How to Survive Trump in 2019
New poetry by Jane Yolen, Angela Amailo O'Donnell, Sandra Fees, Raymond Luczak, and more.
Dear Friend,
This week I am very pleased to introduce my new assistant editors at Poets Reading the News. A huge welcome to Rachel Nolan, Michel Krug and Catherine Strayhall!
As Trump hypes crowds into chants of "send her back!", as Jews shut down ICE headquarters in D.C. to cries of "never again means now," as Rep. Ilhan Omar tweets Maya Angelou's Rise in fiery defiance, it seems that poetic brevity is everywhere, taking shape in the worst ways and the best. And poets have something to say about that.
Jane Yolen shares fields notes from Washington's local swamp. Anton Yakovlev interrupts his regularly-scheduled poetry to contemplate Trump's message to immigrants. Angela Alaimo O'Donnell shares a stunning collection of border songs for the women, men, and children held in the camps. Abby E. Murray reflects on patriotism in 2019 - and what we must do to survive it. Sandra Fees explores the ethical and historical argument for reparations. Yvonne Daley examines Trump's little-credited immigrant past. And Raymond Luczak brings together two pivotal histories in his poetry for Stonewall and the moon landing.
Yours in poetry,
Elle Aviv Newton
Poets Reading the News
Brumation
By Jane Yolen
I have learned a new word today—
brumation—a kind of hibernation
where alligators in southern swamps,
sensing the water is about to freeze,
stick their noses and half those mighty jaws
above the water line, and hang suspended
like senators in the chamber
waiting to see when the president
will melt.
A Complete and Total Catastrophe
By Anton Yakovlev
I am sitting in a poetry workshop trying to describe
my surroundings in a short observational exercise
confined by the beastly heat to the air-conditioned
conference room where snacky chocolates mix
with the smell of cement and rustling pages
flap awkward wings like dirty seagulls in a storm
under windows too high up to meet at eye level
lighting hesitantly the silhouettes in the room
and all the treats on the table eclipsed by the most delicious
biscuit in a box someone brought from the farmer’s market
and as I check my phone to find out how much time I have
I see the newsflash about the man presiding
over the entire country tweeting such insane shit
all the biscuits change color and I am fifteen again
newly arrived in the United States and I love it
but there are some things that just don’t add up
but if I ask what the fuck they’ll just tell me to
go back to my “underdeveloped country”
if I don’t like it and what can I say to that
and in my dream that night I am trying to explain
the current political climate to a gray-haired
comic book character version of Abigail Adams
and my words make sense up to a point but then
she just starts whipping me with her recreational assault rifle
in between bouts of replanting flowers along the runway
trampled by George Washington’s army until
I wake up and fumble for some nice strong coffee
but it’s milkshakes milkshakes everywhere
Border Song: A Mercy of Triolets
By Angela Alaimo O'Donnell
Border Song #1
Say, stolen child, the world from which you’ve come.
You can’t go back, although you know you must.
Your father grieves, your mother is undone.
Say, stolen child, the world from which you’ve come.
You, their only daughter. You their only son.
All their dreams are now turned to dust.
Say, stolen child, the world from which you’ve come.
You can’t go back, although you know you must.
Border Song #2
They confiscate your rosary when you come.
I cannot go to sleep without one.
Thumbing each bead until the night is done.
They confiscate your rosary when you come.
There’s nowhere to hide it. Nowhere to run.
It was my dead mother’s. Now I have none.
They confiscate your rosary when you come.
I cannot go to sleep without one.
Border Song #3
I came with just a hairbrush and a watch
to keep my beauty and to keep track of time.
They took them both the morning I was caught.
I came with just a hairbrush and a watch.
Food was what I craved. Work was what I sought.
Now none of these fine things can be made mine.
I came with just a hairbrush and a watch.
I’ve lost my beauty and lost all track of time.
Border Song #4
My child sleeps in a cage and yet he sings
like the birds of paradise we left behind.
Knowing nothing of the fear the future brings
my child sleeps in a cage and yet he sings.
The children in the states live like kings.
The lies they told us haunt my waking mind.
My child sleeps in a cage and yet he sings
like the birds of paradise we left behind.
Border Song #5
I dream of corn tortillas and black beans
and eat the food the white men bring to me.
White bread and bologna. Canned green beans.
I dream of corn tortillas and black beans.
Old and poor, a man of little means,
I took my buen provencho beneath the banyan tree.
I dream of those tortillas and black beans
and eat the food the white men bring to me.
Border Song #6
Seventy-six women locked inside a cell
made for twelve. This is a little hell.
We cannot bathe. We cannot stand our smell.
Seventy-six women locked inside a cell.
Some of us are sick. None of us is well.
Seventy-six women dying in a cell
made for twelve. Welcome to our hell.
Border Song #7
I lost my country. Now I’ve lost my mind.
I did not know the price would be so high,
that they would hate me since I’m not their kind.
I lost my country. Now I’ve lost my mind,
despise the skin I’m bound in. I have consigned
myself to exile in a place where I will die.
I lost my country. Now I’ve lost my mind.
I did not know the price would be so high.
Read more....
How to Survive Patriotism in 2019
Abby E. Murray
Make your grief a bed
beside the fireplace
using a cardboard box
and the old pink towel,
even if you have no
fireplace, no towel.
Grief is not safe
where you’re going
and you need your grief
to survive. Carry
as little as possible.
There is so much
to pick up, turn over,
hold in your hands,
more than you expect.
Then go. See what is,
bones and all, especially
the bones, untethered
and wet—press them
hard in your palms.
Dig up what was
in the absence of trumpets,
the bruising of color:
once, somewhere,
someone tried to be good.
In order to survive
you must weep
even if you have no eyes.
See? Your grief
would burn alive here.
Your palms might not
make it. Your eyes
might not make it.
That’s okay. Palms
are limited to pain
and non-pain, eyes
do their work in the gut.
Remember the earth,
how it breaks no promises
by making none.
Drag yourself home
through the debris,
even if there is no home,
even if there is no you.
Take up your grief,
even as it rattles in your arms,
sick without you.
Speak to it. Out loud.
It will hear you.
It will pant warm air
and fold itself up
against your cold skin.
Reparations
By Sandra Fees
Flapping, unleashing the winds of change
like the curvature of raven wings,
like a heartbeat, a drumbeat:
This is celebration
what it would mean to intone
a new vocabulary called reparations
to a soul-rifted nation.
There are things that can be reset, resewn, repaired—
a broken bone, ripped sleeve, cracked fender.
But what of the ones left to die
in streets or prisons?
What of broken beginnings, unholy crossings,
the right to the soil?
Counting, recounting, accounting
leaves a white silence
of what might have been.
40 acres and a mule.
This is celebration
what it would mean to intone a new vocabulary
called atonement to a tone-deaf nation.
Unpaid, the past sweeping into the air
like choirs of birds or angels.
If paid, what price to sing again a new freedom?
How to count the past:
250 years of slavery
90 years of Jim Crow
60 years of separate but equal.
Could we exhume the past from the past:
land seizures, redlining, cheap labor–
uncover the roots, chart a new course?
Repairing a heart or an ocean
is like sailing in reverse
like letting the heart beat its steady drum.
This is celebration,
the heartbeat, the drumbeat,
the wing-flap
what it would mean
to intone a new vocabulary
called reckoning to the wreck of
lives not just bodies
to take back the right to the soil
airing secrets that have enslaved
us all to a debt
to a hushed biography of consequences
a balance accruing:
40 acres and a mule
a heartbeat, a drumbeat
tapping the collective memory.
Valeria
By Yvonne Daley
You pray they would catch a break but, as some say,
That’s life, terrarium life, wetter than ever, sodden actually
As a planet tries to cleanse itself, the sky a shroud
Filled with loss: the Camp fire, tornado debris, volcano dust,
A father and daughter washed upon the shore of the Rio Grande.
How much more can we take: the tears overflowing
The banks of a river never created to be a border
A sky so full it weeps upon our shoulders
So heavy, we are always at the flooding stage, sorrow
That should penetrate our comfy homes, leaks from
The nightly news, the weather report, the front page
Drowns out the curses and threats hurled upon humans
Fleeing El Salvador for a place that could spare a blanket,
A toothbrush, a helping hand.
Should one blame the father, the mother for wanting something
Better for the child, themselves? Death was not what they envisioned
As they traversed the bitter deserts, tried to ford a river
Just as your own mother, age 14, crossed a different border,
Was called a herring choker, left school to escape the taunts,
Scrubbed other people’s homes, made a life of labor and love
While another man’s mother fled the tidal flats of Scotland,
Her pebbledash home, married a man made rich from fleecing the poor,
So coarse Woody Guthrie made a song about his racial hate, how she
Wore her own “dynamic orange swirl” of hair, drove her son
In her Rolls Royce as he delivered newspapers. The president would brag about
His teenage job, never the mother with humble roots, English her second
Language, buried with the wealthy in All Faiths Cemetery while another mother
Watched her husband and their daughter drown, so close to the American dream
They could almost touch the bank, almost step from the water.
They named the girl Valeria, which means Strength.
She was two years old.
One Small Brick for Queers, A Giant Leap for Humankind
By Raymond Luczak
Through the gauze of time,
the moon has seen it all
here on Earth: the evolution
of ape into hominids,
the gestures and grunts
of human language, the myths
surrounding our tiny spot
under the swirl of stars,
the gasps of death and beyond.
Once they realized they might be
God after all, they began naming
with the intent to possess. Theft
sparked one war after another.
They conjured a new mythology,
not yet with pages but footnotes
ratcheted with piles and piles
of bones drained of marrow
still clotting our footprints.
When they discovered they couldn’t
control homosexuals, they killed.
They got creative. They burned
Jeanne d’Arc. They outlawed
sodomites. They guillotined
cross-dressing traitors. They lobo-
tomized effete inverts. They gassed
pink triangles at Dachau. They black-
listed suspected faggots.
In 1969, we were just queer street kids.
We had run away to New York City
and discovered we weren’t orphaned
after all. We weren’t related to each other
in those dingy Mafia-owned gay bars,
or cruising for anonymous sex in the alleys,
but our blood had the same family name.
Some of us happened to show up at Stonewall.
Just another summer night, right?
The moon, having seen it all, knew
what was supposed to happen, but no,
she didn’t want the same old ending
this time. She blew us nelly queens,
blessed with the power of makeup and spite,
a kiss so fiery that it launched rockets
inside our bones. We picked up our first bricks
and lobbed them against those puckered faces
who had haunted us every night.
Not even a month later Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin had the audacity to leap
across the moon’s face, an affront to her veil.
She is grateful that no one bothers her
these days. Yet how many more of us,
no longer barricaded by dogma and laws,
must pray to bounce lightly across the lunar
surface of our dreams into each other’s arms?
We are still astronauts aglitter with our first bricks.