Because you are not the admired nightingale.
Because you are not the noble doe.
Because you are not the picturesque
ermine, armadillo, or bat.
They’ve been written, and I don’t know their song
the way I know your scuttling between walls.
The scent of your collapsed corpse rotting
beneath floorboards. Your frantic squeals
as you wrestle at your own fur from glue traps,
ripping flesh from skin in an attempt to survive.
Because in July of ’97, you birthed a legion
on 109th, swarmed from behind dumpsters,
made our street infamous for something
other than crack. Shoot, We nicknamed you “Cat-killer,”
raced with you through open hydrants,
screeched like you when Siete blasted
aluminum bat into your brethren’s skull—
the sound like slapped down dominoes. You reigned
that summer, Rat
And even when they sent exterminators,
set flame to garbage, half dead, and on fire, you
pushed on.
Because even though you’re an inelegant, simple,
a mammal bottom-feeder, always fucking famished
little ugly thing that feasts on what crumbs fall
from the corner of our mouths, but you live
uncuddled, uncoddled, can’t be bought at Petco
and fed to fat snakes because you are not the maze-rat
of labs: pale, pretty-eyed, trained.
You raise yourself sharp-fanged, clawed, scarred,
patched dark—because of this alone he should love you.
But look at the beast, the poet tells me.
The table is already full,
and Rat, you are not a right, worthy thing.
Every time they say that
take your gutter, your dirt coat, fill this page, Rat
Scrape your underbelly against street, concrete, you better
squeak and raise the whole world, Rat;
let loose a plague of words, Rat,
and remind them that you, that I—
we are worthy of every poem.
Here.
At the window facing west, I gauge the storm’s debris—
last leaves, twisted locust pods spilling seeds, bare branches,
long strips of bark peeled from the old maple. Squirrels
frenzied in the disordered too-much. One pauses,
erect, on one end of a curved strip of bark. Another, leaping
from the maple’s trunk, lands on the other end, lifting
the first, which comes down, whipping the other up,
and for an oddly elastic moment they jump alternately,
see-sawing. I laugh. True story, I could add, as we
sometimes say, as if none of the others we told
were. Truth being no more than—no, released from—
this rib of bark in the littered back yard. For a moment
I see my younger brother in his torn blue jacket, straddling
a board on one side of a fulcrum, rising on a playground
a thousand miles away, as the years come down.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
(1861)
—————————————————————————————-
Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat
by Caitlin Seida
Hope is not the thing with feathers
That comes home to roost
When you need it most.
Hope is an ugly thing
With teeth and claws and
Patchy fur that’s seen some shit.
It’s what thrives in the discards
And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,
Able to find a way to go on
When nothing else can even find a way in.
It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such
diseases as
optimism, persistence,
Perseverance and joy,
Transmissible as it drags its tail across
your path
and
bites you in the ass.
Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,
Emily.
It’s a lowly little sewer rat
That snorts pesticides like they were
Lines of coke and still
Shows up on time to work the next day
Looking no worse for wear.
my mom holds her accent like a shotgun
with two good hands
her tongue
all brass knuckle
her hips, are all laughter and wind clap
she speaks a sanchocho of spanish and english,
pushing up and against one another in rapid fire
there is no tellin’ my mama to be “quiet,”
my mama don’t know “quiet”
her voice is one size
better fit all and you best not
tell her to hush, she waited
too many years for her voice to arrive
to be told it needed house-keeping.
english sits in her mouth remixed
so “strawberry” becomes “eh-strawbeddy”
and “cookie” becomes “eh-cookie”
and kitchen, key chain, and chicken
all sound the same.
my mama doesn’t say “yes”
she says, “ah ha”
and suddenly
the sky in her mouth
becomes Hector Lavoe song.
her tongue
can’t lay itself down
flat enough
for the english language.
it got too much hip,
too much bone,
too much conga,
too much cuatro
to two step,
got too many piano keys
in between her teeth
it got too much clave
too much hand clap,
got too much salsa to sit still
it be an anxious child wanting
to make Play-Doh
out of concrete, english
be too neat for
her kind of wonderful
her words spill in conversation
between women whose hands are all they got
sometimes our hands are all we got,
and accents that remind us
that we are still bomba, still plena
say, “wepa!”
and a stranger becomes your hermano,
say, “dale!”
and a crowd becomes a family reunion.
my mama’s tongue is a telegram from her mother
decorated with the coqui’s of el campo,
so even when her lips can barely
stretch themselves around english,
her accent
is a stubborn compass
always pointing her
towards home…
If I should have a daughter, instead of mom, she’s going to call me Point B,
because that way she knows that no matter what happens,
at least she can always find her way to me.
And I am going to paint the Solar Systems on the backs of her hands,
so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say ‘Oh, I know that like the back of my hand’
And she’s going to learn that this life will hit you,
hard,
in the face,
wait for you to get back up, just so it can kick you in the stomach
but getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.
There is hurt, fear that cannot be fixed by band aids or poetry
so the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn’t coming
I’ll make sure she knows she does not have to wear the cape all by herself
because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers,
your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal.
Believe me, I’ve tried
And baby, I’ll tell her, don’t keep your nose up in the air like that
I know that trick, I’ve done it a million times
You’re just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail
back to a burning house so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire
to see if you can save him.
Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place to see if you can change him
But I know she will anyway, so instead, I’ll always keep an extra supply of chocolate
and rainboots nearby.
Because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can’t fix.
Ok, there’s a few heartbreaks that chocolate can’t fix,
but that’s what the rainboots are for because rain will
wash away everything if you let it.
I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass bottomed boat
To look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind
Because that’s the way my mom taught me.
That there’ll be days like this
that there’s be days like this my mama said
When you open your hands to catch, and wind up with only blisters and bruises.
When you step out of the phone booth and try to fly
And the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape
When your boots will fill with rain and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment
and those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you
because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop
kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it is sent away.
You will put the win in winsome … lose some
You will put the star in starting over and over.
And no matter how many landmines erupt in a minute
be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life.
And yes, on a scale from one to overtrusting, I am pretty damn naive.
But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar.
It can crumble so easily.
But don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.
Baby, I’ll tell her, remember your mama is a worrier
and your papa is a warrior.
And you’re the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more.
Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things and
always apologize when you’ve done something wrong
but don’t you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining,
your voice is small but don’t ever stop singing.
And when they finally hand you a heartache,
when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street corners
of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that
they
really ought to meet your mother.
Did you know the average person spends 4 years of his life looking down at his cell phone?
Kind of ironic, ain’t it?
How these touch screens can make us lose touch
But it’s no wonder in a world filled with iMacs, iPads and iPhones
So many “i”’s, so many selfies, not enough “us”‘s and “we”’s
See, technology has made us more selfish and separate than ever
‘Cause while it claims to connect us, connection has gotten no better
And let me must express first, Mr. Zuckerberg
Not to be rude, but you should re-classify Facebook to what it is: an anti-social network
‘Cause while we may have big friend lists
So many of us are friendless, all alone
‘Cause friendships are more broken than the screens on our very phones
We sit at home on our computers measuring self-worth by numbers of followers and likes
Ignoring those who actually love us
It seems we’d rather write an angry post than talk to someone who might actually hug us
Am I bugging? You tell me
‘Cause I asked a friend the other day, “Let’s meet up face to face.”
They said, “Alright. What time you wanna Skype?”
I responded with “OMG!”, “SRS?”, and then a bunch of “SMH”‘s
And realized, what about me?
Do I not have the patience to have conversation without abbreviation?
This is the generation of media overstimulation
Chats have been reduced to snaps
The news is 140 characters
Videos are 6 seconds at high speed
And you wonder why ADD is on the rise faster than 4G LTE
But, get a load of this
Studies show the attention span of the average adult today
Is one second lower than that of a goldfish
So if you’re one of the few people or aquatic animals that have yet to click off or close this video, congratulations
Let me finish by saying you do have a choice, yes
But this one, my friends, we cannot auto-correct – we must do it ourselves
Take control or be controlled: make a decision
Me?
No longer do I want to spoil a precious moment by recording it with a phone – I’m just gonna keep them
I don’t wanna take a picture of all my meals anymore – I’m just gonna eat them
I don’t want the new app, the new software, or the new update
And if I wanna post an old photo, who says I have to wait until Thursday?
I’m so tired of performing in the pageantry of vanity
And conforming to this accepted form of digital insanity
Call me crazy, but I imagine a world where we smile when we have low batteries
‘Cause that will mean we’ll be one bar closer…to humanity
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up the King and Parli’ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holla boys, Holla boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
And what should we do with him? Burn him!
Ithaka
BY C. P. CAVAFY
TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.