A Card Catalog

American Wedding
BY ESSEX HEMPHILL

In america,
I place my ring
on your cock
where it belongs.
No horsemen
bearing terror,
no soldiers of doom
will swoop in
and sweep us apart.
They’re too busy
looting the land
to watch us.
They don’t know
we need each other
critically.
They expect us to call in sick,
watch television all night,
die by our own hands.
They don’t know
we are becoming powerful.
Every time we kiss
we confirm the new world coming.


What the rose whispers
before blooming
I vow to you.
I give you my heart,
a safe house.
I give you promises other than
milk, honey, liberty.
I assume you will always
be a free man with a dream.
In america,
place your ring
on my cock
where it belongs.
Long may we live
to free this dream.

Essex Hemphill, “American Wedding” from Ceremonies. Copyright © 1992 by Essex Hemphill. Reprinted by permission of The Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

Source: Ceremonies (Cleis Press, 1992)

peach couch

When your brain’s all topsy-turvy, maybe try saying an atheist prayer to Maira Kalman for principles of uncertainty, elements of style.  Her tonic always puts my bleh mood to rights again. Just one page in her books unwrapping layer upon layer of pastels that would make Key West turn lime-green with envy. Alternate worlds a synesthesiac could love. The jumbliest, grittiest New York street scene or claustrophobic prewar apartment refracted into sweetly-tilted planes of color. Slightly tart like a clever friend in conversation, the artist’s hand. It imprints on your heart a cheery feeling. How oddly-shaped and yearning our human lives are! Stretched out on the peach couch with one of her books    smoothing out my jaded eye    Just as nice, I think, as meditating or going to yoga. Hello to dourest old dowager, absurdist but apropos pronouncements, hoarder-neurotic’s humor, we meet again. Everything so like life on this island and couch. Except a just-mixed zest of tenderness like the most beautiful pistachio ice cream, rose-water macaroon. 

Kenneth Koch

And I was with you again
But we were going in different directions.
We met and started to go in the same direction.
Then once more our paths crossed and we met again
Under the believable blue of a traffic light where we first met
The village coconut who had forbidden our meetings
But now we meet all the time.
“You go this way and I’ll go that,
And when we head back we will meet
And declare our love”

This is the foundation of the emotions.
The sky is our parade ground and our glove.
The fish in the bay are the slaves of their time and not of art
But somehow our emotions can become their emotions.
This is the beginning of Realism. This is the end of the ideal.
This is the degree of front and back.

Self reblog: Running while female

storiesfrommyclass:

When I moved to New York the summer of 1993 and showed up at summer camp, Manuel Scratch welcomed me with a challenge: “I’m faster’n you.  I dare you to a race.  Meet me at the oak tree tomorrow.”  As I pushed off from the starting tree the next day, I pushed back voices in my head of my father telling me that women are not as fast as men…and  didn’t compete with men in the Olympics…I remember him saying it wouldn’t be fair to us.  I must have known this rule didn’t apply to every single contest between particular boys and girls, else I would have told Scratch he’d rigged the race.  I could have saved myself the stress of trying. 

Instead, I raced at a theoretical disadvantage because of who I was, and unsure what it would mean if Scratch crossed the finish line before me.  What quantities or attributes were being compared or tested by the task? 

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