Ode to Oaktown

I wired my sorrows into Klieg lights and let them shine all over Oakland,
city of Black Panthers and Hells Angels and General Strikes,
driving from the Bronx in a green Toyota Corolla searching.

Was it freedom, or a film I wanted to make something of myself,
took refuge in Oakland’s Lake Merritt,  caught breadcrumbs and fish,
a wayfarer dressed in boots and dreams of Fifth Avenue Peace Parades

to a West Coast of two-story buildings and pastel houses
and summers where the sun did not bother to get up until noon.
Okay, I said to myself, you have to begin somewhere.  That was my beginning.

Oakland Raiders snatched the SuperBowl and I discovered I was pregnant,
sailed a stroller around Lake Merritt and through her Garden Center,
past houses with calla lillies that hugged grey gas meters

even though they were ugly. Oakland took off her clothes slowly
like a woman who wants to know she is loved, following trails in Joaquin Miller
filled with monkey flowers and second growth redwoods,

nuggets of neighborhoods and librarians, the Oakland Museum
surrounded by a moat of golden koi where children entered into culture,
art, and people who hung on walls together.

Let me park my car one last time and walk to the Paramount,
remember the old hotels and faded curtains stuck on brass rings,
where restaurants and condos have become the hope of a business community

that wishes for homicides to fade like fog in the morning,
a place I’ve come to know with gunshots and fireworks,
the way my history has been pressed into a new release.

–from Lenore Weiss’s West End Press collection, Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island

from Spirit Birds They Told Me by Mary Oishi

feel good about yourself
early in the morning
you can hear the birds chirping, whistling,
right there right there in the yard
listen to them see how
light they are hopping about

they know the spirits are here
early in the morning before sunrise
in the gray light the spirits hover about
go out and welcome them
savor the morning air
savor the stillness of little bird noises

they wait for you: the spirits of your grandpa acoma
the spirits of your uncles
the spirits of relatives you never knew
they know you they marvelled at your birth
they wait for you saying: come out
greet us, our little ones
come out, we want to see you again
they hover waiting in front of the house
by the doors, above the windows
they are waiting to give us their blessing
waiting to give us their protection

go out and receive them: the good spirits in the gentle-bird morning
they hover singing, dancing in the clean morning air
they are singing they are singing.

–from A Breeze Swept Through (West End Press)

for Sassy

I should have been alarmed
when you started speaking in equations
numerical manipulations
and your stories didn’t add up
human expression cost too much
so you began sending me
bank statements instead of love letters

you,
the one I trusted with my parents’ retirement
and my children’s future
promised to be there when I needed you
that we were in this together
then bailed

with every red cent
I worked so hard for
to keep you in the black

I should have known
you would bleed me for everything I own
when our conversations
became computations
before you stopped speaking to me at all

you looked at me differently
I was the first customer of your mom and pop’s shop
you were dowered in store credit
carded

‘cause you looked too young to qualify
for your first small business loan
you loved government assistance then
and only love socialism for the rich now

your eyes glinted like a castrated bull
you began seeing me
flush with rouge and sweat and stress
I was your employee then
did what was best for “the team”
took the pay cuts
gave the benefits up
because what was good for you
was good for “Us”

you traveled
left me home
with kids and student loans
to man your phones
while you said

“Baby, I’m only gon’ be gone for a few months.
Once we get these factories stacked up, I’ll send for you.
I’m doing this for us.”

Soon you had more employees there
than here
younger and cheaper than me
barely legal
for you and your off shore whores

the last time I saw you
you did not see me
you crept into our apartment
at 18 Broad Street
to grab your accounting
take it back to your island bank
without so much as kissing me on the forehead
son and daughter laying in bed beside me
you didn’t even kiss your futures goodbye

because you didn’t want to wake them
but now they are awake
screaming for you
to leave
you look at me differently now
like an obstacle
like you could have been more
without taking care of my freeloading ass
like you could have had more
without overpaying wages to my lazy ass
like you could have made more
without the rules
without thinking about other people besides yourself
without me nagging you about human rights
environmental protections
and genocide

you made more shit
than we could possibly need
more than we could possibly greed
when you ran out of a middle class to feed
you were made paranoid by your dogs eating each other
and made the competition
me

I should have seen it coming
when we began breaking dishes and bedroom doors
over which Presidential Candidates we’d support
you wanted the ones you could buy
I wanted the ones I voted for
you began acquiring houses
by selling them to people you knew couldn’t afford them
you picked up a gambling problem
kept lying about some shit
that didn’t exist on the stock market
then one day you got drunk on your own stories
told so many lies you forgot where they started
almost got stung
ended up buying your own junk
bonded out of jail just in time to OD our economy
put that stuff so deep in your vanity
our hopes and dreams
collapsed with your arteries

but there’s always a silver lining
silver I’ll never put in your possession again
I was in an abusive relationship with a bankster
before you
but because I promised myself that never again
would I believe anything a junkie says
‘cause I seen you selling since
new car, new suit, new parachute,
looking like a bonus
yo ass could almost pass for a man, but I know:
if there’s one thing I learned
seeing the entire financial industry on its knees
begging for a piece of my tax dollars
like it would save their lives
flatlined on the floor of 11 Wall St.
black three piece suit,
not a drop of blood
after being shot in the head twice

still alive
while my hands
cup my insides
as the floor of my country floods
with all ten pints of me.
if there’s one thing I learned

it’s that corporations aren’t people
because people die
in the streets.

33-year-old Nazarene
with no kids
at a time when
men fathered at 19
and grandfathered at 38

no Mary Magdalene
no Mary Kate and Ashley
no Mary Jane

yes,
there were questions
in heaven
bigger than
does it exist?
and it does.

there was living proof
every time you opened your mouth, Etta

like a Black Sabbath
you had a voice that would…
that would make God
rest on the seventh day

just like God

patting himself
on the back
at the sound of you
we admire
stare at you
like our own

like our own reflections
spidered in the mirror
hungover
because our Sunday Kinda Love
didn’t make it past Saturday night
fractured

leaving us with questions
questions like
“Why can’t I sing like that!?”
and “I thought she was in recovery?”
questions like
“Why does it seem like
the most broken lives
give us the most solid voices?”

the most complete
most whole
most holy voices
Jamesetta Hawkins
a name only a teenage mother could love
and she did

You and Jesus
had more in common
than single mothers
and invisible fathers

called your mom
“The Mystery Lady”
and imagine
they pro’lly thought
the same thing

about Virgin de Guadalupe
and her kid
with the immaculate childhood
a different kind of prodigy

had you turned around
and split
like your name

Etta James
is who you was
after you went blonde
after you were told
to take advantage
of your light complexion

after you agreed
to dye everything
except your eyebrows
‘cause you wanted to
look like a “bad girl”

you bad girl!
bad enough to
make B.B. King
sweet on you
at 16
in addiction recovery by 21

gone 5 days
before your 74th
dementia
but still telling
anyone who cares to listen
that you remember

that when you were still a child
people used to travel miles
just to hear you sing
perform your own kind of temple miracles

with money changers and prostitutes
a prodigy too
with a voice
as milk and honey
as the heaven you’re from

no wonder
we’re still addicted to what you sung
it comes from heroin in ya lungs

been going thru withdrawals
since you’ve been gone

I’m the one with the weight problem
waiting for your next album
fiending without you
‘cause we can’t hear you sing anymore

celestial body
long before Hollywood’s
Walk of Fame
gave you a star

we weren’t prepared
for your hour-glass frame
to break
leaving Sugar All Over our floors
you said you
“sang the songs that people needed to hear”

and Jesus?
was half “people”
and God was disturbed
that his son kept a diary

however,
God was damn happy
that his very good looking
but very single son
wrote this
about you, Etta
in his diary

“You sang,
You sang.
Oh and then the spell was cast
and here we are now in heaven.
For you are mine
at last.”

and that
was the day
the angels
got their voice back.

–from the forthcoming New Series title, SWEAR, by Hakim Bellamy

–from Savage Sunsets by Adrian C. Louis, West End Press, 2012

One lamp is lit, the color of dusk.
Curled like a fist around my cigarette,
I am stuck in the knuckle of my thoughts.

Late nights like this urge me to push out a poem.
A fat candle burns at three wicks,
the scent of midnight pomegranates.
It is anything but red in here.

In my cotton panties,
I sit and sweat into the pillow,
hair wet down my backbone,
slick as a knife.

Motionless, still I do not
pick up my pen instead, I pinch
out the memory of one afternoon
I kicked ball with the boys,
before the blood came.

My scissor legs were
ashy as the rest,
my scabs half‐eaten.

Our eager yells bounced
from the black‐top into
the sun-baked air and the trees
splintered the sunlight like long fingers
against my sweaty forehead.

Inside the darkness of our house,
my father sits, a television blinks
like a blue Cyclops and pours
static into his ear.

He is a chunk of meat
frozen to his chair and
Mama is somewhere else

I kicked that ball all day
long as if it were the last
time I would ever kick a ball,
arms cinnamon‐dark,
body fast, stealth
like a wet seal slipping in
and around the grasp of
all them boys.

And when the sun boiled
its last cough over our neighborhood
the street lamps burst like marigolds
brilliant bright light
against a grey canopy

Daddy hollered at me,
Come in, stop messing
With them boys
and the screen door
slammed behind me like
a swat across my bottom.

Before the blood came
and there were pomegranates
in my dreams, a purple fistshaped
bruise beneath my left eye,
a bowl full of stars, a gift
from Daddy as I slept
in my bed.

Mama offered up her finest
eye shadow so both sides of
my face would match,

Ain’t you pretty, Mama said
Ain’t you?

But, no I never wrote that.
Some poems are best left
To rattle inside the head
Like the time she burst
from me as a seed does
With a pair of wilted
flowers for hands
I held her, an empty
husk pressed against
the sterile hospital sheets.

Her eyes stretched
from temple to temple and as
the blood still ran down my thighs
in shooting star color
I wondered if all mothers
are meant to be martyrs

Like when I broke all
the glassware in the house,
bits of porcelain clung to
his hair like snow.
The night I ran her Daddy off,
I swear to you, all those razor
blades winked at me from the
lopsided face of my medicine cabinet

Always messing with them boys,
pushing the tongue against the teeth
running fingers across a three‐wick flame,
always never writing down my poetry

Like this one
still clinging
to the inside of my head,
like clean white linen,
Mama’s laundry
and the idea of love

“We like him somewhat.
He knows to fart precisely
the moment the saddle rises.”

The dumb bastards did not
know I always rode bareback
& spoke their secret tongue.
I’d loitered in their mother’s
womb, had suckled her books
in her oak-leathered rooms.

My haggard horse hung low
his head, his neck my pillow
& his back was my bed.
”Fine,” they said.  “Sleep
deep & bring us a dream.”

So we did & we were running
in shimmering delight, delirious
in the strength of our youth.
Our fertile flanks foamed in
the sunlight & our hooves did
not skitter when we hit rocks.

Past the stones & onto sand,
we whirled, dashed around
& over rabbit brush & sage
& heard voices that seemed to
come from the whitening sky.
“You bring us a dream.  You
& not that goddamned nag.”

They did not know the horse
& I were one blood, one bone.
Such purchase was beyond
their deep pockets so we ran
& ran like a son of a bitch
until the sky reddened &
we stalled in a sentence
of sweat & self-love.

–Adrian Louis, Savage Sunsets (West End Press, 2012)