David Bottoms: “Now on the spot where my house sat there’s a Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the K-Mart parking lot is covering the place where my grandfather’s house and store were. When my daughter was a kid we’d drive by and I’d say, ‘This is where we lived, right here,’ and she’d say, ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken?’ But you know, a lot of times at night when I try to go to sleep that old landscape plays over in my mind and it’s just sad, in a way, to have lost that, to have lost that connection and know that I’m one of the few people left who has any sense of that place, what it was and what it meant to folks. Maybe it didn’t mean so much then, but right now it means a lot. It means a whole lot.” (more)
Dan Albergotti (South Carolina): “They just seemed like lines of type on a page at first. And then John Keats was in the room with me. He was still in the ground in Rome, but he was in the room with me too, holding out his living hand, palm up. How could I refuse such an invitation to transcend?”
“Poem for the Educated Black Woman Who Asked My Opinion on Shared Suffering” by Leslie Marie AguilarPosted by Rattle
Leslie Marie Aguilar
POEM FOR THE EDUCATED BLACK WOMAN WHO ASKED MY OPINION ON SHARED SUFFERING
Not to belong anywhere in particular means somehow an ability to go anywhere in general, but always as a tourist, an outsider. —from Carl Phillips’ foreword to Slow Lightning
I nurse my Shiner Bock, in an Indiana bar,
because even though I hate Shiner
the lemon floating at the top of my glass
is a life raft—a wedge of soggy yellow
membranes that carry me back home
down I-20 through Abilene, Weatherford,
Fort Worth, and Dallas where I am the majority
not the minority—but the bitter brown
liquid slides down the back of my throat
like the grains of sand that stick to my lips
during a dust storm. My cells are the same
as your cells, your cells are the same as my cells,
our cells are the same as everyone’s cells, but
here, I am a stain on a laundered white sheet
dancing a cumbia no one else can hear.
In Texas, we use barbed wire as clotheslines
and cactus for hair brushes. We walk barefoot
over freshly mowed grass and let the caliche
make molds of our footprints. In Texas,
tough skin is a product of spit, Goldbond,
and walking it off. We are the same, but
alcohol makes my mouth faster than my brain,
and I agree. We is a federation of bodies that are tired
Leslie Marie Aguilar (Texas): “I was born and raised in Abilene, TX, and am currently an MFA candidate at Indiana University. As a displaced Texan I have successfully managed to ostracize myself in Indiana by using the collective ‘you’ in public. When I’m not writing poems about the winds of the Panhandle, I teach creative writing to uninterested students. However, the expression of understanding on their faces when they finally reassemble Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’ on large pieces of blue poster board from strips of paper and glue sticks makes me want to teach poetry, and more importantly to write it.” (website)
