You guys have weeks worth of presents coming! I had the honor of guest editing the winter issue of Kweli, and over the next few weeks Ill be sharing the work from the issue. It was a pleasure to work with old friends and writers whose work is new to me and with the amazing Laura Pegram. I cant wait for you all to read everything. In the meantime, my introduction to the issue is linked below, and here is a teaser of the work you will find in it: Wanting to kill someone felt like a type of love. Before they caught him, Florence worried about Andy as often as his own mama might: cotton soft thoughts, like was he fed? Was he bloodied? Was he well? Was he sleep at a bus stop? Did he remember to bring a jacket? Bet he forgot. -From Ain’t That Good News, by Britt Bennett Named after the trumpet, after the sound that comes from all the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world. We named you after Monk, too, because sometimes you have to: stack legends in a single body -From Elephants in the Fall, by Dwayne Betts Eddie didn’t hear the word mercury again until months later at Saint-Sébastien when Sister Thérèse pointed the class to a diagram of the solar system. Mercury was the planet closest to the sun. There was no life on its surface, and there never would be. When Eddie asked why, Sister Thérèse said it was simply too hot. When Eddie asked why it was so hot, she said that’s what the Lord intended for Mercury. The next day, the three workers fell from the launch tower, but the spaceport lurched ahead, its first rocket under construction in a giant warehouse that loomed over the clear cut like a monolith. -From Mercury, by Chris Arnold What am I trying to say is— you want a birth of us and them. A source of savagery, a culprit for political correctitude, you want me dour in the photos though my hide is no longer a trophy; you want an endgame, for our seventh generation to be our last. Of course, we all want a good price at the roadside Indian crafts stand. -From Even Hiawatha, Even This Poem, by Kenzie Allen “They seem to want to be happy here. No. Strike that. They need happiness here, like how my father loves that we no longer receive mail from relatives and friends, my mother deciding to leave her collection of letters behind. “Hindi na natin kailangan ‘yan”—those unwanted things—“We’re moving forward!” suddenly an accented English and my mother pulling a box of things away from me, how I just stood there and let her throw out those little notes and handmade gifts my classmates had made for me after I had stood in front of the class I’ve known for years and said: “aalis na po kami, pupunta po sa ibang bansa”—what many aspire to hear—how everyone had rushed to my side saying: “buti ka pa!” and “uy, congrats!” as if I won the lotto or something.” -From Ren, by Lystra Aranal I want to trigger your every reward. Rock-splayed lizard of your bone-dry, longhorn of your dire cornucopia. I want you to bring your rope to me, and hang me by my neck, like bad foxes nailed twelve to a fence. -From Meredith, by Kenzie Allen Umm-Hadya told Ni’ma that she respected fabric more than she respected most people. Think about it, she’d told Ni’ma, we are constantly in contact with some form of fabric. When are we not? Ni’ma had spent a few days after this examining Umm-Hadya’s theory. When she was sitting, she noticed that she could feel both her skirt and the fabric of the sofa. When she slept, her skin touched her sheets. When she showered, she couldn’t stop the shower curtain from sticking to her wet skin. Babies were swaddled in blankets. The dead were wrapped in burial cloths. When Ghassan had come to bury his first wife in Burj el-Shamali, Ni’ma attended the burial. It was incredibly unfair, Ni’ma thought when she saw Ghassan’s wife being lowered into the ground, to escape these twisted alleyways and the bombs from every direction; to make it all the way to America, only to die anyway. -From A Field Trip, by Randa Jarrar With a fuel tank full of testosterone, the procreative drive wedged like a brick against my throttle, I break to bail from atop my lover mid-orgasm—my basting seed a road winding away from her waist. I don’t feel guilt, but I say sorry for the wreck of me on her skin. This maneuver is the choice of men who want to feel but not to father. -From Rhythm, by Kyle Dargan “You saw Romeo and Juliet?” Ms. Keyes said to Mom, and I see her start to realize that she hadn’t met Mom at the show. “It’s not a Christian play,” Mom says to her. Ms. Keyes sat back in her seat, like she can’t believe it. “But, oh, Mrs. Stafford,” she says, “Oh, but DeSean was wonderful in that part. I am so sad you feel that way.” Mom shifts in her seat a little bit, and looks down at her hands. “We make sacrifices, you see,” she says to her hands. I wait for her to finish the thought with “For the Lord,” as she usually does when she’s telling me why I can’t do something I want to do. But she doesn’t say anything else, just lets that sit all by itself. -From DeSean, by Shannon Reed She’s a Negro dove so her song sounds like a man divining scratch-offs, false discerner of his own fortunes. She cups possibility, puts it in a pocket, throws it in the garbage, and purchases another. -From A Dove Sings For Young Lovers, by Ladan Osman Phyllicia speculates that Dylan’s heavily theoretical work intimidates hiring committees. When asked to describe his dissertation, she remains silent for what seems like a long interval. During the next interview she reads excerpts from an impenetrable abstract that mentions Hegel 23 times. Dylan was raised in a working class family in Florida. His father is an underemployed “but hard working” contractor and his mother is a nursing home administrator. Dylan grew up with a sister and a fraternal twin brother. Phyllicia visited Dylan’s childhood home near Tallahassee once when they’d been dating for two years. Her meeting with his family was so unpleasant that they moved to a motel and truncated their stay. Dylan’s father never looked her in the eye and his brother, who is married to a Cuban-American woman, asked Phyllicia what black people wanted to be called these days. Phyllicia has never met Dylan’s sister, who cut ties with the family several years ago, and moves between ashrams in the Northwest. -From Black Women Academics and Their White Male Partners, A Study in Seamless Contradictions by Asali Solomon There must have been at least one of you who wrote, using one of our rumored lost writing systems, words you hoped one day I, Hmong poet of the 21st century, would read -From To a Hmong Poet of the Old Country by Andre Yang For a while, my sibs and I had contemplated the China Coast, the only English speaking home for the aged in Hong Kong. Mum’s Cantonese has never been fluent, and, as the prions continued their maniacal play doh twists and turns, her tongue lost more Cantonese—her fourth, mostly illiterate language—than her literate third one, English. The China Coast held bingo Fridays at which my Hong Kong sister and I became regulars for a time, calling the bingo that is, as recompense for regularly bringing our mother. Sometimes I even played the piano for their sing-alongs. But each time we went, Mum would gaze at the other residents, including a colleague from her youth, a doctor at the hospital where she had been a pharmacist-in-training, and, after winning at bingo, would ask to go home. From Home Base, by Xu Xi Neither of us knows the best prayers but we can pretend, we can let them strain in the back of our throats as melody. -From To Abel, by Ladan Osman
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 23:35:59 +0000
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