipping
in and out of myself like a fish
over a dam. Slipping
like catapulting, careening, plunging. I am slipping out of
my body like a fish from the claws of a bird. I am gripping myself like a bird with my
dinner. I am gripping the empty space where a fish used to be. My body was nothing for dinner. Dinner was a fish, then nothing, then my body.
I was a bird, then I was just
hungry.

Now,
dinner is just
shit because I am on
the toilet gripping the
fish, claws empty. I lean my back
against the toilet lid behind me
and realize I have been clawing
the empty fish all day. My body is
dinner, it’s chewed. I feel the teeth
of the toilet sink into the bird of my back and
I surrender.

For an instant I am the dam,
loose with gravity and falling like a fish
newly freed. Flying like a fish who is a bird.
For an instant the fish of my body is the dam—free.

The Union of Salt and Sand
by
The affliction took many forms: one man refused to sit down, afraid he’d shatter his buttocks; another tried to fling himself into a kiln, in hopes of being remade as a goblet.
A Sereníssima República
by ,
From Bohemia to the Black Arts Movement (and Beyond)
by
The roots of the ’60s Black Arts Movement lie in the same period of urban transformation that encompassed urban renewal and the rise and fall of the earlier bohemia. Hundreds of thousands of Black migrants from the south arrived in several waves before and after World War II — and until 1948, racist restrictive housing covenants and other forms of discrimination kept them concentrated in a South Side “Black Belt” and a West Side ghetto where homes were subdivided and increasingly unlivable.