 Arlington Literary Journal an ejournal also known as ArLiJo, is located in Arlington, Virginia and is sponsored by Gival Press. The intent of ArLiJo is to feature a variety of authors/poets/artists from around the globe whose work provokes readers to contemplate issues, etc. The work chosen promotes understanding and sensitivity across borders, even if initially the work may cause one to take a double-take. Staff Editor-in-Chief, Robert L. Giron Special 2020 Black Women Poets, edited by Teri Ellen Cross Davis Special 2020 Poetry Month Bilingual (Spanish/English) Edition, edited by Luis Alberto Ambroggio Special 2019 Women in Translation Month, edited by Katherine E. Young Access each issue by clicking on the Issue No. to the left of this homepage (scroll downward). Please note that publication in ArLiJo will be by invitation only, starting August 1, 2019. Any work published shall remain the property of the author/poet/artist and for any previously published work to appear the author/poet/artist must still retain the copyright of the work. Please note that ArLiJo is an ejournal. Payment for publication is a book from a selection of books listed below which have been published by Gival Press. Books Available to ArLiJo Contributors NONFICTION: Sexy Liberal! Of Me I Sing by Stephanie Miller FICTION: Dream of Another America by Tyler McMahon Ghost Horse by Thomas H. McNeely Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman by Elizabeth Harris Show Up, Look Good by Mark Wisniewski That Demon Life by Lowell Mick White Twelve Rivers of the Body by Elizabeth Oness The Cannibal of Guadalajara by David Winner The Best of Gival Press Short Stories ed. by Robert L. Giron The Second Act by Tim Brown Barrow’s Point by Robert Schirmer POETRY: Poetic Voices Without Borders ed by Robert L. Giron On the Altar of Greece by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 ed by Robert L. Giron Songs for the Spirit by Robert L. Giron On the Tongue by Jeff Mann Bones Washed With Wine by Jeff Mann The Great Canopy by Paula Goldman Sweet to Burn by Beverly Burch Protection by Gregg Shapiro Honey by Richard Carr 12 Sonnets for the Zodiac by John Gosslee Adamah: Poème by Celine Zins |
Special Black Women Poets Issue Edited by Teri Ellen Cross Davis Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 139 Introduction These poems represent an intersection in the lives of four women-four poets, four Black women, four women of color. Their work explores the painful loss of history, the intimate aches of family, what makes a family, and how we see and respond to the world around us. Blackness is not a monolithic culture-all of our experiences pull from and create the African diaspora. These poems speak to the moment of Black Lives Matter and beyond it, because next week, next year, twenty years from now, we will still be Black women and what we do and how we love will still matter. We are in this fight for the long haul-toiling in the shadows, yelling to be heard. I say the names of these women as a thank you to them for allowing me to share their work: Saida Agostini, Paulette Bette, Carolyn Joyner, Alexa Patrick. Vous êtes ici (French for you are here) In a Paris museum, a cool blast lifts her white cotton dress, billowing round her cinnamon legs. C’est Marilyn Monroe says the man next to her. A smile charms his laugh, she hastily smooths down the unintended peep show. Snapshot: Rain at the Rodin museum, sculptures glisten and glint Snapshot: Hotel room’s plush velvet curtains, the color of spilled wine The hairy mound of a bush, framed Elevated—The Origin of the World. A Black woman molded in bronze shouldering Africa as Four Parts of the World. Snapshot: A small café, a sip of coffee with cream, silk clouds slip down her throat Snapshot: A perfumerie, discovering scents that will ghosts her footsteps for decades to come. The best body is often retrospect. She traveled over 3,000 miles. A man compared her to an icon—visibility is more than being seen, it’s not being erased. On every map, she remembers to look— From a more perfect Union, to be published in 2020 by Mad Creek Books and winner of the 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. Copyright © 2020 by Teri Ellen Cross Davis. About the Author Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, to be published in 2020 by Mad Creek Books and winner of the 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. Her first collection, Haint, was published by Gival Press, and won the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She is the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize winner and a member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective. She has received fellowships to attend Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Community of Writers Poetry Workshop and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work can be read in many anthologies and journals including: Not Without Our Laughter: poems of joy, humor, and sexuality; Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam; and the following journals: Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Mom Egg Review, Natural Bridge, Poet Lore, Harvard Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Tin House. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. Saida Agostini Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 139 we thiefed our name translate this into any tongue and you will have a story of white smooth skinned evangels with hot palms and unnamed dark women ready to fuck in the embrace of open fields. one uncle tells us of free black men running past the threat of trinidad into guyana, another of corsica still more speak of ships, another a big rambling house more confused then its yellow children. everyone is clumsy with our blood this—family trees can prove: look for a root and sap comes wandering none of us will ever know our mothers just burst forward from job’s great black head lying and feasting. Copyright © 2020 by Saida Agostini. granny teaches her children how to eat poison the lessons starts in Essequibo. the summer of 1965: a crowded kitchen fat with pleading, another yellow gal, 20 with three children all hungry and wailing mummy where daddy? 21 days spent restless waiting and waiting by an unforgiving door and empty larder, restless steel pots clanging on the stove and it goes on like this: with a father shamed home after three weeks of sweetness with another woman, back to his own starving children nursed on boiled white rice spiced with cassareep. his own belly big from love while his wife spins time into fields of obeisance, all this love that cannot be made into survival without him. three weeks of hunger becomes love the women he fucks ghosts and so on, until she can’t eat without that lump in her throat that makes her want to bawl out onto the street screaming me husband don’ wan’me me husband don’ wan’ me watch her banging and banging these pots cooking down truth into an inchoate stew domesticate hurt into a monster we trust more than our own eyes. help us still love a congregation of men and the brute country that made them until we while away whole life times singing hymns that make us fat with belief he doesn’t beat me it’s the evil eye why leave him this litany sang as she watches the blossoming bruise on my own mummy’s arm twenty years later while I play house at their feet, set a plate brimming before her and say eat meaning let your children live. Copyright © 2020 by Saida Agostini. good favor —after great great granny’s photograph like any good higue, i was beautiful once: this picture is proof enough of blood, proof that something nameless can and will haunt you how one generation’s griefs can abide for a thousand more my own daughter could not speak of me for the century of her life without tears that water blessed me as did her silence your mother would tell you don’t ask great granny about her mummy and so you obeyed, just sucked back words into your throat where everything beautiful and grieving can be caught. this kind of quiet is an impossible love. black folks don’t get to own their bodies, why should their names be different? I was murdered by my husband’s hand and now even in death you let him get the last word. my picture is a talisman perched in every last one of my grandchildren’s homes. me bonnetted and severe in stiff colorless splendor: let this picture be a lesson, the yeast that finally makes you rise up against any fool who tries to say they know you how you lived because they believe they know how you died Copyright © 2020 by Saida Agostini. what love is —after Phillip Levine you are 8, holding hands with your little sister in the back of your father’s car, watching as he slows the engine down to a bare murmur and pleads with your mother marching down the highway, the flowers on her hat trembling like her hands as she walks away from her husband as if she could walk away from this life and all she borrowed to buy it. you will focus on your father’s pleadings the empty promises to treat her kindly, stop sleeping with other women, and your sister will start to wail asking is mummy not coming back home no one has the breath to answer her, least of all you. in your baby wisdom, all you can do is wish beyond heaven that she won’t listen to daddy’s lies keep marching away from that car and be happy without you you’ll look at the dead buck on the side of the road, next to your mother, as she stops to listen to your father’s lies, the deer’s neck smashed, his body still beautiful, the fur soft, flesh ripped exposing a dark black machine so soft, stinking and fragile that years later you’ll remember the risk of loving something that wild. what it gave up to run across that road, the sheer dumb luck it held for the thousands of days it ran riot over a shrinking forest, and the men determined to kill it, halve its neck and embrace the head as a trophy. one day, you’ll be brave and ask your mother why she stayed why she kept her children and raised them with a man who thought taming was an act of tenderness. you won’t listen to the answer Copyright © 2020 by Saida Agostini. About the Author Saida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet whose work explores the ways that Black folks harness mythology to enter the fantastic. Saida’s poetry can be found in Barrelhouse Magazine, the Black Ladies Brunch Collective’s anthology, Not Without Our Laughter, and other publications. Her first collection of poems, just let the dead in, was a finalist for the Center of African American Poetry & Poetics’ 2020 Book Prize, as well as the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her first chapbook, STUNT, will be released by Neon Hemlock in the fall of 2020. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, Saida has been awarded honors and support for her work by the Watering Hole and Blue Mountain Center, as well as a 2018 Rubys Grant funding travel to Guyana to support the completion of her first manuscript. She lives online at: www.saidaagostini.com. Paulette Beete Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 139 Poem for a Pandemic of Dead Black Bodies —for Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd step on my neck break my mother back to ancestral grief ashed in black mouths wail the names of the dead wail their true names, wail beloved beloved belovedbelovedbelovedbeloved ash filling mouths filled with grief, filled with howl filled with rage, filled with hurt filled with wounds of whiteness threatened, threatening white words that mean know your place know your grief has no synonym in white words that burn black bodies to ash falling falling falling falling falling brown skin bludgeoned and whipped whip light as an anvil whip light as a sledgehammer whip light as history falling full of white words words words words out of reach out of reach out of reach black freedom out of reach out of reach out of reach black justice out of reach out of reach out of reach the end of grief white time ticking like a bomb hungry for black bodies white bodies thrive like grief thrives in black bodies kidnapped by white rage broken by white rage black bodies as justice for white rage whiteness burning black bodies cities burning like black freedom burning in black mouths choked with ash Copyright © 2020 by Paulette Beete. all the gods go Boom! 4 little girls go Boom ribbons go 4 little smiles God goes— 4 little girls fly out of his hands Boom! 4 little girls fly into his hands Boom! 4 little girlbodies Boom! go their voices Boom! goes God’s wail listen to God keen Black bodies become Boom! cinders on his tongue grit in his eye Boom! go God’s hands empty lonely Boom! goes Bombingham flash of white hands flash of Black girls flash of —— That first Boom! still howling how long Black bodies holler Oh! Ow! Boom! sing Boom! clap Boom! wail Boom! catch Boom! die Boom! God Boom! catch God! oh God! oh Boom! —oh God! Copyright © 2020 by Paulette Beete. Study for A Man in Relation to His Child In this poem my father is an absence. In another poem, I might hardly miss him. In another yet he is alive and well or he is a man without a daughter -sized space within him. He is an ordinary man. These are only guesses. I do not know what truth sounds like, if that is what’s knocking at the door. If I knew how to write who my father was I wouldn’t write this poem. If I could apprehend my father in the language of fathering I wouldn’t write this poem. I do not know how tall my father is. I do not know how much he weighs. Sometimes he wears a mustache. Sometimes he doesn’t. How should he look in this poem? Which of his shadows should I hold onto? If I bring my father back to life how can I make myself appear life-sized in his eyes? Copyright © 2020 by Paulette Beete. Some of my best friends are white . . . Some of my best friends are white. How do I betray myself in loving them? What of this Black self do I amputate? I don’t doubt that they do love me and I doubt that they can love me. What gymnastics of whiteness make my Blackness bearable? How have I undone myself? In the mouths of my White friends I am unnamed like in a book I read that told how someone can destroy you if you give them your true name. I see now I am their pet. No— I am their beloved. We are separate but unequal in our love for one another. They hide in their whiteness. I hide in their whiteness. Even if I can palliate the infection so only one drop of whiteness remains —am I still stained? Each time I pull a white friend to my breast do I colonize myself again again? Copyright © 2020 by Paulette Beete. About the Author Paulette Beete’s poems, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in journals including Crab Orchard Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Always Crashing, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, among many others, and in the anthologies Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC and Saints of Hysteria (with Danna Ephland). She has also published two chapbooks of poetry: Blues for a Pretty Girl (Finishing Line Press) and Voice Lessons (Plan B Press). She has been a Winter Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and several of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Maryland. Carolyn Joyner Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 139 Nothing but A Ragged Wound* —after Natasha Tretheway Like the moon that night, my son wanes into a likeness of his child’s past self, as if returning to a place of new beginning where once he had begun. He wanes into a likeness of his child’s past self. Soon, earthly dreams will ink black, as he returns to where he’d once begun, becomes the breath he will have lost. Soon, earthly dreams will ink black. I wonder if he’ll meet surprises upon his death as he becomes the breath he will have lost, closes his gaped mouth to pose a smile. I wonder if he’ll meet surprises upon his death when his face lights up, a tropical sun beneath, his gaped mouth closes to pose a smile. A big air walks into my sorrow. When his face lights up, a tropical sun beneath, I begin to ride the red possession of regret,* beg for a big air to walk into my sorrow, erase memories of me trying to wash him from my womb. I begin to ride the red possession of regret— for him having a father who never saw his good, me trying to wash him from my womb. I am lament’s muted dirge. His father never saw his good. I retreat into the valley of the shadow, lament’s muted dirge, my child’s past self-waning like the moon that night—my son. * Gwendolyn Brooks quoted phrases Copyright © 2020 by Carolyn Joyner. Umbilical He dies with a tube in his stomach, inching tawny liquid into a bedside bag. The color changes when he drinks strawberry vitamin water, and finally, when he doesn’t. I sit in the blue sleeping chair next to him, a sentinel guarding body fluids like treasure. Each hue in the dark rainbow tells a story. The yellow-red beckons me to float its segue to copper-brown. My head begins to dizzy, limbs turn to dust; I know the ruddy swirl he leaks is mine— the blood I’d given him when he lived inside, that ushered him into manhood, let him make mortgage deals, groove to Chuck’s go-go. The supple tube it pulses is umbilical, cancer the placenta to which it is attached, like a mother’s belly in delivery turned inside out, giving birth to death. Copyright © 2020 by Carolyn Joyner. Feelin’ Red kinky and cool, saucy and irreverent, a little wicked even, yet, mesmerizing— a blend of call-back-the-dead red smoldering in a cognac and cashmere voice and 5-inch stilettos spiking the samba dance floor—an aroma of ginger with whiffs of mango chutney and cinnamon at its edges. Red as in, “Yo, baby, you rockin’ those jeans.“ Talkin’ ’bout the delicious hugging an apple’s shine, the blush in freshly spanked cheeks, a sacred sister giggling deep, speaking in wild mimosa tongue. I’m that ribbon kiting a brazen breeze, silken and surprising, my body’s rooms home to a hellcat itch to bray at the moon (in the daytime), boast, I let the dogs out—unbleached American guerilla dogs, tethered to the cave of my black skin, barking house-on-fire red, about to leap. Copyright © 2020 by Carolyn Joyner. The Big Lie Dying wasn’t something you’d do. I wouldn’t let you think you were because I couldn’t, because nothing would make you dead, because you were the life that would beat death, because if it Glory, glory . . . came looking, I’d hide you behind my back, set fire to its chill. There was no talk of its long legs, our chests puffed-up with its foul breath. I let truth rage behind invisible walls, knowing’s hallelujah! vaulted niches. The Big Lie. I lived it—visceral armor for lungs, heart, gut—gift of second skin that kept me safe inside, didn’t fall away until long after you were gone. His truth . . . It was the only way to get out of bed, put off tomorrow’s long-suffering today. is marching on. Copyright © 2020 by Carolyn Joyner. About the Author Carolyn Joyner, a Washington, DC poet, examines life’s themes in her work through the use of contemporary and traditional form. She has been featured in various literary magazines and anthologies, among them, Revise the Psalm, Obsidian, Pleiades, Gathering Ground, Beyond the Frontier, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly. She has a Master of Arts degree in creative writing from The Johns Hopkins University, is a Cave Canem and Hurston-Wright Foundation fellow, and has been awarded artist fellowship grants from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Alexa Patrick Featured in ArLiJo Issue No. 139 The Black Men Outside the Waterfront Safeway Catcall Me & I’m sure it’s not me who they call for; D.C. winters make any contact, flickering lash, a fire to put your hands over. They stand like barren trees, crooked teeth shiver like hood castanets, remind them of worlds other than corners. I wonder who they have at home to be tender to, if they paid the bill, if this small moment of devotion runs like a furnace. In this city of rush hours and new buildings, of no one here is from here anymore, even the air becomes brittle with lonely; maybe, they yell I love you, just to hear the echo. Copyright © 2020 by Alexa Patrick. My Mother Once Flattened My Father’s Tires because my father kept driving on the grass after my mother told him not to, and it only a few months after the divorce finalized. She, anticipating his disobedience (with a puncturing joy) delicately placed 11 nails on the barren area and awaited his return. I still hear the rusted words crowd the rental car, swell enough to drown Stevie Wonder’s A Time to Love, cooing in the background. I knew the Toys R’ Us sprees, the large pizzas, had deeper roots yet to surface each feeling more apology than play, my father’s face cracked like a drought, the lack of sleep, something running him over. My mother was just fine. Wanted my father gone, but the lawn to keep the flowers he planted. Bulbs knotted, stubborn fists refusing to sprout, or take direction. My mother took consequence into her hands, tilled it with green thumbs, tells the story to this day behind laughter. My father drove us back after two days at the Sheraton, after swimming pools, movies, a small vacation from a home to which he never fully returns. Every time he does, my brother and I grow taller, like weeds, he says, mourning what he can no longer tend to, has only half of, a garden of grief pressed at his skin. Again, he dropped us off, ran over the grass, backed out of his once-driveway. Shaking her head, my mother watched him try to resow what power he had, then leave, confident, like she wouldn’t eventually make her point. Copyright © 2020 by Alexa Patrick. Ode to the Hickey Some call it childish, result of clumsy, eager, not watching your mouth, or its mess, a silent come here finishing in a loud, deep purple. When it is honest it is all breath, and spit, and now, and now, the blood beneath the surface, whispering a sweet nothing. A smaller me might have worn scarves in summer just to hide what my skin wanted, when boys thought me too Black to bloom a bruise. Now, no material compares to the silk of a proud lover, who claims me, shouts against my neck a panting hue, a pendant to proximity. I trace the edges in the mirror, thank all the boys whose secret I was. My grown self gladly trading shame for public side eyes, wolf whistles, wrapped like garments around my throat. Copyright © 2020 by Alexa Patrick. Sugar Gathered like sunflowers at the breakfast table, six sisters share a midnight, wash down 7Up cake with the kind of laughter reminding you they are in the choir, bells in their throats like hallelujah, the sweetest thing. This, before their hands cracked from prayer and spanking babies, when they’d pinch blood into their cheeks, fix the lipstick gracefully announcing the small mole they all kept at the corner of their mouths. So pretty, even their sharpest words were frosted. I come from sugar the way a hymn comes from grief or praise; I have so many ways to return: Grease my scalp with the same oil I use for pans and find myself in a Pittsburgh kitchen, forget everyone’s name and weep because I love them, dream of pistols under pillows, wake up bitter about husbands I don’t yet have. Every morning rises a manicured finger pointing home. Geraldine went first, winked at my mother from the casket. Willa passed on her 102nd birthday. They all know how to make an exit, make us mourn in confection. Their grace, not dead, heirloomed, like beauty mark or recipe, there even in the cavities left behind. Their stories coat my teeth; I, too, am beside them. Never alone or lost, just alive, with their names trailing like crumbs to God. Copyright © 2020 by Alexa Patrick. About the Author Alexa Patrick is a singer and poet from Connecticut. Alexa is a Cave Canem Fellow and 2019 Head Coach of the D.C. Youth Slam Team. She has held teaching positions through Split This Rock, The University of the District of Columbia, and the Center for Creative Youth at Wesleyan University. She has also coached the slam teams of American University and George Washington University for the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational. You may find Alexa’s work published in The Quarry, Gargoyle, CRWN Magazine, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. |
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