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

by Tim Seibles
                                                   with Cudjo Lewis

Can’t unnerstand how we fit in dis scene
The day fall down like a man wit no bones
Don’t look like dis the dream I tried ta dream

Not sure what make dem white eyes so mean
Spent most’a my life tryin not ta cry alone
Can’t hardly see how I fit in dis scene

Pockets so empty even springtime ain’t green
Look like my best chance went off on its own
‘Cause dis ain’t the dream I been tryin’ ta dream

I bet dis the saddest place I ever seen
Me and my heart prolly destined ta roam
How’d I get caught up in dis scheme?

Guess some hammer done fell on my dream
You know how it go when your good luck get gone
Who want dis place ta be like it be?

You hear what I say    but dat ain’t what I mean
Been grindin so long my song scrape like a moan
Gotta get myself outta dis scheme

They say when I die leas’ my soul be clean
Maybe they think my hard head turnt ta stone
‘Cause dat ain’t the dream I been tryin’ ta dream

Dis country roll on like a floodwater stream
Nothin much left’a my body but bone

Look like I’m fit’n’ta die in dis scene
But sher ain’t the way it was s’posed ta be

 

     Note: Zora Neale Hurston’s recently recovered book, Barracoon, features a series of
              interviews with Cudjo Lewis (born Kossola Oluale in West Africa) in which he
              describes his life before and after being captured and shipped to the
              American South to be made a slave.

.

 

Poem copyright 2022 by Tim Seibles. All rights reserved.

See more poems from Tim Seibles debuted on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Movie,”  and “Naive.”

 

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

by A. Van Jordan

“…I am dead.
Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.”
                  Hamlet Act 5, Scene 2

                  the body’s shadow
had much to say,
but no one in ear shot
understood its language

                 ~

                   the clouds stood heavy,
and when the cops confronted the body…

                  ~

             the boy showed his prowess to indulge in play,
just one of his many gifts,
which scared onlookers

                 ~

            no black man appeared in the park,
just a child, just people judging him

                 ~

          as he approached,
she wondered how she’d explain him
to her father

                  ~

          the opportunities for joy
presented themselves
in more colors than the boy
could name, so he chose black,
enjoying them all

                 ~

         passersby who laughed at him
showed their gratitude by memorizing his face,
then by wielding his visage whenever
they found themselves in a jam

                ~

          was his laughter a declaration
of his joy or a sacred prayer
offered over poor souls resigned to their fate

                 ~

          corn chips, black licorice, marbles,
plastic pellets, toy gun, jaw breakers,
bubble gum: crushed apogee of memory

                 ~

         when he imagines knowing then what he now knows,
he imagines dying before his time

                 ~

          a jar of preserved pears,
canned by his grandmother,
occupies his mind. When he gets home…

                 ~

          a man beats a drum in courtship to his beloved…
nah, a boy dribbles a basketball,
boasting of his youth

                 ~

        a saga took place in the mind of the police,
as they glimpsed the black child,
who was caught smiling as he walked toward them

                 ~

        his sister’s scream, pulled
from a well too black to ring shallow,
echoes whenever his name …

Poem copyright 2022 by A. Van Jordan. All rights reserved.

See two more poems from A. Van Jordan debuted on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Bored, Tamir Chooses to Dream,”  and  “Hex”

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