Anthony Walton is the author of a chapbook of poems, Cricket Weather (Blackberry Books, 1995), and with Michael Harper edited Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945 (Back Bay Books, 1994) and The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (Vintage, 2000). He is also the author of Mississippi: An American Journey (Vintage, 1997); and with Kareem […]
in memoriam Thelonious Monk You have to be able to hear past the pain, the obvious minor-thirds and major-sevenths, the merely beautiful ninths; you have to grow deaf to what you imagine are the sounds of loneliness; you have to learn indifference to static, and welcome noise like rain, acclimate to another kind of silence; […]
Sometimes I see in my mind’s eye a four or five year old boy, coatless and wandering a windblown and vacant lot or street in Chicago on the windblown South Side. He disappears but stays with me, staring and pronouncing me guilty of an indifference more callous than neglect, condescension as self-pity. Then I see […]
At Shaw’s Market the lobster tank sits to the right of the fish counter, just left of the freezer with the fish sticks and frozen perch. Therein lie the lobsters, stacked like so many traps, brackish and silent, their pincers rendered useless, wrapped in yellow plastic. Scuttled into these briny and light-dulled shallows, they hulk […]
The white girl smiles and hands me my meal, perfectly happy, it seems, to see a black man smiling and accepting a warmed-over quarter-pound of meat with cheese. I am on the road, rolling through Jackson County, here for food and gas on my way to Tennessee. The way her pink and silver-ringed fingers touch […]
The keyboard is an abstract landscape white, cold, brittle ivory porcelain sheen, black keys for color and relief. A mind could come unglued there, marooned in the mindblinding aural spectrum as if chromatics were an infared map of the other world. Brilliance, the mind creating its own weather, its own regions for exploration, polarities of […]
Mickey says hey you guys, go throw eleven, which means for me and Knox to unstack and stack a hundred hundred pound sacks of corn starch or dextrose or whatever off a truck out of St. Louis or Decatur or Kansas City. Midnight, and we will be loading and unloading until dawn. Next it might […]
Passion killings plane crashes overdoses accidental and intended Suicides bus wrecks women the inability to choose between one woman and another heroin, booze the inability to choose between pleasure and the Lord men prison the white man the white man who owns the record company the melismatic celebration of disaster the gut-wrenching agony of joy, […]