IPS Blog

A weekly featured poem of provocation and witness. You can find more poetry and arts news from Blog This Rock.

Note from a Prodigal Son III

The gavel
The splintered body
The red-neck guards
The state dungarees
The grey cinder block
The naked shower
The elemental fear
The unspoken yoke
The mercy plea
The awakening
The trembling hands
The walk to chow
The razor fence
The barrel’s scope
The Rottweiler’s teeth
The hesitation
The guttural pain
The calls refused
The return to sender
The rivulet of tears
The frozen heart
The opaque night
The seclusion
The muffled screams
The masturbation
The silence

-Randall Horton

Published in The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street (Main Street Rag, 2009). Used by permission.

Randall Horton, originally from Birmingham, Alabama, resides in New Haven, CT and is a former recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. He is the author of the poetry collections The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street and The Definition of Place, both from Main Street Rag. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Haven and the poetry editor of Willow Books.

Horton appeared on the panel Dissidence, Memory, and Music in African American Poetry during Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

A weekly featured poem of provocation and witness. You can find more poetry and arts news from Blog This Rock.

For the Fifty (Who Formed PEACE With Their Bodies)

In the green beginning,
          in the morning mist,
                    they emerge from their chrysalis

of clothes: peel off purses & cells,
          slacks & Gap sweats, turtle-
                    necks & tanks, Tommy’s & Salvation

Army, platforms & clogs,
          abandoning bras and lingerie, labels
                    & names, courtesies & shames,

the emperor’s rhetoric of defense,
          laying it down, their child-
                    stretched or still-taut flesh

giddy in sudden proximity,
          onto the cold earth: bodies fetal or supine,
                    as if come-hithering

or dead, wriggle on the grass to form
          the shape of a word yet to come, almost
                    embarrassing to name: a word

thicker, heavier than the rolled rags
          of their bodies seen from a cockpit:
                        they touch to make

the word they want to become:
          it’s difficult to get the news
                    from our bodies, yet people die each day

for lack of what is found there:
          here: the fifty hold, & still
                    to become a testament, a will,

embody something outside
          themselves & themselves: the body,
                    the dreaming disarmed body.

-Philip Metres

Used by permission.

A weekly featured poem of provocation and witness. You can find more poetry and arts news from Blog This Rock.

Final Exam Administration

I enter to find all the students in uniform
occupying a small room.

I hand out pencils and registration forms.
Some begin without orders.

I remind them to remain anonymous
no names, just ID numbers should appear

on the waiting pages, white and clean
as unwritten letters or discharges.

Just a number   the private
in BCGs and fatigues mumbles

from the back   that’s all
we are.  A number

and a gun.   His comrades laugh,
erasing what might have been.

Do your best   I say,
and they settle, salute.

-Remica L. Bingham
Used by permission.