Poetics Presents

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Poetics Presents

Carol Malley

Carol Malley was poetry editor of Peregrine literary magazine, and received a commendable award for a poem in the William Penn Warren contest sponsored by New England Writers. She earns her living as a journalist for the Republican. A poet and fiction writer, she has had worked published in numerous literary journals including AIM, the Larcom Review and Freezer Burn Magazine, and in anthologies, including When a Lifemate Dies: Stories of Love, Loss and Healing (1997) by Fairview Press, and Inside Grief (2001) by Wise Press. She leads writing workshop for inner city Latino teens and low income women and is the facilitator of several on-line poetry workshops. She has published three books of writings by inner city teenagers.

What I Learned from Langston Hughes

Poetry speaks in the voices
of ordinary people,
pulses in the blood
of cotton pickers,
creaks

on the planks of boats
that carried Irish,
Russian, Polish
to Ellis Island,

roars in the salty swell
of refugee loaded rafts,

utters the language of near do wells,
hums the folk talk of slaves,
kick dances on inner city streets:

da dum da dum

Poetry tells the story
of your mama, my Mom,
someone else's mother

ironing,

making her own starch from silken flour,
testing heat with blistered water,
the bubble of sizzle.

It's the pulse beat of remembering
Daddy kissing
the neck of a bottle,
the gurgle and slurp
of liquid lie,

the sound of your sister,
my brother,
someone's lover
sliding into home plate,
hot and dirty,
or sliding long and down
Yo Mon, you got a dime
down.

Poetry sings the rolling pen
as it flattens dough,
the melt of butter on hot bread,
women and men doing that thing
they do when bodies thrum.

Poetry sings
in crusted, sugared over dreams
realized, deferred,

exploded.

Copyright Š2003 by Carol Malley