Wake to find everything black
what was white, all the vice
versa—white maids on TV, black

sitcoms that star white dwarfs
cute as pearl buttons. Black Presidents,
Black Houses. White horse

candidates. All bleach burns
clothes black. Drive roads
white as you are, white songs

on the radio stolen by black bands
like secret pancake recipes, white back-up
singers, ball-players & boxers all

white as tar. Feathers on chickens
dark as everything, boiling in the pot
that called the kettle honky. Even

whites of the eye turn dark, pupils
clear & changing as a cat’s.
Is this what we’ve wanted

& waited for? to see snow
covering everything black
as Christmas, dark pages written

white upon? All our eclipses bright,
dark stars shooting across pale
sky, glowing like ash in fire, shower

every skin. Only money keeps
green, still grows & burns like grass
under dark daylight.

Kevin Young, “Negative” from To Repel Ghosts: The Remix. Copyright © 2005 by Kevin Young, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Further to yesterday’s posting, this is a recent poem that revisits the horse-witch phenomenon, and it is in my collection Farming the Poems that can be downloaded for free here.

This poem refers to Arthur Brown, the farmer and horseman who with his wife owned the cottage I first lived in, on my own at age 17, in Belstead Village, Suffolk.  He and Maud were the most wonderful, loving and inspirational surrogate parents to a wild, independent teenager: sweet, honest, generous, wise. More details at the above link.

I came across the new SPS site quite by accident just now though a tweet in my twitter feed, liked by someone I follow.

The Crabbe Memorial Poetry prize represents a wonderful memory where back in 1979 the accolade of winning was one of those significant prompts to my feeling like a writer, providing as it did support to my sense of purpose. It is no different today when editors/publishers support work and continue furthering the writer’s sense of that purpose [I am short-handing, but am not embarrassed to acknowledge the connection].

I moved out of Suffolk in 1976 so this competition win of 1979 was in my penultimate year of studying at university when I was also beginning to have poems published – just a few.

It was also pleasing to see on the SPS site its writer/member profiles which included names of  those who were in a reading/sharing/critiquing postal poetry group I belonged to in 1979/80. This was mainly most supportive, though occasionally brutal! It too is an important part of my life in general – that Suffolk connection – as well as a writer.

Horse-Witch can be read on the new site here.

although my father although
my mother although we rarely
although we whispered

although the silence although
the absence although even now
some TV books not to mention

radio websites new militias hate
groups raging against our socialist-
communist-fascist although but still:

our textbooks now our museums
mostly our college literature
courses even our crayons not

to mention our young president
who could scarcely have been
imagined when we when I—

and although I’ve gone back
and filled in some blanks
I’m still learning this un-

learning untying
the knot of Yes but re-
writing this   Yes   Yes

Martha Collins, “White Papers [45]” from White Papers. Copyright © 2012 by Martha Collins.

Razorblades inside the popcorn balls, LSD a secret in the
candy – here was another Halloween horror story

from the 60s where kids ghosted in sheets and carrying
paper sacks would safely stroll neighbourhoods

without parents and in the certain hope of bulging bags
filled with a different kind of deadly.

The many years and removed by this distance,
wondering at those same streets now: escorts with guns

who might shoot anyone not giving because this is our
ritual; checking for messages on the inside of wrappers (like

calls to worship a different god); strange scared faces at curtains
ignorant about foreign festivities and the dangers we can

imagine – but at least call American, or subliminals unlike ours
about sugar and the other sweet certainties of who we are.

(after Ehrich Weiss)

I

Geography matters.
It is the plan,
the arrangement of things
that confuses our enemies,
the difference between what
they expect and what they get;
as simple as bobbing for apples
becomes difficult, deception is
an achievement in ordering the obvious.

II

Let us make a song
for our confusion:
Call it “Red Skies over Gary”
or “Red Skies in the Sunset”
or “Red Skies and the Open Hearth.”

Red Skies over Gary,
you are my sunset,
my only home.

Let us make ourselves invisible,
not make songs, or even
disappear suddenly from
the sidewalks of Calumet.

III

Cobalt and carborundum
are refinements of the art.

So it’s true, you held
the razor in your teeth,
or was it pure magic,
a miracle of place?
One makes for workability,
the other for hardness,
and chromium bright,
the stainless achievement.

IV

I came from Calumet to Gary,
and it was early evening;
south of the mills, poppy fields
toxic red above the car lots,
have a Coke on Texaco
’til the mercury arcs devour us
and it is purple night.

Michael Anania, “A Stratagem” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by Michael Anania.

Was delighted to see this cover and work based on the humuments of Tom Phillips by Julian Anderson, described so: ‘This suite of eight movements was inspired by a very unusual book of drawings and poems by the artist Tom Phillips entitled ‘The Heart of a Humument’, related to his larger book A Humument.’

I don’t know how long this will be available, but you can listen to snippets here.

I envied the dog lying in the yard
so I did it. But there was a pebble
under my flank so I got up and looked
for the pebble, brushed it away
and lay back down. My dog thus far
overlooked the pebble. I guess it’s her thick
Lab fur. With my head downhill the blood gorged
me with ideas. Not good. Got up. Turned around. Now I
see hundreds of infinitesimal ants. I’m on an
ant home. I get up and move five feet.
The dog hasn’t moved from her serene place.
Now I’m rather too near a thicket where
I saw a big black snake last week that might decide
to join me. I moved near the actual dog this time
but she got up and went under the porch. She doesn’t like
it when I’m acting weird. I’m failing as a dog
when my own kind rejects me, but doing better
than when I envied birds, the creature the least
like us, therefore utterly enviable. To be sure
I cheeped a lot but didn’t try to fly.
We humans can take off but are no good at landing.

Jim Harrison, “Man Dog” from Dead Man’s Float. Copyright © 2016 by Jim Harrison.

I’m watching football, which is odd as
I hate football
in a hyperbolic and clinically revealing way,
but I hate Bill Parcells more,
because he is the illuminated manuscript
of cruel, successful men, those with the slitty eyes of ancient reptiles,
who wear their smugness like a tight white turtleneck,
and revel in their lack of empathy
for any living thing.
So I’m watching football, staying up late to watch football,
hoping to witness (as I think of it)
The Humiliation of the Tuna
(as he is called),
which is rightly Parcells’s first time back in the Meadowlands
since taking up with the Cowboys,
who are, as we all know,
thugs, even by the NFL’s standards. The reasons

I hate football are clear and complicated and were born,
as I was, in Nebraska,
where football is to life what sleep deprivation is
to Amnesty International, that is,
the best researched and most effective method
of breaking a soul. Yes,
there’s the glorification of violence, the weird nexus
knitting the homo, both phobic and erotic,
but also, and worse, my parents in 1971, drunk as
Australian parrots in a bottlebush, screeching
WE’RE #1, WE’RE #1!
when the Huskers finally clinched the Orange Bowl,
the two of them
bouncing up and down crazily on the couch, their index
fingers jutting holes through the ubiquitous trail of smoke rings
that was the weather in our house,
until the whole deranged mess that was them,
my parents, the couch, their lit cigarettes,
flipped over backward onto my brother and me. My husband
thinks that’s a funny story and, in an effort to be a “good sport,”
I say I think it is, too.

Which leads me to recall the three Chihuahuas
who’ve spent the fullness of their agitated lives penned
in the back of my neighbor’s yard.
Today they barked continuously for 12 minutes (I timed it) as
the UPS guy made his daily round.
They bark so piercingly, they tremble with such exquisite outrage,
that I’ve begun to root for them, though it’s fashionable
to hate them and increasingly dark threats
against their tiny persons move between the houses on our block.
But isn’t that what’s wrong with this version of America:
the jittering, small-skulled, inbred-by-no-choice-
of-their-own are despised? And Bill Parcells—
the truth is he’ll win
this game. I know it and you know it and, sadly,
did it ever seem there was another possible outcome?

It’s a small deposit,
but I’m putting my faith in reincarnation. I need to believe
in the sweetness of one righteous image,
in Bill Parcells trapped in the body of a teacup poodle,
as any despised thing,
forced to yap away his next life staked to
a clothesline pole or doing hard time on a rich old matron’s lap,
dyed lilac to match her outfit.
I want to live there someday, across that street,
and listen to him. Yap, yap, yap.

Erin Belieu, “I Heart Your Dog’s Head” from Black Box. Copyright © 2006 by Erin Belieu.

i’m going to build this bridge as metaphor
with an arch of words

or suspended by lines
that rhyme

deploying a beam as the grammar
of tension and compression

perhaps a truss to suggests its
complexity of narrative

and consider a cantilever as
mirroring images

alternatively the cable-stay in its perfect
love sonnet sway

or tear the whole fucking thing down for its
formulaic and tell-all twee

ways