You arrived a day before the landing, breathing water more than air. It was the day the shackling men called sabbath, and we’d been brought up into the sun and made to twist our mouths around words they taught us by the rhythm of the whip. When I went down on my knees they […]
Sing the mass– light upon me washing words now that I am gone. The sky was a hot, blue sheet the summer breeze fanned out and over the town. I could have lived forever under that sky. Forgetting where I was, I looked left, not right, crossed […]
Vernon Johns There were maybe four of them, perhaps five. They were headed, where? It does not matter, only, they were not home yet, were not near anyone who could have cared. So hungry, they stopped there anyway. And when they heard, We don’t serve your kind, one among them laughed, That’s okay. […]
Pause here at the flower stand—mums and gladiolas, purple carnations dark as my heart. We are preparing for a war, and I want to drag home any distraction I can carry. Tonight children will wake to bouquets of fire that will take their breath away. Still, I think of my life. The […]
(Beirut, 2006) For those 36 days, his garden pined. The plants he loved conspired to claim him wholly on the evening he returned. He’d have been lucky to find a snake among the weeds. Lucky with a scorpion. The earth turned, his heart fell to the plot his knee bones drove […]
Billie Holiday baby you were meant to be home you were meant to be what I ain’t never known blue flame done melted my song and you won’t tell me if you’ll risk the curse between my thighs won’t give me more than the music of your fingers strumming my slip’s strap […]
Camille Dungy, author of, What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), answers an audience question about writing while she was in high school, recorded live at Messalonskee High School, Oakland, Maine, September 30, 2005.
Camille Dungy, author of, What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), answers an audience question about writing while she was in high school, recorded live at Messalonskee High School, Oakland, Maine, September 30, 2005.