Spring 2009, Volume 6

Poetry by Raina J. León

To Survive

we can't talk about this
rule number 5:
students shall not talk
about charges, sex, drugs, gangs or anything
not related to school
life is not related
how you got here
how everyone got here
whole neighborhoods
all their children        what does this say about injustice
we can't talk about this
you will go downstairs to your cell
I will sit a teacher without a student
we can't talk about you
just about Macbeth or Things fall apart
how you can relate to both
we can't talk about that
just the texts and I'll give the examples
spies turn their heads slow from ceiling corners
we can't talk about anything
forget that you can talk
just listen        just listen
i want to save you        am i as guilty of trying to be a savior
how do you save yourself when silent
mouth clamped shut
we can't talk about this
no questions        no answers
Miss León?        no        "Here is what you have to do"

Beyond Edible

With a portable blow torch, you have to burn
the hair from the dog, so that the yard smells
like a crematorium raised up on beauty salon ashes.

Before the skin dimples over in scabs, you bare
the knife and slice quick along the belly.
Pull out the guts of growl and play, all the memories

entangled in dripping wet intestines. That you take and throw.
Know that this was no street-spawn. This was someone's
pet—someone rich from Chapel Hill or just passing

through the state—and laugh as you slide the carcass
back on its spit, drop it down and have the little thugs
crank it around. This must be a Southern thing,

eating a dog. No, Miss León, this is a nigga thing.
You just let the boys keep spinning that puppy, add
a little barbecue sauce. When it simmers and pops,

and when the meat just about falls off the bone, tear
off a leg, chew on that. I swear you will lick your lips.

Vox Populi

1 Dontarius wants to pick apart the cost
of learning about Jews when he is Black.
He deals with his own holocaust
every day. What of Middle Passage past?
Some now lord over tenants, prod and boss
the poor while they forget Hitler's attack.
Come to my ghetto. Taste sauce, raspberry sweet,
that child-blood makes while white men laugh and leap
.

2 We are brothers—I have no brothers—in pain.
We defeat our missions by shouting "See,
my struggle is worse." I was in prison
before I was born. What can you tell me
about defeat?
We are all citizens
of this changing world. It s no mystery
that all sorrows haunt us all. How we must
be vigilant...In ghettoes, we trust.

3 I want to read about my people. Why
am I always reading about someone
else? I feel like I am a firefly's
wing: translucent, yanked by finger and thumb
just to be thrown away. Absence is a scythe
against my mind. No wonder I am so dumb.

I look in my library to find him books.
I am silenced by nothing, crannies or nooks.

4. My mouth soils itself, becomes a landfill
as I drag out the reasons. No pretty
and perfect way of explaining overkill
across continents, how by learning, we
resist. By committee, they sit stilled
in their seats, ears perked. Heads nod that they agree.
We must do research to see the connections.
Books, please?
Released before I can bring them.


BIO:  I write to you from the Vermont Studio Center, pulled from the politics and engagement of my normal life. I am a teacher and poet in North Las Vegas and deeply entrenched in the use of the arts as activism, but here I am allowed to be writer with no other hat to wear. What I am sending is straight from this latest work centered on my previous work as a teacher at a youth detention facility.

I've had some small success within poetry. I have been published in OCHO, Poem. Memoir.Story, Xavier Review, Salt Hill Journal, Black Arts Quarterly, African American Review, Poetic Voices without Borders, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade, Growing Up Girl: An Anthology of Voices from Marginalized Spaces, MiPoesias, AntiMuse, Farmhouse Magazine, Furnace Review, and Constellation Magazine among others. My first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols, was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book Poetry Prize (2005) and the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize (2006) and will be published by WordTech Communications in 2008. I am also a proud graduate fellow of Cave Canem (2006), member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, board member of The Acentos Foundation and editor of The Acentos Review.