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Jennifer Bradpiece is a graduate of Antioch University's BA program. While at Antioch, her focus of creative writing led her to complete an internship at the literary arts center Beyond Baroque in Venice, California. Her work has been published in the pagan anthology The Pagan's Muse, as well as in journals and zines such as Media Cake eMagazine and Poetic Diversity. She has work forthcoming in Mad Poets Review

Waking in 2007

In sleep you struggle toward something,

each dream an unread passage from a book you can’t remember.

You wake up drowning for water,

leaning on the wrong side of sleep.

You think sleep should be a town with its own watering hole,

a spacious factory, clean, uninterrupted, and self-sufficient.

You wake to another pedophile in your morning coffee.

An Amber Alert in your evening wine.

Small stories of fear with no context

until the next hurricane makes headlines without history.

Your country is still at war.

This hits you sometimes like the knowledge of a stove left on

as you drive at the midway point of a long trip.

You switch on a public radio station.

Somewhere a dictator is deposed.

At home journalists are jailed dubiously and torture

is more domestic export than exotic import.

You turn the radio off; these stories evaporate as if dreamt.

A former model and aspiring million heiress dies

a mysterious expected death.

You hear about this twenty times before noon.

All day middle aged women lament

the sadness of a life’s end, a public figure

they might have called “slut,” “tramp,” or “whore,” days before.

And you think, everyone loves a dead girl.

You sleep with a Blue Pit Bull pressed up against you,

more likely to cure Avian Flu than maul flesh.

Across the sea the breed has been banned

by a country whose Western ancestors are remembered

as rejects and convicts, who, you think,

might have more sympathy for the unwanted feared.

But you know what fear can do to a country.

How when economies or buildings topple,

regimes rise that find specific logic in abstractions.

Today, recognition of a past genocide

is more inconvenient than unpopular war.

And you think you hear America sigh as it spends itself into debt:

an individual right, a collective legacy. While China

wakes from its dream of communism to find

capitalism crudely knit onto backs of workers

who may have missed the change.

And America slips back into dreams of delivering democracy,

waking now and then in an intricate bed of Empire.

It stretches and rolls further on the right mumbling something about God.

You share this with your psychiatrist.

She suggests medication.

You warn her, this pill better be a levy that won’t break,

last longer than the effects of an atom bomb,

turn you into a town with its own water hole:

an oblivion more uninterrupted and self-sufficient

than sleep.

Gravity

The day penetrates, painfully blunt without you.

Cells protest, the awful choking head

is dragged from dreams to dawn,

bubbling toward awareness,

that gasping transition.

Always the desire to be unhooked,

wanting nothing of the light,

crisp air, possibilities of sky.

The line of consciousness tightens:

ties me not to the day’s dock

but to a dinghy, that hardly holds the weight

of where you used to be.

Time

Time is an old man with Alzheimer’s.

History hinges where wrinkled wrist meets gnarl of wood cane.

Fate and Destiny hum brightly, dispersing air into

birds named Promise and Presumption.

The gauze lady at Time’s side is Luck.

She sweeps an arm, this one lithe and pale,

a moonbeam slicing through wooden boards, a rotting shed.

Even the succulents wither.

Breath slides flat on the floor beside the heart, still as laundry.

Her other arm ascends, fully fleshed and ruddy.

Skies split open, constellations bloom, spill

like laughter echoing between Possibility and Circumstance,

the tuning forks of Chance twining

a melodious decay.

And it is always always midnight here

and Time becomes an old man in constant forgetting

and Luck is always the lady reminding,

sometimes through velvet smile

sometimes through clenched-tooth whispers, changing the story,

the story always always changing.

§

Three poems by the American Man of Letters, Countee Cullen

by John R. Guthrie

Countee Cullen, 1903-1946 ( Source: Google Images)

The one reference to blacks in SC public school textbooks of my generation was in the required 7^th grade course based on the Sims South Carolina History. Said text’s only reference to blacks was to note that chattel slaves of the Palmetto state were so delighted with their status that they felt compelled to frequently burst into song, dancing as they did so. Doubtless my fascination with Countee Cullen’s poetry when I discovered it as an adult was enhanced by my abysmal ignorance of black history.

Cullen began writing poetry at 14. He was recognized early on as a student of exceptional brilliance and promise, winning a city wide poetry prize while still a student at Manhatten’s prestigious Dewitt Clinton High School. His prize winning poetry was widely reprinted. He graduated from New York University Phi Beta Kappa. The first of his many books was a poetry collection, Color, published the same year he graduated. It met with considerable critical acclaim. He then took a masters degree at Harvard. Cullen became a noted figure of the Harlem Rennaisance along with such luminaries as Langston Hughes. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1928 and studied abroad for two years. He married Nina Yolande DuBois, daughter of W.E.B. DuBois. Playing out a tragedy reminiscent of the cowboy protagonists of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, after two months of marriage Countee traveled to Europe--not with his bride, but with his alleged lover Harold Jackman. Cullen and his wife divorced the next year. Cullen did eventually remarry; to one Ida Mae Robertson. He died of uremia on January 9, 1946. Three examples of his poetry follow:

Incident

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

Yet Do I Marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brains compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

From the Dark Tower

We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit,
Not always countenance, abject and mute,
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;
Not everlastingly while others sleep
Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,
Not always bend to some more subtle brute;
We were not made to eternally weep.
The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,
White stars is no less lovely being dark,
And there are buds that cannot bloom at all
In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;
So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,
And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

With appreciation to the original publisher The Harvard Square Commentary (see ”links”).

The Chickasaw Plum - Volume IV - Number 12 - December 2007

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