Clean thoughts

Linden Avenue Literary Journal published the excerpted poem in their 2017 February issue (no.57).

Read the rest there. My poem, Had I...?, on a page among great company:

Anecdote on IG

Harlem Sweeties by Langston Hughes

Have you dug the spill   

Of Sugar Hill?

Cast your gims

On this sepia thrill:   

Brown sugar lassie,   

Caramel treat,   

Honey-gold baby   

Sweet enough to eat.   

Peach-skinned girlie,   

Coffee and cream,   

Chocolate darling   

Out of a dream.   

Walnut tinted

Or cocoa brown,   

Pomegranate-lipped   

Pride of the town.   

Rich cream-colored   

To plum-tinted black,   

Feminine sweetness   

In Harlem’s no lack.   

Glow of the quince   

To blush of the rose.   

Persimmon bronze   

To cinnamon toes.   

Blackberry cordial,   

Virginia Dare wine—

All those sweet colors   

Flavor Harlem of mine!   

Walnut or cocoa,   

Let me repeat:

Caramel, brown sugar,   

A chocolate treat.   

Molasses taffy,

Coffee and cream,   

Licorice, clove, cinnamon   

To a honey-brown dream.   

Ginger, wine-gold,   

Persimmon, blackberry,

All through the spectrum

Harlem girls vary—

So if you want to know beauty’s   

Rainbow-sweet thrill,

Stroll down luscious,

Delicious, fine Sugar Hill.

Oh, if one could leave this world for a while...

@_waterlu

I have an Instagram account now.

In 2015 only.

Anyway, let's connect!

link: Lu de Leeuw

Re-read

White Oleander, Janet Fitch (1999)

This book is one of the very best in lyrical prose.  It opened a whole new world for me as a writer when I first read it about four or five years ago.  It was like finding home: here was a book of fiction in my lap written in a way I had only imagined (and thought unlikely to exist) up until the time.  Everything I had read before was kept "clean, cut" formulaic, "the language simple", but Fitch married poetry and prose in a most splendid manner.  More importantly to me — like Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, et al. — she was another writer who affirmed my pen; they continue to tutor me in the ways of writing not-so-beautiful stories beautifully, daringly.  The grotesque, the ordinary, and seemingly minor can indeed be depicted picturesquely.

This excerpt is in the voice of the novel's narrator Astrid about her poet/scorned/murderer mother: 

"I didn't want to remind her that I was the reason she was trapped in electric bills and kid's shoes grown too small [...] She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot.  I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress."

Ain't Google nifty?

"Changing Places in the Fire"

The wind in the trees

arrives all night at a word.

And the man who can’t sleep

and the man who can’t wake up

are the same man.

A memory of the ocean

torments the trees, a homesickness.

And the man who watches shadows of windblown leaves

and branches on the curtains,

the man who believes

a single page of the falling leaves restored

may be carried back to the living,

can’t tell God’s blind hand from God’s seeing hand.

The wind, stranded in the branches,

like a memory of fire

tells the oldest stories of Death

disguised as a traveller, or overlooked familiar,

friend we shunned for less

faithful playmates.

And the man who’s afraid of the dark

and the man who loves the dark

are the same man.

A man who’s afraid to die,

he would piece the tree back together,

each part numbered and labelled:

branch, leaf, breath, cry, glance.

A man who’s afraid to live,

he thinks to himself: Postpone all morning bells.

The ore lies awake inside the rock, a dream

of origin pealing.

The bread that rises in a house that fails,

a man weeping.

The happy grain who elects the oven,

a man laughing.

And it isn’t until the wind pauses

that he thinks he knows what it says.

It isn’t until the man dismantles

wind, trees, listening, does he know

there is wind, there are trees, and no listening

but a dream of listening, a dream

with infinite moving parts,

hems, pleats, train cars, recurring stairs,

an imperfect past, a rumoured present,

figures multiplied inside a mirror.

It isn’t until he begins to wish

to sing

the whole flower

of his breathing, does he recognise

himself, a blossom mortally wounded on the stem.

—      Li-Young Lee (Behind My Eyes, 2008)

Bookshelfie

This is me being Internet trendy.  The bookshelf belongs to the library of a certain think-tank.

Library picks

Clockwise, from the left:  Flying Home and Other Stories, Ralph Ellison (1996); What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politcs, Adrienne Rich (1993); The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991); Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje (1976); Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

Currently reading...

The Book Thief, Markus Zusak (2005)

"When she came to write her story, she would wonder exactly when the books and the words started not just to mean something, but everything."