Joking Matters
Dear Reader,
Tell me - what does your yearbook page look like? Does it give shoutouts to your best friends? Does it sneak in code for the year's most legendary party? Show off your ride? For the governor of Virginia, it features horrifying snapshots of his "friends" (because he can't quite remember if it was him) showing off in blackface and a KKK costume.
So often when incidents of racist terror sprout up like this, people distance themselves from the incident. Oftentimes, they claim it was "just a joke." Poet D.A. Gray writes this week, "Joking. / The word creeps through the vents / to the point we wonder if we heard what we heard." It can be easier to question our own instincts than to believe that something is as bad as it is. Of course, Maya Angelou covered how to best respond when she wrote, "When people show you who they are, believe them the first time."
Believe the white governor of the state that presided over Charlottesville when he tells you that he feels blackface and Ku Klux Klan costumes are not at absolute odds with his leadership role. Believe that he could believe this. Believe that many, many people will agree with him. Believe him. And then show him the door.
Elle Aviv Newton
Editor
Joking
By D.A. Gray
Shadows are slinking down whitewashed walls
and the hum of a lone buffer begins to make
the floor look breakable as glass. We are stopping
at the end of today to hear the covert voices
materialize, as if it’s safe to say Joking.
We stand in the doorway looking up one side
and down the other for the source, wanting,
wanting to be in on the joke.
The long, thin
day’s end of the shadow stretches like a snake
across the empty hall, and it seems to say
Joking.
From the direction of a shot ringing out
(or is it a cork?) a voice says Joking; from the sound
of sirens (police say an anonymous tip) we hear
Joking; there’s the sound of a slap on the stairs
(or is it a window shutting?) punctuated by –
Joking.
The word creeps through the vents
to the point we wonder if we heard what we heard –
or Joking.
And soon it rises out of our lungs, we who step
out of our office, our school, over the man face down,
and past the once familiar friends and coworkers
slipping into the cracks, past the sound of a child
sobbing begins to sound like laughter.
Joking we say,
looking over shoulders, out of the corners of eyes.
The Shutdown is Over - For Now
By Marianne Gambaro
I didn’t cry
until I heard about the mice.
Not when I heard about
minimum wage TSA workers
who couldn’t afford child care or gasoline.
Not when I saw
federal employees lined up outside food pantries
in some Depression-era montage.
Not when I heard about people
being called back to work without pay
like 21st century indentured slaves.
Not even when I heard about the potential
of ruined credit ratings and lost homes
that looms when paychecks are denied.
I didn’t cry when I heard the interviews
with NASA workers whose daily data collection
had been interrupted and compromised.
I didn’t cry when I heard about
small ancillary businesses—
gas stations, luncheonettes, preschools—
suffering losses they would not recover.
I almost cried when I heard
how our national parks
were profaned and vandalized,
iconic Joshua trees destroyed
and how disappointed children
who had made the pilgrimage
to our nation’s excuse for a capital
were denied the long-anticipated
sight of pandas or spacecraft.
No, I didn’t cry
until I heard about those damned mice—
when the government researcher
was finally permitted to reenter her lab
and found her whole team
of tiny white research assistants
dead in their cages.
Sixteen-Year-Old Unmade Bed Sells for $4.3 Million Dollars
By Erica Goss
You can’t unsee this:
panties, crotch-up, copper
ring of menstrual blood,
morning-after bubble-pack,
ashtray full of butts,
half-empty vodka bottle,
and the remnants of a condom,
like a hoop a tiny tiger
might have leapt through.
She says, “I don’t have
periods anymore.” Holds up
a slender belt and laughs. “This
used to fit me.” And yet
how thrilling: someone
almost died for love
on that dimpled sweaty bed;
someone cried out,
dumbfounded with pain; someone
paid four million dollars
for that kind of glamor,
that awful joy: the killing desire.
From the Archives
When the World As We Knew It Ended
By Joy Harjo
We were dreaming on an occupied island at the farthest edge
of a trembling nation when it went down.
Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched
the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry
by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed
by a fire dragon, by oil and fear.
Eaten whole.
It was coming.
We had been watching since the eve of the missionaries in their
long and solemn clothes, to see what would happen.
We saw it
from the kitchen window over the sink
as we made coffee, cooked rice and
potatoes, enough for an army.
We saw it all, as we changed diapers and fed
the babies. We saw it,
through the branches
of the knowledgeable tree
through the snags of stars, through
the sun and storms from our knees
as we bathed and washed
the floors.
The conference of the birds warned us, as they flew over
destroyers in the harbor, parked there since the first takeover.
It was by their song and talk we knew when to rise
when to look out the window
to the commotion going on—
the magnetic field thrown off by grief.
We heard it.
The racket in every corner of the world. As
the hunger for war rose up in those who would steal to be president
to be king or emperor, to own the trees, stones, and everything
else that moved about the earth, inside the earth
and above it.
We knew it was coming, tasted the winds who gathered intelligence
from each leaf and flower, from every mountain, sea
and desert, from every prayer and song all over this tiny universe
floating in the skies of infinite
being.
And then it was over, this world we had grown to love
for its sweet grasses, for the many-colored horses
and fishes, for the shimmering possibilities
while dreaming.
But then there were the seeds to plant and the babies
who needed milk and comforting, and someone
picked up a guitar or ukulele from the rubble
and began to sing about the light flutter
the kick beneath the skin of the earth
we felt there, beneath us
a warm animal
a song being born between the legs of her;
a poem.