Dreaming Into 2020 Like...
Breaking poetry by Richard Garcia, Christen Noel Kauffman, Candice Kelsey, Alyx McCoy and more.
Dearest readers,
I hope you were able to celebrate Dr. King Day with something magical. I usually purpose it toward listening to as many of his speeches as I can get my hands on. King's words weave well with January energy - a time for renewing radical visions and audacious hope. And this year, young as it is, we have been needing it. From Iran to Australia, it feels as if the world is unraveling - and here in Oakland too, where over 4,000 homeless people go to sleep beneath bridges and alongside freeways every night.
But today I want to remind you that sometimes our unraveling is a becoming. In November a group of homeless black mothers called Moms4Housing occupied a vacant property in West Oakland. The house was owned by Wedgewood, a company from southern California that flips homes in the Bay Area. Housing costs and homelessness have skyrocketed with the tech boom, yet it is estimated there are 6,000 vacant homes in the city. When the mothers endured a militarized police eviction replete with mini-tanks and AR15s early last week, it felt like the city had dammed a mighty stream and looked the other way.
But on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the newswires bent into a rare and beautiful shape. It was announced that Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf had brokered a deal with Wedgewood. Now the house is being sold to Moms4Housing with help from the Oakland Community Land Trust - and the city has first right of refusal on all of Wedgewood's Oakland home sales. And so we begin this year at Poets Reading the News with one remarkable message made possible by these women: Dreams can come true.
Below, Christen Noel Kauffman pens lines for a tiny marsupial conservationists fear was extinguished in the Australian bushfires. Michel Krug, Brian Wallace Baker and Sheree La Puma explore the developments in Iran. Candice Kelsey conjures deep empathy for Meghan Markle. Alyx McCoy explores the function of police bodycams. And Richard Garcia knows the revolution won't be televised - but will it be indifferent?
Yours in poetry,
Elle Aviv Newton
Editor-in-Chief
Poets Reading the News
P.S. We've put together a lovely little look back on 2019 at Poets Reading the News on Medium - take a look here!
The Latest Extinction
By Christen Noel Kauffman
Australia is burning, and daughter
I think about the rare dunnart
in its wobbling through charred leaves.In a mother’s way, I want
to spread my body as a bridge
to carry it safely to coast,but the fire would still burn us all.
Even you, my girl, in all
your new skin and loose teeth.I will try to hold the dunnart’s fur
on my tongue, tell you how
it mirrored the soft brown of sand.When I describe its front pouch,
how the body resembled a common
mouse with ears tipped like a fox,you will wonder if it was ever real.
You will draw it in blue, give it wings
as you would any mythic thing.I watch this inferno like a war,
tally the death tolls of koala and kangaroo.
Still, there are the empty burrowsand lists of names I want to carve
into trees. Is this the worst part? This
instinct to pay homage by cutting into flesh.Daughter, I break when I imagine
the dunnart’s young jumping into sea,
as children might jump from a burning house.I check the smoke detectors outside
your room, listen for the crackling
pop of a fire in our walls.
Hassassis
By Michel Krug
Assassins aren’t just rakish men
who blend like medicine
in a glucose drip
Questions For My Sister
By Brian Wallace Baker
I want to ask you more questions:
Was your base hit?
How close were you to the blast?
But I don’t because I know
they limit what you can say
Breaking Apart
By Sheree La Puma
lined up, one by one, body bags like matchsticks are waiting for the snap of wings
Megxit
By Candice Kelsey
for Meghan Markle
This poem is the press
This line the Daily Mail
This caesura – your father
These letters your letter
This stanza breaks
Like the shutter
Of a super telephoto lens
And this alliteration
Is afterthought arising
Around Archie – your agony
These metaphors
Are your brown eyes
Elegant script
Under saddened brows
Washed over
By flattering streams
This verse is free
Of meter and rhyme
Donning its fancy title
Like your cocktail hats
And this stanza resembles
The Pont de l’alma tunnel
Unlike your feather-soft heart
Of new wife and mother
This poem is not vulnerable
And will never hear your words
Thank you for asking
This poem is the press
Writing you without you
Breaking lines like stories
No one should read
Big Picture
By Alyx McCoy
Cops just make for sturdy scalpels in this emergency room we call home.
The Revolution
By Richard Garcia
The revolution will be so quiet, so slow, so insidious, that no one will notice when it happens.
From the Archives
What I Think When I See #alllivesmatter
By Abigail Carl-Klassen
Where I come from people post memes of Martin Luther King
with “Never Rioted” and #allivesmatter stamped under his folded palms.
In these pictures he is always unmoving—silent—alone. Never linked
at the elbows with other protesters. Line after line shutting down traffic
from Selma to Montgomery—marching. Never yanked away from a sit-in.
Hand smashed flat against the lunch counter in resistance. Arm twisted
behind his back as police push him down the street. Never with handcuffs
locked around his wrists. Never a megaphone pressed to his lips. Never
his raised fist. Never slunk behind the railing of the Lorraine Hotel. Never
his blood scrubbed from the balcony. Never the crowds laying hands
on his open casket. Never his funeral wagon pulled by two mules. Never
the garlands and candles. Never the cities alight in the days after his
murder. Never with the hashtag, “Riots are the language of the unheard.”