a costume. dark overalls, handkerchief, and ugly-ass shitkickers, clutched like gifts in his outstretched hands chase the stink of mule dirt back into my head. now he wants me to wrap my music in a brown bag of coon to give them what folks ’spect to see, says i need the genuine look of farm […]
…an’ everything gotta be ‘live on you son. read the crowd like a fortune teller’s tealeaf, from the plunk of a nickel to the bang of a quarter to the smell of thieves schemin’ on a blind man’s cash. see this scar? i was between guitars in san antonio and broke enough to wrestle men […]
Tyehimba Jess’s first book of poetry, leadbelly (Verse Press, now Wave Books, 2005), is a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. He won the 2001 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship in Poetry for 2000 2001, and the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award. He was on the 2000 […]