
Featured poet: Lew Rosenbaum
Laquan
1
Two days ago the number was 1033
Today it is 1040
In November alone 77
27% had “mental health issues”
In England and Wales, police shot and killed 55 people in the last 24 years
In the U.S., police shot and killed 59 people in the first 24 days of 2015
Iceland has had one fatal police shooting in its 71 years of existence
Stockton, California had 5 fatal police shootings in the first five months of this year
The police fired six bullets in the entire year of 2013 in Finland
In Pasco, Washington, police fired 17 bullets in the fatal shooting of Antonio
Zambrano Morales
The police shot Laquan, firing 15 bullets into his already prone body
2
Half the victims of police killings are white
One quarter are Black
About 17 per cent are Latino
About 2 per cent are an unknown demographic
Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans make up the final 3 per cent
All are poor. All are poor.
3
In the U.S. “contingent work” amounts to 40 per cent of all jobs
Globally, three out of four workers are “vulnerably employed,” unemployed or
inactive
Temp workers are “disposable workers”
“Temp workers” are the major component of a new class, of the new generation,
The successor to the hip hop generation,
The best educated and fasted growing new class in history
The most criminalized in history
Called trailer trash and thugs
The school-to-prison-pipeline encarcelating generation
4
They
The one hundredth of one percent
Our rulers
They are telling us in so many ways
“Get out of town or else
Laquan
And all your brothers and sisters
You too who are reading or hearing this
You are disposable
We do not need you.”
5
Staring into the barrel of the gun
Contemplating the pink slip
Discharging and disgorging us
From that miserable excuse they call a j.o.b.
Looking at the homes
Almost tasting the food
Basking in the fantasy of warm clothes we need.
Let’s end the charade of begging
Standing in front of the superstocked supermarket hat in hand
Let’s take over the bakery
Say no to crumbs
Disarm the cops
Pie for everyone
Punish the Murderers
Without water there is no life.
Last night a thirteen year old
Told how she started her day, preparing for school,
She pours bottled water into a pot
Sets it on the stove to heat up,
Uses some to make her oatmeal for breakfast,
Then brings it to the bathroom
Where she brushes her teeth and
Washes her face.
When she comes home, she carries more
Bottled water to take a bath.
She does not want any more painful skin rashes.
Without water there is no life.
Then two young siblings said
The school told them not to use the water
A month after they started school.
Their older sister said her school
Told her not to use the water
Two weeks ago. This is not a joke.
Without water there is no life.
Taking away life is murder.
A friend tells me there will be no fish
In the ocean after 2048. None.
The thing is, the trend is reversible.
Food is money, and the moneygrubbers
Are killing the thing making them rich.
But taking away life is murder.
I can’t forget this story. The woman
Who drank the water and miscarried her child.
Or the mother who described how
Her child was now having seizures,
While another has been acting out at school,
And both have lead poisoning
From the water coming from the Flint River.
The governor knew about the poison.
He appointed the emergency manager of the city and
He OK’d the city saving money by using the tainted water.
But taking away life is murder.
Without water there is no life.
Punish the murderers.
Water must be clean and free for all.
Tehachapi Idyll
I wrote this in 1994. Diana and I were 2 years married and, as our friends noted, living on cloud nine. It had been nearly 30 years, the summer of 1966, since I made my first journey into California’s “The Valley,” the “Central Valley,” or more explicitly the San Joaquin Valley. I drove from Los Angeles along the zig-zag highway known as the Grapevine. In the Spring, rugged mountain pass is covered with brilliant orange of the California poppy. Then the first view of the valley floor, 2,000 feet below, takes your breath away in Spring: the highway parts the Tehachapi Mountains, reveals miles of orchards and row crops. But when you reach the rolling, brown foothills, they engulf you. They are the original sensuous models for the reclining Botero sculptures. Only in this environment do you recognize that what appeared from Botero’s hands as monumental are dwarfed by the looming, voluptuous reality of the hillsides. What began in 1966 as a fantasy wrote itself 30 years later, with a new inspiration. We’re still living on cloud nine.
When I lie with you
My hand naturally falls
Across the geography of your thigh
And traces a journey from calf
To knee to the mesa of your hip,
Then coasts down
Meandering briefly at your waist
To nestle at the meadow of your breast.
At such times my own legs and arms
Suffuse with the warmth of your summer sun,
Bathe in your medicinal sauna.
Then the border between us
Opens
No line separates the you from the me.
The liquid lava that is us
Pours into each other
We feed each other until we know
We cannot quench our thirst
Until together, and with others,
We build the biggest fire of all.
Fabric of Memory
I’ll make a sweater for you, she said.
Can I design it? I replied. A broad smile spread across her dark features,
She nodded, told me to block it out on a grid.
Taking a sheet of graph paper, I applied pencil
To the squares, picturing king and queen,
Rook on either side, outlines of the features
In forest green and ruby red on a white background.
Below the figures a row of squares stand on point,
Diamonds with a splash of opposite color in their centers.
She said it was a difficult design; her fingers twirled
Needles and yarn so that each day, on my return home
From school, I’d measure the changes and
Guess how much longer I’d have to wait.
When I ran into the snow, took it for a ride
Down the hill across the street on my sled,
I gloried in the warmth that embraced me with its tight weave.
That was sixty years ago. I just unearthed this fabric
Of my memory out of the drawer from where I heard it calling,
Held it up to remember the snow-whiteness of the yarn
Now aged, much as my hand that holds it, now
More leathery, marked with brown spots.
The figures now set on yellowed woven strands
And I remember the long yellowed whitish hair that dangled
From her head, woven into braids on good days, in her last years.
The cold wind swirls around my head on that slide down the hill
And numbs my gloved fingers and the snow sprays on my tongue
As the runners turn sharply, and all that and more
The sweater in my hands calls up.
As I feel this I look at the sweater warming me now,
A loosely knit garment with a plain dark green back and
An abstract, almost Mondrian style front design and think
Of the nimble fingers that made this for me, a different pair
Of hands, my sister’s hands, born of the woman of the chess sweater.
Some of what warms me this year comes
From the smile I see as I slide into it, the twinkle in her eyes.
We talked as we sat in her dining room
Mining memories, straightening past misunderstandings,
Sharing music, writing, art, history
And all that I absorb from the language of the fabric.
Something like this grips me as,
When I turn in for the night, I warm my feet
With old socks, where my heels erupt from cavernous holes that
Long ago stripped the fibers of the yarn. I have no working
Knitted socks any more; yet I hang onto these because,
Well, they work well enough for my bed time purpose,
But also again I think of who made them for me,
And I alternate using them, so none will feel slighted.
In this new year I am surrounded by, I rejoice in gifts,
The physical gifts that offer their utility, new or old, more or less.
But there is more. They conjure out of separate realities
The community that we are together, past and present.
I worry though. When I am gone, who will remember
The sweaters and what they mean? When the sweaters
Disappear into dust, what happens
To the love from which they were made?