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."

Last night, whilst

Last night, whilst casually reading:

I happened across the passage of the .jpg excerpt I've had stored on my phone for ages:

I think I must have Google-searched quotations and phrases from the story after I had seen the film some years ago.  Generally, I prefer to read the book first.  However, when I happened upon the movie I hadn't known it was based on a novel (Ishiguro 2005).  A good forty-five minutes into the film and I instinctively knew that the picture was too good to not have literary origins.  Google confirmed my suspicions and the rest, as they say, is history.

Freewrite throwback

How big is my brave: Deciduous

Link: A Poem

ITCH Magazine: A Journal of Creative Expression (Issue #12 Taboos) published another one of my poems.

A leap of honesty

Link: A Letter

The incredible lightness of self-preservation...

It's like yoga for your sanity.

The last book that made you cry?

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell ...

Had my face awash with tears.

Currently reading...

My Mrs Dalloway (1925; this ed. 2000) copy I copped for ten bucks

I'm sitting on page 35 of 165.  It has been a slow read thus far as the narration itself is both here and there.  The last five or so pages read have finally introduced me to the mortality conscious nature of the novel; yes, this is subject matter that can be grey and intimidating but it's never too early in the day to contemplate life and agency.  

I watched The Hours earlier today, it is based off Virginia Woolf's depression and eventual suicide as well as the story of Mrs Dalloway and its connection to three generations, Woolf's included.  I liked the depiction and foresee how it will positively affect the duration of my reading.  The writing, as expected, is splendid indeed.

Seeds in the Black Earth (1988)

The above is a South African compiled anthology worth nearly 200 hundred pages of glorious, glorious poetry edited by a certain Brenda O'Brien... A book I happened to happen upon in my parents' library during the recent holidays.  The works span both the domestic and international, contemporary and classic.

I wonder if I'd be as committed to literature were it not for my folk and the literary environment they raised me in.  Whenever I visit home I discover a new world of wonder they had paved for me (and my siblings, of course) — 'tis a gratitude infinite.

10 Books That Stayed With You

The assignment: "List ten books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take but a few minutes and don’t think too hard — they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you."

1) White Oleander - Janet Fitch

2) Black Skin, White Masks - Frantz Fanon

3) The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

4) The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

5) Q&A - Vikas Swarup

6) Buck - Tamela Larimer

7) Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

8) The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

9) Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson

10) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver

Wow, this was incredibly difficult and compiled very hastily.  So many titles came to me the further I went down the list, but I stuck to putting down those that came to first and are a little more significant to me in some way or the other.

"Be kind to yourself while blooming."