There’s No Luxury in Poverty
My family was poor government cheese free box of food for Thanksgiving sleeping on a cot until I was in my twenties couldn’t afford a bed roaches & rats as roommates emergency room visits drained limited funds doctor or medicine or rent or food going out was a treat movies or dinner could only have one no pets barely could feed ourselves new clothes only on birthdays or back to school don’t ask for too much mama didn’t have it like that don’t beg don’t envy what others had even if they rubbed it your face mama was a proud woman a product of a different era she knew how to make do with what she had we learned from her how to make a dollar out of fifteen centers even when we went to beg hungry tomorrow held the promise of something better we just had to hold on
White Knives, Blue Tears & Red Whips
The whips fed on the blood of my forefather’s backs. Soaked it up like needed sustenance, leaving the drops for the soil
We cried into the sea, bodies floating there like black buoys bobbing atop the waves, the ships they leapt from sailing on
The moon revealed escape attempts. Brown bodies shining like dark stars in the light. Hounds at their heels.
Our people fought in wars & were used as shields for white bodies, sacrificing themselves in the hopes of helping their families back home
We have a history of sacrifice & of forgiving. It may gain us a special place in Heaven but for now, we suffer a Hell on Earth
Extraction
Through the ribbon of veins I seek my cellular relevancy my DNA an exact science the essence of me an elusive soul an incomplete marker of my actual self a form beyond the physical I am damaged & ignore it I need repair like a drone hovering in a broken sky the tools to fix me far from here
Response to the Ode to the Happy Negro Hugging the Flag
after Anais Duplan & Robert Colescott
The pulpit turned me away
rejected I was rejected rejected
They would not let me look for you
in their holy sanctuary, searching
for you for you for myself in you
gone from the pulpit into the white light
God is God is what is God?
where is he? where is she?
black lash against my black body
my arms are up up from the concrete
Base holding the pole, finding you
there in repose black repose I can’t
look away even as the lash bloodies
my hands my arms my black body
in repose as the gray concrete turns
red, you are still in repose such stately
repose, your black legs straddle
the white pole like a lover
in the heat of a summer’s night
black lips touching black bodies sweating
in repose I still reach for you, fighting
the lash thirsty for my black skin
as the flag waves I see stars I see stars
my blood stripes on the concrete
Shirley Jones-Luke is a poet and a writer from Boston, Mass. Ms. Luke has an MFA from Emerson College. Her work examines the many forms of trauma experienced by the Black body. Shirley was a 2018 participant at VONA, Tin House and Breadloaf Writer’s Conference.
Signal Mountain Review - Volume V, Issue I 