a transcription of the poem read on the home page of this issue

by Tim Seibles

Five-legged pocket spiders, knuckled
starfish, grabbers of forks, why
do I forget that you love me:
your willingness to button my shirts,
tie my shoes—even scratch my head!
which throbs like a traffic jam, each thought
Leaning on its horn. I see you

waiting anyplace always
at the ends of my arms—for the doctor,
for the movie to begin, for
freedom—so silent, such
patience! testing the world
with your bold myopia: faithful,
ready to reach out at my
softest suggestion, to fly up
like two birds when I speak, two
brown thrashers brandishing verbs
like twigs in your beaks, lifting
my speech the way pepper springs
the tongue from slumber. O!

If only people knew the unrestrained
innocence of your intentions,
each finger a cappella, singing
a song that rings like rain
before it falls—that never falls!
Such harmony: the bass thumb, the
pinkie’s soprano, the three tenors
in between: kind quintet x 2,
rowing my heart like a little boat
upon whose wooden seat I sit
strummed by sorrow. Or maybe

I misread you completely
and you are dreaming a tangerine, one
particular hot tamale, a fabulous
banana! to peel suggestively
like thigh-high stockings: grinning
as only hands can grin
down the legs—caramel, cocoa,
black-bean black, vanilla—such lubricious
dimensions, such public secrets!
Women sailing the streets

with God’s breath at their backs.
Think of it! No! Yes:
let my brain sweat, make my
veins whimper: without you, my five-hearted
fiends, my five-headed hydras, what
of my mischievous history? The possibilities
suddenly impossible—feelings
not felt, rememberings un-
remembered—all the touches
untouched: the gallant strain

of a pilfered ant, tiny muscles
flexed with fight, the gritty
sidewalk slapped after a slip, the pulled
weed, the plucked flower—a buttercup!
held beneath Dawn’s chin—the purest kiss,
the caught grasshopper’s kick, honey,
chalk, charcoal, the solos teased
from guitar. Once, I played
viola for a year and never stopped

to thank you—my two angry sisters,
my two hungry men—but you knew
I just wanted to know
what the strings would say
concerning my soul, my whelming
solipsism: this perpetual solstice
where one + one = everything
and two hands teach a dawdler
the palpable alchemy
of an unreasonable world.

Poem copyright 2010 by Tim Seibles. All rights reserved.

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

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a transcription of the poem read on the home page of this issue

by Khadijah Queen

          after Anaximander & McMorris

futile a cartographer’s dream to
graph	material persistence
	of faults

Poem copyright 2020 by Khadijah Queen. All rights reserved.

See more poems from Khadijah Queen on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Choice” “Better Living,” and  “Bordeaux Abade.” 

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a transcription of the poem read on the home page of this issue

by Mervyn Taylor

They’ll read your works in rooms
where the host describes you as
funny. They’ll touch your hand,
and remind you to sign one for
the daughter they haven’t seen

in years, who’s out on the coast
someplace, having a hard time
coming to terms with a mother
who means well, all her life
seeking everyone’s happiness

before her own. They’ll pick up
a book and find the one line
of solace you offer among all
the many distraught ones, about
a carpenter who built a dream

house for a prostitute he loved.
And they’ll read it back to you,
how he smoothed the purple
heart into impossible rooms,
a gift you hardly recall giving.

Poem copyright 2023 by Mervyn Taylor. All rights reserved.

See more poems from Mervyn Taylor on The Fight & The Fiddle: “The Pause,” “The Blind Storyteller,” and  “Evening.” 

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a transcription of the poem read on the home page of this issue

by Erica Hunt

and not disappear in the dredging
the edited ledgers omit antiphonal groans

Reader, you were meant to be legible
even in the failure to communicate
your will to resist snatching defeat from
the jaws of easy victory the truth slips in as a figure of speech.

Reader step into my room
this page faces you
what will I miss if you blink
what blots the ink pens and hems the imagination
what hides in the brackish
back stories hostile to the wobbled word,
what resists being pinned to the truth?

Reader, we are carbon, and more
the exact degree of life is inestimable—
some of us chew ice and others suck chalk
some crave salt before there is savor
others can never be too full of sugar or bourbon
sucker punched and stunned by death’s pugnacious brawl
into dream time and song, extending both ends
night into day.

Touch, reader, we were meant to touch
to exchange definitions and feed the pulse of
language. I promise if you step in
it will propel you, me, it:
topple distinctions
ease doubt and belief, and
all that in between.

Poem copyright 2019 by Erica Hunt. All rights reserved.

See more poems from Erica Hunt on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Mood Librarian.” 

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a transcription of the poem read on the home page of this issue

by Safia Elhillo

in the divorce i separate to two piles                 books:
       english      love songs: arabic
my angers   my schooling    my long repeating name
       english    english    arabic

i am someone’s daughter but i am american born        it
       shows in my short memory
my ahistoric glamour     my clumsy tongue when i forget the
       word for [ ] in arabic

i sleep         unbroken dark hours on airplanes home           &
       dream i’ve missed my
connecting flight      i dream a new & fluent mouth full of
       gauzy swathes of arabic

i dream my alternate               selves each with a face
       borrowed from photographs of
the girl who became my grandmother   brows & body
       rounded & cursive like arabic

but wake to the usual borderlands     i crowd shining slivers
       of english to my mouth
iris    crocus   inlet   heron         how dare i love a word
       without knowing it in arabic

& what even is       translation is immigration        without
       irony         safia
means pure           all my life it’s been true           even in my
       clouded arabic

Poem copyright 2017 by Safia Elhilli. All rights reserved.

See more poems from Safia Elhillo on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Portrait of Christopher,” “Outdoor Waiting Area,” and  “Psychogeography.” 

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a transcription of the poem read on the home page of this issue

by Samantha Thornhill

for 8th graders at City School of the Arts

What if I were to tell you that I am you,
that your face is my mirror? What if
we’re all infinite expressions of One Beloved?
That we, my friends, are multidimensional
masterpieces? What if I were you, with your
ancestors ghosting through my veins,
housing your past life pains (instead of mine);
if I had the sweet and sour privilege of ambling
in your dress rehearsals of skins
across the cosmos; if I were the only
you in all the animated universe, then
would I arrive at your exact missteps?
What if my failure to understand you is my folly?
What if it is possible to be broken and still
whole, brilliant fissures of light leaking up and through?
What if vulnerability is our best armour, our iron?
What if pristine planets with pure beings do exist, but
we chose this evolutionary planet of hard rocks?
What if the assignment is to forget ourselves
into remembrance, to love unconditionally
in the muck, to spiral up from our primordial depths?
What if we chose all of this anyhow:
our wonderfully shitty parents, hurdles,
backhands and crash landings?
What if the Most High indwells in the lowly
and far flung, and from the reaches of hell
we can still be each other’s angels? Friends,
friends, if I were to tell you all
of this, would you believe me
or would you nod and say,
I know?

Poem copyright 2022 by Samantha Thornhill. All rights reserved.

See more poems from Samantha Thornhill on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Midases,” “How to Use African Black Soap,”  and “Four Sonnets.”

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a transcription of the poem read on the home page of this issue

by Shane McCrae

Listen to my last breath    you’ll hear each breath I’ve drawn
Since my voice changed and the sound got
Deeper bow your head     pull down     a shroud from the heaven white
Folks get peace     privacy from pull one down

To cover us I know you got     a ladder or a string
A ladder in your pocket straight
And tall     a white string made of white strings twisted tight
Together and it hangs

Above your head you     pull and
A ladder rolls     down from that heaven
White folks pull grave by grave to Earth

I know y’all got a heaven     just for y’all and
A God who don’t speak     or don’t make y’all listen     listen
Bow your head     that is the voice of God     that breath

Poem copyright 2022 by Shane McCrae. All rights reserved.

See more poems from Shane McCrae on The Fight & The Fiddle: “I squeezed through,”  and  “Law’s Dream”

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a transcription of the poem read on the home page of this issue

by Shara McCallum

May 2018: to Robert Burns, after Calum Colvin’s “Portrait of Hugh MacDiarmid”

You saturate the sight
of those who come after, poets
and painters alike. Your words invade
my mind’s listening, manacle
my tongue when I try to speak
on all I backward cast my eye
and fear and canna see.
Who would I have been
to you, what stone
in the ruined house of the past?
In this world, I am unloosed, belonging
to no country, no tribe, no clan.
Not African. Not Scotland.
And you, voice that stalks
my waking and dreaming,
you more myth than man,
cannot unmake history.
So why am I here
resurrecting you to speak
when your silence gulfs centuries?
Why do I find myself
on your doorstep, knocking,
when I know the dead
will never answer?

Poem copyright 2021 by Shara McCallum. All rights reserved.

See more poems from Shara McCallum on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Outside the Frame,”  and  “Passage”

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a transcription of the poem read on the home page of this issue

by Evie Shockley

now that i’m on this track, i can’t find my way back
to the main drag. in the middle of 2020, i carelessly
drifted off onto the a street not quite a cul-de-sac, but
still sacked or socked in, a cloud having swung so
low i got stuck, the flow of traffic—distinguishable
thursdays, next weeks, augusts, and aughts—
carrying on getting carried away without me, just
off-scream off-screen. obscene that i seem to have
delegated dailiness so long that my mind’s
convinced it’s no longer essential. with last year
misty, my brain has relegated the whole of pre-
pandemic life to a fog. or is that exhaust fumes? Will
i need eye surgery to see my way clear back to that
spring in paris, that year in the berkshires, that
north carolina decade? cataracts over cackalack. the 
question is: who was i when we last hugged so
close our bones met? where are the coffee spoons of
yesteryear? i’ve measured out my life in package
deliveries and what’s in bloom. the time is now
thirteen boxes past peonies. if you can locate my
whereabouts on a calendar, come get me. i don’t
know where i’m going, but i need a ride.

Poem copyright 2023 by Evie Shockley. All rights reserved.

See more poems from Evie Shockley on The Fight & The Fiddle: “from the infinite alphabet of afroblues,” “décima on the fabric of time,” and “composition.”

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