by Kei Miller 

                                 After brutally criticizing the then Government’s plan to build a new highway which would have profoundly upended the life of her community, a Trinidadian woman stood firm in her critique saying, ‘Me eh fraid; I saying it in Big!’

Oh to say a thing in big – in monument,
in syllables more solid than statues;

             to say a thing not in drizzle or rain
but hurricane, in swell and surge,

the centre always still

but outside bands of wind lift
galvanized rooves like a sudden choir

giving back to the frenzied preacher,
his last words; oh,

to say a thing in drum, in what rumbles
across mountains and through canefields,

that trembles the wattled walls
of Quashie’s shack:  behold,

the day of the watchman
is coming; oh

to say a thing in obeah, in the broken
necks of white yard fowls, in the poured blood

of goats, in Sycorax, original
modder-woman walking cross the crest of hills,

pulling the moon till the night sea bubbles
up like a cauldron; oh

to say a thing plain, without if I may
             or should it please the court.
             or with all due respect;

to convene again, our parliaments,
to wear again, our crowns,

to recognize inside us what is dust
and bone and world and star; oh

to gather from our smallness,
that which is large – 

 

 

Poem copyright 2023 by Kei Miller. All rights reserved.

See two more poems from Kei Miller debuted on The Fight & The Fiddle: “A Mathematical Problem I Have Been Unable To Solve,”  and  “The Dead”

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Critical Essay | Writing Prompt

by Kei Miller

In Heroes Park, Jamaica, there is a grave,
and in that grave, there are 26 coffins,
and those 26 coffins share the remains

of 145 women. Let’s go back:
there was a fire – a sudden leap
of orange against the 1 am sky

and then shouts, and then sirens
loud against the warm Kingston night
like the warning of everything

that was to come and that is yet to come.
I was barely two but I remember
my mother crying the next night

over the news report. Let’s go back:
there was a great grumbling
like the sound of flies swarming,

and an election, hovering over
the harsh horizon, lining us up
in the sight of its guns.

Then death began to accumulate
around us in ways we did not know
possible. I was born into this

turfing, this parade of blood, this
extraordinary violence, and this
impossibility to believe in nation

the way my father did.
We were so wary from tending
the dead that the 1am sound of fire

trucks and old women burning
was just the sound of everything
we could no longer bear to hear.

What remains after fire?
What speck of ash is body, and what
board, and what bed, and what bible?

For Agatha Jones, victim #83,
indigent though she was, read
verses each night before sleep –

Agatha – who never acquired
the skill of quiet reading, (too many
noises in her blood), muttered

useless promises to herself
each eventide, “When you pass through
the waters, I will be with you;

and through the rivers, they shall not
overwhelm you; when you walk through fire
you shall not be burned.”

Do not say ‘Dental Records’;
what records? Do not say ‘DNA’;
it was 1980 and Jamaica.

No way to distinguish
body from bed, bible from board,
Agatha from Doris from Norma.

All women, all old, all black –
as if they could not be seen except
by fire; as if they could not be heard

except by sirens; as if
they could not be counted,
except by coffins

that did not even equal
the sum of their bodies,
let alone, the sum of their lives.

Poem copyright 2023 by Kei Miller. All rights reserved.

See two more poems from Kei Miller debuted on The Fight & The Fiddle: “The Dead,”  and  “The Subaltern Dreams of Big.”

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Critical Essay | Writing Prompt

by Kei Miller 

are only bones and wide
              acres of empty.

              They live
underground; they are, in fact, the ground –  
              the leave by which we walk.

Or else they live in air; they are here
             right now. You might feel them
                          as a sudden draught of winter,
                          a shock of cold against your back.

They are summoned by candles, or by sage,
             or by the holding of hands in a circle –
             whose centre holds the chalk of their names.

Sometimes, they break the frames that hold
             their photographs.

Sometimes, they play pranks by moving
             furniture, the armchairs they once sat in.

             Sometimes they just walk the streets,
                         on J’Ouvert morning, for instance.

Come evening, they raise their thumbs on highways,
             always seeking a ride home. For they

are constant roamers.
             Their roaming lasts exactly nine nights.
                         Or else, 40. Or else, eternity.

They visit us in our dreams.

And they are obsessed with counting. They count each grain
            of thrown salt until morning comes
            and they disappear

to ride in low-swinging chariots. Or on the backs of turtles.

            In the beginning, it is said, there were two turtles.
            One carried the moon; the other carried the dead.
            They plunged deep into the water
            but only the one with the moon resurfaced.

They follow Bin dir Woor who is the first of the dead –
            who having scared away a great bat
            from the forbidden tree
            brought death into the world.

They have returned to the Great Wheel and are waiting
            to be reborn.

They are weighed against feathers.

They are littered across the galaxies.

They live in the stars.
            They are, in fact, the stars. They hold council in the heavens.

They haunt the living. No. They are haunted by the living.

And they are rarely seen, but can be
            if you rub the gunk from a dog’s eyes
            into your own, or if you part your legs and bend over
            to look through the archway of yourself.

They rest in paradise. Or in Power. Or in Peace.
            Light perpetual shines on them.

They are our most certain future.
            And they are always remembered.
            And they are always forgotten.

                                                               Eventually.

Poem copyright 2023 by Kei Miller. All rights reserved.

See two more poems from Kei Miller debuted on The Fight & The Fiddle: “The Subaltern Dreams of Big,”  and  “A Mathematical Problem I Have Been Unable To Solve.”

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Critical Essay | Writing Prompt

by Malika Booker

I look into night and its black
is a gathering of John Crows, in
shiny black frocks waiting
for morning to pick my son’s bones.
This night I wondering, how I could kill
Isaac, my only boy chile and milk still
in he eye. He navel string not too long
cut and buried beneath that Mammy
Apple tree and my doubts are ringworms
borrowing into my skin, my hand shaking bad,
bad, water springing from my pores like wild
rain. I sweating like the wicked, hands shaking
more bad now, causing big man like me to weep,
bawl like I is a little girl child. Causing
big man like me to hold on to babbash bottle
and swig back hard liquor. As I drink
I thinking how I go tell he mother? How
I go tell she that I kill she only boy child,
and leave he tie up there on a block
of wood for wild beast and old crows
to peck? This night is wildness,
and I here stranded in the wilderness,
lost in misery, me-one, asking how
I could do this thing? There is no\
comfort this night. I want to snatch
up my son and run, hold he to my chest,
I want to lay my body down on that pile
of wood, take he place. Blood, that is
of my own blood, how could I harm him?

 

 

Poem copyright 2023 by Malika Booker. All rights reserved.

See also, “My Ghost in the Witness Stand,” by Malika Booker debuted on The Fight & The Fiddle.

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Critical Essay | Writing Prompt

by Malika Booker

                                    ***

A Levite persuades his unlawful wife to return to him – Judges 19

(Objection)

• The man raided like law was his warrant
• What right to raid the law like his warrant, his right
• The man persuaded/ raided/ marriage law his sanctity

Persuades
–       Substitute dragged; hair clamped in palms
Persuades
–       Substitute with hand collaring throat
Persuades
–       Barricade breached, law unlawful to my body
Persuades
–       His right, his might, my flight – ask why?
Persuades
–       Picture fist hammering my cowering body, fake Tabanka smiles
Persuades
–       Picture his smiles at wife with grilled teeth
Persuades
–       Picture grip, and ignored, glass pressed into skin
Persuades
–       Picture body in a car trunk
Persuades
–       Picture body thrown, carted over donkey back
Persuade
–       Picture punishable death.

***

This donkey can’t drag no damn load.
This donkey can’t drag no damn load.
This donkey can’t drag no damn load.
The donkey can’t drag no damn load.
This donkey can’t drag no damn load.
This donkey can’t drag no damn load.
This donkey can’t drag no damn load.
This donkey can’t drag no damn load.
This donkey can’t drag no damn load.
This donkey can’t drag no damn load.
This donkey can’t drag no damn load.
This donkey can’t drag no damn load.

This donkey can’t drag no damn load.
This donkey can’t drag no damn load.

                                                ***

And it came to pass in those days when
him woo me like dew shine on grass blade

And it came to pass in those days, when
I was pastures green, not ripe to be swayed

And that there was a certain Levite who look to him
steups – not took to him, state instead, “ensnared” 

And that there was a certain Levite who took to him…
that then wore, no, bruk me up like untamed mare

And that there was a certain Levite sojourning
loitering, liming to whistle gal passing rum shop

That there was a certain Levite sojourning
label horner man to woo gal fi fling down hill top

Who took to him a concubine out of…
steups – say took me to him as damned wife thereof.

                                                ***

They have a way he start eye up my body
say he thickening me up like I is rump

            Say he thickening me up like I is rump
            body to disect, slaughter, quarter and cut up

Body to disect, slaughter, quarter and cut up
I was parade each day on        his auction block

                        My parades are pirouettes, toes bloody on wood block
                        is the way he watch me, make I had was to run

Is the way he fists lick me make I had was to run
one foot in front of the other, mi skin put foot

                        One foot in front of the other, mi black skin put foot
                        cos in his words I was a bird to pluck.

                                                ***

Like yard fowl I run    run back                      to mi Poopa     yard
but   but           he welcome     rancid as spoiled         coconut
water. What mek yuh run, come back,  home, little gal?
over and          over like stuck record.            When he          kick   kick
our dog down concrete steps. When palms    bruk  wood  table.      
When blood stained    stained our sheets each morning’s bloom.
But was not poppa’s bosom a rock and hard hard chest!
His vile viper tongue hissed, Sketel,   hissed salope, said, girl
man have right to fling lash    in he wayward wife     ass
finger pointed pointed            to St James scripture, like      Judge’s
verdict,  then fist         hammered wood. Yet I know in these
island villages, when man      shadow have weight heavy so,
is one sleep away from blood hot with rum   to raising cutlass,
over woman prone body, so I hauled up my skirt and put foot.

                                    ***

Man look at my crosses, they scrape my name from story like scaling fish
because as woman is rass to get you name to slip onto they tongues,
when the storyteller ah grind him crusty foot-bottom on top you back.

Because as woman is rass to get you name to slip onto their tongues
when the storyteller ah grind him crusty foot-bottom on top you back
flinging names like runway gal, like whore, like property pon auction block.

When the storyteller ah grind him crusty foot-bottom on top you back
flinging names like runway gal, like whore, like property pon auction block
but though you chain me neck like dog , me mind dances pon ruffled water.

Flinging names like runway gal, like whore, like property pon auction block
but though you chain me neck like dog , me mind dances pon ruffled water
The trees also bears witness and they shake whispering and bawling out my name

but though you chain me neck like dog , me mind dances pon ruffled water
The trees also bear witness and they shake whispering and bawling out my name
Yes I always runway see how much wanted poster nail pon fence

The trees also bear witness and they shake whispering and bawling out my name
Yes I always runway see how much wanted poster nail pon fence
But is not the black woman’s name always soured in the mouth of men

Yes I always runway see how much wanted poster nail pon fence
But is not the black woman’s name always soured in the mouth of men
How they pelt cuss pon my reputation like licks, like peas, like my body is nothing.

But is not the black woman’s name always soured in the mouth of men
How they pelt cuss pon my reputation like licks, like peas, like my body is nothing
History always cast this black body inna horror story and pelt me out of the frame.

How they pelt cuss pon my reputation like licks, like peas, like my body is nothing
History always cast this black body inna horror story and pelt me out of the frame.
Gal how they swallow my name to the bottom of their stinking belly to swim in acid.

History always cast this black body inna horror story and pelt me out of the frame.
Gal how they swallow my name to the bottom of their stinking belly to swim in acid.
Yet feisty and hard ears is like heavy stones lodged in the bass of my belly bottom.

Gal how they swallow my name to the bottom of her stinking belly to swim in acid.
Yet feisty and hard ears is like heavy stones lodged in the bass of my belly bottom.
Is not rass to slip my own name under lay bones, something in me could not be broken
                                                    Nane, name, nema, unname name —                                                                                                         
                                                                                               Name name name
unname name

                                    ***

he took a knife divided her together with her bones.
he took a knife divided her together with her bones.
he took a knife divided her together with her bones.
he took a knife divided her together with her bones.
he took a knife divided her together with her bones.
he took a knife divided her together with her bones.
he took a knife divided her together with her bones.
he took a knife divided her together with her bones.
he took a knife divided her together with her bones.
he took a knife divided her together with her bones.
he took a knife divided her together with her bones.
he took a knife divided her together with her bones.
he took a knife
he took a knife

                        ***

 

Poem copyright 2023 by Malika Booker. All rights reserved.

 

See also, “Abraham the Night Before the Sacrifice,” by Malika Booker debuted on The Fight & The Fiddle.

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Critical Essay | Writing Prompt

by Khadijah Queen

Les Chartrons, December 2021, after dg nanouk okpik

This horizon’s dawn line makes me curious
enough to wonder if artist-I
could actually exist
sans worry, duty, pain—

Today’s-I makes breakfast for loves—
sweet greens & blackberries, smoked salmon
& sliced baguettes, salted butter & peach jam,
coffee with cardamom & cloves—luxurious

& a never-tiresome river view feast as today’s-I
tidies both table & borrowed kitchen. Loses track
imagining an otherself tracing soft
colors to capture, another life making

mistakes in water media, trapped in practice,
cutting paper the texture of bark, silk,
giddy with ease & industry. In that living
dream I summon the reserve I keep warm
that keeps me warm, fighting
the freeze that’s stalked me since
I first tried to burn myself down.

Refusing what’s aged my insides,
I write down shades to collect—
zaffre, an almost azure, celestial; count prismic
light particles in instant waves, soothing
bitter memories a continent past to lilac
as ships bevel the river surface,
as if holding boldness as quiet—steady.

Today’s-I watches until late fog
makes moonrise over the Garonne lift
light from its own reflection. I pay
specialists to fix me. They can’t.
Somehow I don’t give up.

 

See two more poems from Khadijah Queen debuted on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Better Living”  and  “Choice”

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Critical Essay | Writing Prompt

by Khadijah Queen

I.

When your mother dies, you’ll think about all the poems you’ve read
about mothers dying. You’ll remember your sister telling you
she doesn’t want to be here anymore & all the familiar sayings ring alien,
harsh-lit, an opacity you are forced to accept: I feel like
she’s slipping away. When your mother dies, she’ll have already
grieved too many losses: her parents, her closest-to-heart sisters,
her baby brother Nick. Her son/your brother.
Steven. The echo of grief lasting
as long as the ache in the bones of a long life, longer than cigarettes
and liquor and stress might invite—

II.

In Spring, maybe I’ll be alive again. In the fall of my future
I’ll circle the square
three times in the City of Fools. Three times
they’ve carved out my core, what they call ruined
parts of me removed and nothing
replaced. Stitches stay
unraveling. In between—

the hail, the rain, sun beating
down. In better memories, the Bay of Nice
at my right, I’ll walk far enough
for my left knee to swell. I’ll arrive in yellow
to eat veal & drink an almost-glass of Sancerre,
take the later evening
to rest. In twin dreams I forget logistics,
forget keys in cars and luggage in trunks.
I forget what goes where & as punishment
I’m stuck where I don’t want to be. I believe
a body is home for the time it breathes.
In between, the pain of what we do to it,
what we allow, refuse, endure. No one ever
told me I could allow pleasure
on my own terms. I had to decide.

III.

In a family of madwomen & mean men
I learned how not to fail in public
but knew it would happen again. The world we belonged to
didn’t want us as ourselves, but as bodies as functions. On a map
a place like that has no ridges. It is invisible, almost—
mapped inside the violence mapped by force
inside men and their brick hands and mortared language
shutting us hard into silence. Once, someone told me
Too much smiling gets a girl in trouble.
If I protect my own teeth from the corrupting air
what happens to everyone else’s?

Once I was a sailor. I talk about it
so I can believe it. I wear all my long necklaces
at once & lace my ears with sunstone
& have only one tattoo. I love so much it all falls out,
not unlike blood from deep cuts. My grandmother
sat at the head of her dining table one Labor Day
& in a lull turned to me & said
all the people I knew are dead. Too often now
I wish for low clouds to fill the echo
of absence, to make it visually
& beautifully undefined, as we’re left
on this side of unknowing, without them

Poem copyright 2022 by Khadijah Queen. All rights reserved.

See two more poems from Khadijah Queen debuted on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Better Living”  and  “Bordeaux Aubade”

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Critical Essay | Writing Prompt

by Khadijah Queen

According to whatever magazine
trying to sell me ________
gloss rules bounty,
happiness, what’s called tasteful
color, arranged
space, minimal, to me
so abstract even in my new
income bracket. On my ninth
birthday the white friends
I invited home for
my party couldn’t come,
their parents finding
our address in the ghetto
I called a neighborhood, a street
where I sped my tassel-handled bike
streaming pink and lavender and light
blue in the whizzing wake of fast cars,
a home with people eating
greens for breakfast and cereal
for dinner and bean soup
when money got low and
everything still tasted too good
because we knew what it felt like
to go hungry. The ghetto a site of invention
even if you only learn
to invent your means of escape.
Sometimes another view
changes your own. When I describe
a thing as ghetto, I mean invented
from scraps, from polluted air, starved
belly squeeze and small body hiding from
stray gang/cop
bullets or family fists
or the smoke that fills
the lungs of those who made you,
whose care singes
and soothes in the span of minutes,
salve and slap. When I say
my mind has ghetto shapes
I mean the chaos panic
I move through like L.A.
Colors-era streets with danger
and death as ordinary a shade
as trees the city
ripped out in the name of close
surveillance. The urban
planning didn’t account
for busing to preserve what
I already knew.
Who I softened into despite
buckled concrete miles I tripped
and ran over in cheap white shoes,
toes poking through too-big
socks folded into necessary discomfort,
who counts luxury
not as owning or labels or jewels
or even bragging rights. I claim a self
beyond place. You can’t know me
or my hood, your language
too small, too fake.
Let a real one tell it.
A self in a place so safe
it must be and can’t be white
can’t help living better.
No one else gave me this
furniture. I bought it, and yes,
on credit. Obsessed with earning
and proving. On Crenshaw,
I learned to skip red, blue, to love
purple. Black. Tightrope
silence when I could
read what my body made
others think they could do
to it. Fighting
for a center without moving.
Afraid of what. I can’t afford it.

Poem copyright 2022 by Khadijah Queen. All rights reserved.

See two more poems from Khadijah Queen debuted on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Choice”  and  “Bordeaux Aubade”

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Critical Essay | Writing Prompt

by Tim Seibles 

It was already on when you came in:

a two-lane road, the car’s high beams
blaming the dark.  In the rearview mirror,
the downtown of a city—familiar, but not.

Because you have found yourself
cast in the world without your consent,

you think you must be something
like other people—like the dude
two rows back with his face lit by a phone

or maybe like the star    behind the wheel:
one eye swollen, the other tight in a squint. 

You want to know what happened,
what’s happening and where the road
will go and when and soon

she’s standing outside a 7-11
filling up her dusty, dark-blue Mustang.

Early sun steams the back window.
Maybe she drove all night—

her voice: part sorrow, part wind
under the overhang.  Why didn’t I  

see it before, she asks aloud
for everyone, flexing the engine,

ready to go.
This is the story of what

happens when what
has seemed one way

turns out to be another way:
like a priest.

Even when the day is sprung,
and you wake up trapped
in everything, you want this face

on screen: cool, without a flinch.

Even the way she steers
is a declaration—you want to drive
like that. 

You could drive like that:

like somebody in charge,
somebody who “knows the deal.”

On the passenger seat,
half-stashed in her scarf, a .38.

Your mind moves to revenge: how

your circumstances    just don’t
make any sense.  You want

to know who made it this way

and one chance to make them
back down and beg: the reversal,

sizzling with drama and music
that means you were right

 all along.  That’s why you

keep watching—like everyone else
holding their sodas in the dark.

She could be a friend,
A nice person who deserves

some goddam justice.  You
can tell she’d like another life:

without so many
hard decisions adding up

to only one.  Maybe

you really are the character
other people think you are,   

even though they can’t hear
what’s playing in your head.

After the movie, you walk
back into the mall wondering

if you could do what
she did.  That was  

pretty good, you mutter
with no one nearby  

 and light all over your face.                                                 

Poem copyright 2022 by Tim Seibles. All rights reserved.

See more poems from Tim Seibles debuted on The Fight & The Fiddle: “The Last Black Cargo Blues Villanelle,” and“Naive.”  

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Critical Essay | Writing Prompt

by Tim Seibles

                                          I love you but I don’t know you  
                                                          –Mennonite Woman

Sometimes somebody says something
and a lost piece of your life comes back:
When I was seven, I would walk home
with Dereck DeLarge, my arm

slung over his skinny shoulders,
autumn sun buffing our lunch boxes.
So easy, that gesture, so light—
the kind of love that lands like a leaf.

I’m trying to talk about
innocence: two black boys                                                                                     
whose snaggle-toothed grins
held a thousand giggles. 

Remember?  Remember
wanting to play
every minute, as if that
was why we were born?

Those hands that bring us crying
into the world, that first
hold us    must be like wings,
like gills. Though this place

is nothing like where we’d been,
we arrive almost blind, astonished
as if to Mardis Gras in full swing.
There must be a time

when a child’s heart builds
a chocolate sunflower—
the air, invisible velvet
touching his face.

I remember an inchworm
walking the back of my hand,
the way the green body bowed.
I tried to keep it with me all day. 

The change    must’ve come
slowly—the way insects go
silent with the autumn chill.
I want to understand

how each day ice grows
and thins beneath our feet:
This itching fury that holds me
now—this knowing

the soft welcome
that once lived inside me
was somehow sent away,
how I talk myself back

into all the regular disguises
but still walk these
American streets
believing in the weather

of the unruined heart.
Love: a secret handshake,
a password I just can’t recall.
My friends—their eyes

cornered by crow’s feet—
keep looking for a kinder
city    though they don’t
want to seem naïve.

When was the last time
you wrapped your arm
around someone’s shoulder
and walked him home?

Poem copyright 2022 by Tim Seibles. All rights reserved.

See more poems from Tim Seibles debuted on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Movie” and “The Last Black Cargo Blues Villanelle.”

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Critical Essay | Writing Prompt