I’m honored to have my poem “Bud Powell’s Brain” included in the new anthology Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era.
From the book’s description: Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era is an edited collection of critical essays and poetry that investigates contemporary elegy within the black diaspora. Scores of contemporary writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order to militate against the white supremacist logic that has led to recent deaths of unarmed black men, women, and children. This volume combines scholarly and creative understandings of the elegy in order to discern how mourning feeds our political awareness in this dystopian time as writers attempt to see, hear, and say something in relation to the bodies of the dead as well as to living readers. Moreover, this book provides a model for how to productively interweave theoretical and deeply personal accounts to encourage discussions about art and activism that transgress disciplinary boundaries, as well as lines of race, gender, class, and nation.
The book is available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle editions.
A bit about the Amazing Bud Powell, and the poem, below.
Bud Powell’s Brain
Was it that hard-boiled cop’s unindicted Nightstick
that scrambled your system, sending misfired messages
into the soft-wiring that polices ungovernable impulses?
Or was collateral damage already done? Chemistry coalescing
the onset of sickness, like a chick pecking through its shell?
Uno Poco Loco: an epitaph for stillborn souls that can’t
escape the yoke of adversity; Nature’s always improvising,
uninterested in excuses, or anything that could plausibly explain
the roots of Squares—and circumstances of those serving them.
Poached forever by the eyes of the White and the Other
Color, printed in numbers on top of paper pyramids:
E Pluribus Unum—a private club you’re forbidden entrance,
even decades after your death, a pitch black Ever After
that tastes and smells like vanilla extract and crackers, Jack.
This world’s never been accommodating to hard cases, helpless
to understand languages they’re confusedly fluent in, and
like a conjoined twin, it smothers thoughts and steals oxygen
from a disobedient brain, inflamed by anger or alcohol or
something stronger, risky antidotes for those inscrutable squawks
you’ll transcribe for anyone, willing to open their ears
and better still, their wallets:
Fat fortresses dispensing the only justice
served after last call.
Something you can score, like love
or junk in any back alley.
Unless you can’t
afford the going rate.
Which means, like always:
You’re broke.
