The Poetics of Liberation - Looking back to envision the future.
Originally published on Poetry Foundation
A central question I grapple with as a white teacher working in a predominantly Black and Latinx school community is how to effectively teach racialized content in a way that brings joy and empowerment into the classroom. As opposed to a curriculum that solely centers narratives of pain and oppression as if they are the defining experience of People of Color. A great mentor, activist, scholar, educator, and founder of CREADnyc (Culturally Responsive Educators of the African Diaspora), the late Khalilah Brann used to lovingly admonish me, “There needs to be joy in your curriculum, Alex!”
While developing my units for the 2017–2018 school year, I participated in a year-long series of workshops developed by Brann and titled Woke Cypha, which aimed to create “learning experiences that are centered in the development and mastery of academic skills and positive racial identity development for students of the African Diaspora.” The workshops introduced participants to several guiding principles for developing culturally responsive curriculum for Black and Brown students in New York City, including the Sankofa principle. Sankofa is an African word from the Akan tribe in Ghana. The literal translation of the word is, “It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.” The etymology of the word is SAN (return), KO (go), FA (look, seek, and take), and the symbol is a bird with its feet firmly planted forward and its head turned backwards. The principle of Sankofa teaches that a strong future cannot be separate from seeking knowledge of the past.
“Don’t scare me like that, colonizer.”
“Wakanda forever!” could be heard through the halls at Academy for Young Writers in East New York, Brooklyn, throughout February and March as I began my spring semester writing elective with a group of 10th-graders. I wanted to harness the energy that had spread as a result of Ryan Coogler’s film Black Panther, set in Wakanda, a technologically advanced African nation that had never been colonized. In April, we began our poetry unit with a brief introduction to Afrofuturism via Wakanda and Janelle Monae’s album Dirty Computer. Then we started exploring the work of artists whose content and craft invoke liberatory realities, such as Jamila Woods, Eve Ewing, Zoe Leonard, and Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves.
The lesson included here is the 14th of 23. After spending time considering how poets write alternate ways of being in the world, this lesson introduces students to the concept of Sankofa as a possible framework for writing poetry. The unit’s essential questions are: How do poets write liberatory futures into being? How do poets use language to disrupt an unjust world? What language is helpful in discussing a writer’s craft? Although I have taught the following lesson within this extended unit, you can adapt it into a stand-alone, two-part lesson that might be used in any poetry, history, or literature course.
Part One: Where Do You Stand?
As an opener, I post the following two statements and ask students to choose the one that most aligns to their own perspective:
A. We cannot change what has happened in the past so we should focus on creating a better future.
B. The knowledge of the past must never be forgotten if we want to ensure a strong future.
I ask students to identify as an “A” or a “B” depending on the statement that resonates most, and have the As and Bs gather at different sides of the room. Once students are in groups, I ask them to share their reason for agreeing with the statement they chose, and then ask them to consider reasons that one might disagree with their perspective. In other words, I ask them to identify a possible counter argument. After approximately three minutes, I invite each group to choose a spokesperson to share their responses. I find by the end of the brief share out, students mostly agree that it is important to move forward and that the past serves as a guide for planning the future.
Once students have returned to their seats, I display an image of the Sankofa symbol via a projector or SMART Board. I ask students to work with a partner to take an “inquiry stance” for the image.
In one minute, each partnership makes a list of as many questions as possible about the image. We then go around the room and have each partnership ask a question until all questions have been shared or three minutes are up. Students might ask: What is the bird holding in its mouth? Why is the bird’s head turned backwards? No analysis is allowed at this time—only questions. The objective of the inquiry activity is for students to invite each other’s analysis through their own questions.
At this point, I ask if anyone would like to decode the image and explain their reasoning by referencing details of the image. Then I introduce the concept of Sankofa and share the definition. I remind students that we’ve been looking at ways in which writers create utopias and imagine liberatory futures through poetry, and that today we are going to read two poems that position themselves toward the future while incorporating the past. I provide students with copies of the poems and, if possible, I project the poems on a SMART Board or with a projector.
As a class, we read the beginning of “dear white america” by Danez Smith:
i’ve left Earth in search of darker planets, a solar system revolving too near a black hole. i’ve left in search of a new God. i do not trust the God you have given us. my grandmother’s hallelujah is only outdone by the fear she nurses every time the blood-fat summer swallows another child who used to sing in the choir. take your God back. though his songs are beautiful, his miracles are inconsistent. i want the fate of Lazarus for Renisha, want Chucky, Bo, Meech, Trayvon, Sean & Jonylah risen three days after their entombing, their ghost re-gifted flesh & blood, their flesh & blood re-gifted their children. i’ve left Earth, i am equal parts sick of your go back to Africa & i just don’t see race. neither did the poplar tree. we did not build your boats (though we did leave a trail of kin to guide us home). we did not build your prisons (though we did & we fill them too). we did not ask to be part of your America (though are we not America? her joints brittle & dragging a ripped gown through Oakland?). i can’t stand your ground. i’m sick of calling your recklessness the law. each night, i count my brothers. & in the morning, when some do not survive to be counted, i count the holes they leave. i reach for black folks & touch only air. your master magic trick, America. now he’s breathing, now he don’t. abra-cadaver. white bread voodoo. sorcery you claim not to practice, hand my cousin a pistol to do your work. i tried, white people. i tried to love you, but you spent my brother’s funeral making plans for brunch, talking too loud next to his bones. you took one look at the river, plump with the body of boy after girl after sweet boi & ask why does it always have to be about race? because you made it that way! because you put an asterisk on my sister’s gorgeous face! call her pretty (for a black girl)! because black girls go missing without so much as a whisper of where?! because there are no amber alerts for amber-skinned girls! because Jordan boomed. because Emmett whistled. because Huey P. spoke. because Martin preached. because black boys can always be too loud to live. because it’s taken my papa’s & my grandma’s time, my father’s time, my mother’s time, my aunt’s time, my uncle’s time, my brother’s & my sister’s time . . . how much time do you want for your progress? i’ve left Earth to find a place where my kin can be safe, where black people ain’t but people the same color as the good, wet earth, until that means something, until then i bid you well, i bid you war, i bid you our lives to gamble with no more. i’ve left Earth & i am touching everything you beg your telescopes to show you. i’m giving the stars their right names. & this life, this new story & history you cannot steal or sell or cast overboard or hang or beat or drown or own or redline or shackle or silence or cheat or choke or cover up or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or ruin
this, if only this one, is ours.
The first time we read the poem together, I interrupt them after the first five sentences and ask the class to collaboratively answer a few questions that ground students for the small group discussions that follow. I might ask: What’s happening in the poem so far? To whom might the pronouns refer? Who are the people named? What do the allusions reference? Is there any evidence of the Sankofa principle?
I find that it’s important to pause the conversation while the student excitement and desire to discuss is still high so that the meat of the discussion can take place in the small groups.
To transition to the second poem, I ask students to name other ways in which a poet can honor the past in addition to paying tribute to people who have been treated with injustice in the United States. After two or three students share ideas and we’ve identified honoring our family and ancestors as another way to honor the past, we read the beginning of “big bang theory” by t’ai freedom ford:
in theory, she big bang.
her brown round lump of a body
stardusting half dozen babies into being
and giving God all the glory.
first Junior, who sprang to 6’4” like his daddy
ate up everything including the cardboard
pickled his tongue in sips of thunderbird
till shriveled liver polka-dotted his hands and lips pink.
Sista came next, wearing Ethel like storm cloud
and hex, shamed her into Angelina, meaning:
messenger of God but she big
and unpretty as a heathen.
Doris Yvonne got all the pretty and the skinny
and the crazy, so folks couldn’t covet.
at 6, she saw colors fuzzed round people
thought everybody had this rainbow vision.
then in 1952, my mama brown-nosed herself
here. granny named her Amber, a quiet, too-dark
punk of a girl, ass-whippings all the way home
from school. married her fool-self off at 14.
Wayne came out in handcuffs. did not
pass go. went straight to jail. met
Muhammad and became Ramel
became crackhead became ghost.
Pamela named me. cute as she wanna be
spoiled with religion, granny’s baby
spent half her life in the church testifying
to chicken wings, getting her holyghost on.
granny big bang. sequined hat
gangster. kicked Otis senior out
for mucking up her doilies with
engine grease. grandbabies everywhere.
fat as pork rinds and hungry as slaves.
she banged pots til they bled gravy,
banged her big body to the floor
in stroke. invented: serious as a heart attack.
she buried all the men with Jesus
on her breath. and when her big-boned
self big-banged to dust, we didn’t call
it death. we called it magic.
After we read the first three stanzas together, we collaboratively answer a few questions to ground students for their small group discussion. I might ask: What’s happening in the poem so far? To whom might the pronouns refer? Who are the people who are named? Do you notice any evidence of the Sankofa principle?
In my 10th-grade class, I allow students to choose which poem they want to read and discuss in a small group. For example, if 15 students are interested in reading “big bang theory,” I divide them into three groups of five. However, depending on the students’ level of experience in collaborating as self-directed groups, I also might pre-assign groups of four or five students to each of the poems. (Depending on students’ comfort and experience with analyzing poems, one might choose to look at and discuss the poems as a class instead of having the students work in small groups.)
Once students are grouped, I give them the task. First, identify two students who will read the entire poem aloud to the group. Then, invite each group member share their favorite line. Finally, prepare to present the answers to the following questions to the rest of the class:
What do you think this poem is mostly about?
Where is there evidence of the Sankofa principle? Provide one example of how this poem envisions a liberatory future while “looking back.”
What are the “poem ingredients” someone could follow to write their own poem?
Part Two: Writing in Response
If the students are comfortable working independently, I give the class a 15-minute reading period to read both poems to them- selves. Otherwise, I would ask one or two students to read the poems aloud to the class. Next, we review the “poem ingredients” that were generated by students during the first part of the lesson, and I ask each student to finalize their decision about which poem they’d like to write after. My 10th-grade students came up with the following ingredients:
If you want to write a poem inspired by “dear white america” by Danez Smith:
• Write about leaving earth to find a better place (i.e. where there is no racism, sexism, etc.).
• Use repetition (“I have left earth…”).
• Use similes and metaphors to make comparisons.
• Use stories from the past (American history or other histories).
If you want to write a poem inspired by “big bang theory” by t’ai freedom ford:
• Choose one person that came before you in your family (e.g., grandparent, aunt).
• Compare the person to the “big bang” or choose a different scientific phenomenon or theory.
• Write whatever you know about that person or make stuff up.
• Include other family members related to that person.
• Write four-line stanzas.
• Create one stanza about each person.
• Use imagery and descriptive language.
The prompts provide students with differentiated entry points for honoring the past in their poems. Students who don’t want to bring in history and current events can write about family. After students write, we hold a class reading in which every student reads a draft of their own poem.
The Sankofa principle has become a roadmap for my thinking about curriculum. Students often complain that their history classes are irrelevant. But I want students to see that they are history. I want students to make the connection between what they’ve inherited and the future that is theirs to create; to honor their ancestors and teachers while being free to dream the futures they deserve. The poems that the students write during this unit invite them to see their own lives and experiences as authentic and valid contributions to both literature and history. I continue to hold Khalilah’s admonishment near my heart and ensure there is joy in the curriculum. While struggle is an important part of the two poems we explore in this lesson, both honor those who have come before as well as the joyful possibility of what may follow.
Alex Cuff, "The Poetics of Liberation: Looking Back to Envision the Future" from Spellbound: The Art of Teaching Poetry. Copyright © 2019 by Alex Cuff. Reprinted by permission of Teachers & Writers Collaborative.
Originally Published: August 1st, 2019
LA Book Review, Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & The Body
Originally published on LA Book Reviews
On Belief
After “A Letter to William Kinter of Muhlenberg” in The Jacob’s Ladder (1958) by Denise Levertov
I dreamed a name disappearing like the tail of a large rodent turning a corner. I have nothing but its diminishing line and a warning to not go through the motions (motion sickness). I wake up and think that perhaps knowing the name is less important than the experience of the space in between. The space in between having known a name I no longer know and the disappearance of a rodent’s tail. Aisha Sasha John writes that, “Knowing is a consequence of believing.” I’m starting with what I know. To build a piece of writing might imply that the piece already exists and needs to be assembled. I believe this is true but not the only truth. About me writing. I trust this will have to be good enough because the other option is to stall. If I stall long enough, I stop believing. In myself and other things. In my 20s I discovered that the phrase γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know thyself) was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. It was an impossible invitation.
On Anxiety
After “Parts of an Autobiography” in Milk & Filth (2013) by Carmen Giménez Smith
As a child I would jump from my hiding place during games of hide-and-seek because I could not stand the anticipation of being found. “I’m here!” I’d volunteer and desperately untangle myself from the dresses in my mother’s closet. My family did not discuss feelings but my mom definitely asked me about pooping. “How are your bowels?” she’d ask casually. Last month I sent my mom an image of an “I POOPED TODAY” T-shirt and she texted back Gross!!!!!!!!! Then I texted her this tidbit about constipation, since my condition is hereditary: In truly serious cases, constipation can be a symptom of an impacted bowel caused by a large, dry lump of feces that’s stuck in your colon. In very rare cases, straining to push it out can kill you. On Valentine’s Day in 1997 I purchased anal beads for my college boyfriend. He refused to participate saying something along the lines of, “I will not put those in my butt.” I can’t remember anything else from that night or the rest of that semester actually. I’m still not sure what my condition is. Not doing great today. To counter the onset of a sinking mood, I consider making a list of 10 things in which I have faith. I know for sure that pooping every day won’t be on my list.
The scripture says that the kingdom of heaven is within. Joseph Bradshaw, the author of Healing the Shame that Binds You, writes that “[t]oxic shame looks to the outside for happiness and for validation, since the inside is flawed and defective.” I’m thinking of the binding power of flax mucilage. The constipation, while having loosened its total grip on my colon, is still in charge and I’m really worried about my large intestine. I mean, if it isn’t able to absorb nutrients due to a layer of shellac from years of not pooping, then who am I? I’m in the bath with my brother Brendan. Small brown turds begin to float to the surface of the tub. Someone shrieks as if there are turd sharks emerging. If depression is my slow landslide into darkness, lightness is my large intestine dutifully performing its undulation of peristalsis as a joyful muscular tunnel. I meditate on the relationship between constipation and courage. Constipation and fear of a lover’s fear of anal. Constipation and the mother. Constipation and dying intestines. And I wonder if the light from my large intestine is a thousand years old.
On Writing
After “From 1928 to Whenever: A Conversation with Anne Sexton” in American Poets in 1976
I write to hold something together or I write to break it apart. I dream about how hard it is to get off the ground as a bird. I have a poor memory. This alone tests belief. I read books and cannot retell or synthesize what I’ve read a month later. Facts that I take in through the reading process might as well be dreams from a past life. When I am tired I experience what my mom calls the “heebie jeebies” — restlessness in the muscles as if my body is complaining about its lack of options. I sit on a couch-like chair at Poets House and recall my dreams, massage my calf muscles, and think about the previous evening at the Union Theological Seminary, where Michelle Alexander asked Naomi Klein if she considers herself a revolutionary. Klein responded: “Can you have a revolutionary without a revolution?” She added that she hopes she’d show up if there was a revolution. If I accept Klein’s logic that perhaps there cannot be a revolutionary without a revolution, I wonder can there be a poet without a ________? I hope too that if _________happens, I will show up. Perhaps I am already showing up by continuing to live in the spaces between failing at everything.
My sentences are often too heavy on the subject. I write sentences while standing up because I have sprayed dissolved magnesium all over my body to relieve my constipation, the side effects of which include “emotional stagnation” and a tendency to produce incomplete ideas. This results in sentences that are incredibly insufficient in their ability to create meaning. The word sentence from the Latin sentire, to feel. How are you feeling. My thighs are burning. The fastest way to absorb magnesium into the body is through the skin if you can handle the sting. Handling this is crucial especially if there is a chance that your large intestine has stopped absorbing nutrients. In the ’80s my dad called me a commie pinko for putting ketchup on my scrambled eggs. The magnesium is working but there are still abstractions I cannot absorb into the skin. I blow-dry the hair on my labia then my armpits then my bangs for 30 seconds a piece in that order until everything on my body is more or less dry.
On History of Whiteness
After Admit One: An American Scrapbook (2016) by Martha Collins
I think I’m not alone, as a white American who went to public high school in the ’90s, when I say that my knowledge of history is meager. What I did learn were reductive hero narratives filtered through the red-white-and-blue smoking lens of patriotic, racist history textbooks. So when I started reading history in my mid-30s, I was super late to the game in having my head pulled up from a smoggy sleep. The more I learn, the more I am able to see and challenge my own internalized racial superiority, the belief that white is better, an ideology by which my very logic and sense of reasoning have been trained. History reveals how white supremacy reproduces itself and shape-shifts adapting to the contemporary, seeping into each aspect of my relationship to people, institutions, places, stories, and beliefs. The aporia of whiteness is its pervasive invisibility to white people. An invisible centrifuge sucking everything up and spitting it out dead.
On Fathers
After Go Find Your Father / A Famous Blues (2014) by Harmony Holiday
My father arrives in my dreams and my writing. In dreams he is often helpless or ineffectual and sometimes drunk. Sometimes he is near death. Sometimes he is dead. In one dream he died of natural causes. I was devastated. In another, he died of a broken back and then surprised me by waking up. I was indifferent. He evokes both tender affection and dull anger. In my poetry my father is often an analogue for intergenerational shame or an aspect of patriarchy such as sexual violence, failed masculinity, or that shadowy threat of anxiety. He’s both the angel in the choir and the bat in the basement. I dreamed my family at a wedding in an unknown city. My dad pulled a fat roll of bills out of his gray suit jacket. I knew the roll was made up of singles covered with a hundred-dollar bill which he peeled off cautiously when my siblings and I needed cab fare. I felt my dad’s self-consciousness in front of the other suited men though they didn’t seem to notice anything. After paying the cab driver, I held tightly to the change from the hundred- dollar bill so I could give it to my dad. I think we were in a Scandinavian city though I’ve never been so I can’t say for sure. You know how dreams work, not everything mirrors real life. But the shame, there was no mistaking the shame. How everyone has to bear the weight of the fragile fathers.
From an Aerial View the Family Unit Is Made Up of Individuals Corresponding to Their Environments
My family spent the nineties climbing over furniture. My siblings and I tried to stay out of the way because my parents believed in the Eternal Law, which promises wretched lives to evil men. We assumed that this law applied to evil children as well. My parents lived in the moment but not like zen masters — they didn’t know they were living in the moment, they couldn’t understand the present and canceled the future out with the past. Or at least that’s how I see it now, looking back, a line-drive sort of existence, a difficulty, not in adhering to beliefs, but in remembering what they are. We held our breath and prayed for the best, making exterior a shared fear of loving. And living happened under anaerobic conditions. This might’ve fucked me up if I hadn’t had a few of my own beliefs, mainly in things that I could see, like difference between a man-made lake and a bathtub, like frozen waffles. I learned difference early on and when I could see it, I made it real. The color of a maraschino cherry was not the color of a real cherry and the order in which siblings were born—first middle second fifth second to last—I knew that too. I knew that warm-blooded vertebrates provided with wings are sometimes birds, but I couldn’t conceive of flying bodies as non-bat objects. I thought of anything that flew outside my window as a nocturnal mammal with webbed wings. At the time my father lived in a den filled with green wicker furniture. The den fell under jurisdiction of Temporal Law which protects the things a man can lose: an 18-inch TV, a portrait of Duke Snider, framed and signed. A sagging green chair legislated my father. He turned his will over to the bats living in the basement. The basement fell under jurisdiction of the Night, and of the Bats. In the Old Norse sense of the word husband, my mother was my father’s husband. She held distress at bay with lilacs. She tried to protect us from the power of the den but her silence couldn’t will it away. The room raged with freewill and acid reflux. In ’88 my parents put the chain lock on the basement door before I’d reached the top of the stairs. My change in scenery read as resignation. I coveted the potential violence of baking soda and vinegar. I doubted windows. I mixed drinks. I mounted chairs. I made pinpricks. I snapped doors. I bent flukes. I said yes to what was still alive. I did not murder someone with a colander of pinto beans. I did not recline into a spread eagle on the cold floor. I stood still and let a few pieces of grass fall between my fingers. In ’98 the house burned to the ground. No one died but everyone was hurt.
¤
Teaching About Racism: Toward a Shared History and Common Language
Originally published on Teachers & Writers Magazine
“White cops are racist,” a student said. It was September 2014, and we were discussing Ferguson in my third-period, tenth-grade ELA class.
“I hate white people,” another student asserted, holding my gaze.
A hush came over my class of 28 students as they studied my face, gauging how I, a white teacher at a predominantly black school in Brooklyn, would respond. It was the fourth day of school, and I hadn’t yet established any strong relationships with these students. My attempt to address the death of Michael Brown, and the response in Ferguson and around the country, wasn’t going as I’d hoped.
“Damn…that’s racist to say in front of Alex!” another student chimed in.
“No, it’s okay,” I assured them over the hum of other voices. “I don’t take it personally. And really, it’s not possible for a person of color to be racist toward a white person. I mean, in a way all white people are racist in the sense that we benefit from a racist system because we have white skin.”
The girl who said she hated all white people said, “So you agree that all white cops are racist?”
I thought about my uncle, who was a sergeant in New York City before he moved to Pontiac, Michigan, to take a job as police chief outside of Detroit. A few years later, he lost his job, claiming he was “diversified out” because a black man had replaced him. “Well, no…and yes.”
Despite the comfort I thought I had in facilitating discussions around race, I realized I didn’t have the language to talk about whiteness. My efforts had stalled on the topic of racist cops, when I had wanted to facilitate a conversation about the connections between police violence and systemic racism in our country. I wanted students to be able to differentiate between interpersonal racism—which in my experience is often what high school students mean when they use the word racism—and institutional racism.
At the time, it was clear to me that my feelings of inadequacy reflected the collective inexperience of white people—in a time that is ridiculously referred to as post-racial—in talking about race. But it also become clear that my students and I lacked a shared vocabulary for the history of race in the United States, and this lack severely limited the conversations we could have about Ferguson.
Throughout the summer of 2014, educators and activists all over the country were compiling resources at #teachferguson to help teachers begin to talk about Ferguson with their students. Some school districts provided resources to their teachers while others suggested that teachers “change the subject” if Ferguson came up in class discussion. Although the New York City Department of Education (DOE) didn’t explicitly discourage teachers from having these conversations, it also didn’t provide resources or encouragement to support its 1,700 schools that serve 1.1 million students, over 85 percent of whom are people of color.
The DOE’s silence on Ferguson and related events from the summer of 2014 ended on December 3, the day that a Staten Island grand jury refused to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in the choke-hold death of Eric Garner; eight days after a grand jury refused to indict officer Darren Wilson in Michael Brown’s death; 11 days after 12-year-old Tamir Rice was murdered by officer Timothy Loehmann in Cleveland; and 13 days after Akai Gurley was shot to death by officer Peter Liang in the stairwell of the Louis H. Pink Houses, less than a mile from the high school at which I teach in East New York. On December 3, NYC Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña sent an e-mail memo to principals with “suggestions for working with young adults around positive ways of expressing themselves during this time.” The language was vague and symptomatic of a larger problem: the refusal to name racism in a system plagued with its effects.
The memo included language like “in light of current events,” “to discuss their feelings,” “to respond to complex situations,” “current events can be a great learning experience,” and “ask your school staff to be extra vigilant throughout the day.” Days short of the four-month anniversary of Brown’s death, the DOE memo urged teachers to “teach Ferguson,” without ever mentioning the word race. This was not surprising from a system that offers no mandatory training around racism for its 70,000 teachers—60 percent of whom are white.
Talking about race as a white teacher is a skill that needs to be practiced. It necessitates an awareness of how one’s racial identity plays out in the classroom and school community. An ahistorical approach and a lack of precision in the language used to discuss race can result in conversations that reduce racism to charged interactions between individual white people and individual people of color. The memo points to a larger failure of schools—which are an extension of a white society that doesn’t have to talk about race—to equip all teachers to talk about race, and to ensure that white teachers are asked to critically examine the effects of their whiteness in relation to students of color.
September 2014 was not the first time I brought up race with my students. Over the past dozen years, I’ve used literature to open conversations about racism in my ELA classroom, using texts that focus on war and colonization to texts that examine anti-black racism in the United States. Through reading and discussing novels, short stories, poems, and essays by authors like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, students were able to explore the ways in which our constructed identities affect how we are treated by society and how this treatment impacts our lives.
As I prepared for the 2014–2015 year, I decided to ground my first unit in the events of Ferguson. Doing this meant that discussions of racism could not wait until we were getting to know the characters, conflicts, or themes in a work of fiction. I have faith in literature as a vehicle for exploring issues of race and power in the classroom, but often my classes’ discussions about literary texts had been confined to a hypothetical world of fictional characters. Past conversations on race were embedded in texts that offered a backwards glance: Morrison’s Beloved is set in 1873 and Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk in the early 1970s. While the lessons of those works remain cogent today, the period settings were remote to 15- and 16-year-old students. Nor had I given students the language or theoretical concepts necessary to make explicit connections between the racism that the characters face, the racism that the students face, and the racism they observe throughout the country. I wasn’t helping them move beyond an analysis that a certain character was racist or discriminated against because of their race. And so, when I brought Ferguson into my class, I raised an expectation—“let’s talk about race”—without introducing the historical context or the language to articulate how our collective experiences have been shaped by systems of oppression.
As a teacher, I think in terms of scaffolding. If students don’t know the parts of speech, I can’t jump into rhetorical analysis of sentence structure. I would need to ensure that students can differentiate a verb from a preposition before teaching them parallelism: they’ll be able to identify parallel structure on their own, but they won’t have the language to talk about what it’s doing. When my students asked if I believed that all white cops are racist, I found myself in a similar quandary. The students needed more context, and I needed more experience talking about racism and whiteness. We hadn’t built the shared vocabulary necessary to have productive conversations about Ferguson.
For the winter–spring 2015 semester, I designed an elective focusing on the history of race and racism in the U.S. In this foundation course, we read essays such as “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, “On Racism and White Privilege” from Teaching Tolerance, and several pieces found on Mia McKenzie’s blog Black Girl Dangerous. We watched clips of standup comedy: Louis CK on the benefits of being white and Aamer Rahman on why there is no such thing as reverse racism. We also watched videos about internalized racism made by students of color and read articles that debated whether black students should be taught exclusively by black teachers. We explored questions that students posed on the first day of the class: Why is there so much racism? Why do white people think they are better? If race isn’t real, why does racism exist? Have race relations really changed since the Civil Rights Movement?
Early in the semester, the students worked together to create two documents that we kept posted in the classroom during the remainder of our meetings. The first was a list of terms I asked them to define in their own words: race, racism, prejudice, ethnicity, white supremacy, interpersonal racism, institutional racism, internalized racism. This gave me a clear idea of how they were thinking about racism and how to use what they already knew to move forward. The second document was a “race timeline” spanning the 1600s through 2015. They filled in as much as they knew about anything related to race history in the US, and we then began the process of filling the gaps in our historical knowledge and refining our definitions by differentiating between terms.
In this pursuit, there were three essential resources: the PBS documentary Race: The Power of an Illusion, my notes from the Undoing Racism workshops held by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), and the Four I’s of Oppression framework. The documentary provides the social, economic, and political histories that supported the creation of systemic racism in our country. PISAB helped us clarify our definition for racism: 1. race prejudice plus power 2. a social construction biased in favor of people who have come to be called white. The Four I’s of Oppression is helpful in understanding how different types of oppression: 1) stem from ideology; 2) are built into the nation’s institutions; 3) affect people on an interpersonal level; and 4) take roots within individuals, in the case of racism, as either internalized racial superiority in whites or internalized racial inferiority in people of color. With reference to these four interrelated sites of oppression—ideological, institutional, interpersonal and internalized—we were able to think about the role of power in racism.
Using these resources, students learned about the historical construction of race and the ways in which those who were identified as white legally benefitted, resulting in the system of advantages for whites today. For example, students were outraged to learn that although black soldiers fought in World War II and were eligible for the GI Bill, they were unable to use the funding due to exclusionary practices in real estate (redlining) and education. After exploring such topics, students had a clearer understanding of what the “institutional” in institutional racism means.
We also shared stories about our earliest memories of racial identity awareness, as well as our family members’ views about and experiences of racism. As a white teacher, I wanted to name my whiteness in an effort to disrupt the idea that white is an unspoken and normalized state of being. I shared the story of first hearing the term “white privilege” when I was in my early twenties, after growing up in a racially segregated suburb of Long Island. Initially, I had rejected the term and clung to my working-class identity in an effort to deny the privilege I gained from my whiteness. I talked about the ways in which racism still lives in my family, and about how I’m learning to recognize it in myself and to talk about it.
By the end of the semester, we’d really just begun. But with a common language to talk about racism, a shared historical knowledge, and a sense of trust established through sharing stories about our own racial identities, we were able to have constructive conversations about questions and ideas that students brought to class.
In the wake of that semester, I was also able to make small adjustments to my ELA curriculum to deepen the conversations about racism that emerged through the course texts. We created a historical timeline for the play Fences in order to contextualize the Maxson family’s experiences in 1950s Pittsburgh within the history of slavery and Jim Crow. Students recognized conflicts in the Maxson family as examples of intergenerational trauma and were able to see Troy’s key conflicts as the direct result of institutional racism. We used postcolonial theory to analyze Langston Hughes’ 1956 short story “Passing”: students made the connection between the economic effects of the Great Depression on a black man living in Chicago and his decision to pass himself off as white as a relationship between institutional and internalized racism.
Another example of how having a shared language played a role in deepening students’ ability to have more nuanced conversations about race occurred in mid-April. The organization Facing History and Ourselves recommends teaching students the following terms to examine human agency in making history: resister, upstander, bystander, collaborator, perpetrator, and target. I had just introduced those terms in preparation to begin reading Night by Elie Wiesel, when Freddie Gray’s arrest and subsequent death sparked riots in Baltimore. We explored whether riots are an acceptable response to police brutality. Students read “Nonviolence as Compliance” by Ta-Nehisi Coates and “What We Need to Understand about Freddie Gray and Baltimore” by Camonghne Felix; and working in groups, they identified the authors’ arguments and decided whether they agreed with the claims. Each group came to a consensus in matching the roles of the rioters, the protesters, Barack Obama, the police, and the mayor of Baltimore to the Facing History terms. There were disagreements on whether the police were collaborators or perpetrators, or whether Obama was an upstander or bystander. Having access to this language allowed for more complex analyses among students and for less reductive arguments during their discussions.
Learning to talk about race and racism with my students has been a challenging process, one fraught with challenges and errors. There were times when I avoided conversations in order to push through content, or because I simply lacked the energy or the courage that day. But I’ve also witnessed what can happen when we collectively uncover a shared history and common language; when we disrupt whiteness as a normalized state that doesn’t need to be considered during racialized conversations; and when we provide an historical anchor from which to understand how ideas of race and forms of racism have persisted, shifted, and mutated over the centuries. The process may be slow and messy, but if recent events have shown us anything, it is that ignoring this history only perpetuates the conditions that we have inherited.
This past year alone—from debates over the Confederate flag to the exposing of Rachel Dolezal to the shooting of five black activists by white supremacists in Minneapolis—there’s been an unfortunate surplus of teachable moments regarding the history of racism. As teachers, we have an obligation to incorporate these events into the curriculum and to facilitate conversations that will allow students to see these events in context, as part of a foundational history of oppression that continues to shape our lives. It is essential that these conversations include both students of color, who are most affected by racism; and white students, for whom much work awaits.
Alex Cuff was born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and grew up in the suburbs of Babylon, Long Island. She currently lives in Brooklyn, where she works as an instructional coach and reading teacher at a public 6–12 school. She is a co-founding editor of No, Dear, a journal featuring writing of New York City poets, and the advisor to Raven Press, a student-run small press that publishes hand-bound chapbooks out of the Academy for Young Writers in East New York. Her most recent writing can be found online in Apogee Journal and the Recluse, and is forthcoming in 6×6. Alex is a graduate of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.
Brooklyn Poets: Poet of the Week: reprint of Dirt and interview
Originally published on Brooklyn Poets
POET OF THE WEEK: ALEX CUFF
June 15–21, 2015
Alex Cuff is a poet and public school teacher living in Brooklyn. Her writing can be found online in the Recluse, Apogee Journal, Sink Review, Two Serious Ladies, Bling That Sings and Leveler, and is forthcoming in 6×6. She’s a graduate of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College and co-founding editor of No, Dear magazine.
Dirt
I am digging up potatoes and find the motherLike all mother spuds it’s rotten to the core
Like it I have to be sacrificed
So that others can live
This guy says he likes when I’m sexy
He calls me Simone instead of Alex
In my mother’s dining room
The blue-ribboned wallpaper
This guy pulls out his dick
Swings it toward my stomach
I know I’m in big trouble
If I pay the slightest attention
The wall-papered room is a small rocky cliff
A peninsula surrounded by water
Someone has set up a cocktail lounge on the sea floor
I dive down and mix a drink
I am drunk with the lions
Their manes are humiliating
I spend the next ten years searching for that rocky cliff
Waiting in line for a public bathroom
I remember the girl stored in tupperware
My call to keep her alive
I’m hanging off a dead man’s leg
His body attached to the crag of a mountain
A heavy wind bends us back like a lever
We snap and crash onto the rocks
The man’s body crumbles like dry mud
I spy a living man hiking up the hill
I ask him to save me from the crag
My mother accuses me of trading danger for sex
She is naked and wrapped in saran wrap
I’m kneeling on the ground
My head between the knees of this guy
His right hand between my legs
I’m informed that I will need to die by hanging
I stress about which pants to wear for the event
I’m acutely aware of the exposure of my body
The twisting and turning of the rope are in play
My mother hangs the windows with drapes
The room fills with smoke
My daughter asks me to change into a polka dot skirt
I visit the Jefferson branch of the library
I’m confused by her request
I study the past until I am learned and silent
When the house is demolished
I let others pick up the pieces
My daughter approaches
Okay okay I’m ready now
I stack two-by-fours
A man sends me to his friend’s private library
For a white tome titled HERE AND NOW
He explains the premise
A collection of logical fallacies
I’m prohibited from reading
He says I owe him dinner for his brilliance
We like our women the way they are
I butter both sides of a roll
I double up the body bag
I follow his logic and pick up the check
I think of all the hamsters who have died for no reason
I note the past tense when I speak
All my verbs are in the subjunctive
When autumn ends I settle on winter’s length
Nothing is slated to happen for years
Chairs from my hips and doors from my wrists
I walk through the house dislodging
I stand armed in the kitchen until morning
—Originally published in the Recluse, Issue 11, Spring 2015.
Tell us about the making of this poem.
This poem was mined from dreams. It’s a collage. It began with a potato dream. I’ve worked on a lot of farms and have a love/hate relationship with digging up potatoes. Similar to digging for shallots, it’s like finding buried treasure but you only have your hands to guide you. That’s the cool part. The shitty part is sticking your fingers into the rotted planter potato, the mother. At the time I patched the poem together from recorded dreams, I had been thinking about a chapter of The Queer Art of Failure where Judith Halberstam writes of a shadow feminism that “speaks in the language of self-destruction, masochism, an antisocial femininity” in order to disrupt the inheritance of the “relationship to patriarchal forms of power” from mother to daughter. A fraught mother/daughter relationship emerges in much of my writing and I am interested in what I understood to be Halberstam’s permission to destabilize this sacred relationship, to offer a possible out for the daughter, risking the violence of separation from the mother and family bond, for a new way of relating to the body. I like that as a lens to think about the suggestion of sexual violence in some of the images in “Dirt.”
What are you working on right now?
I’m trying to figure out how to respond through poetry to racism while remaining focused on my own experience, as opposed to trying to frame other people’s experiences. So basically I’m trying to write about whiteness. I’m interested in naming whiteness and making what is often invisible (despite its pervasiveness) more visible. Right now this consists of one poem published this year at Apogee Journal, lots of notes, unfinished poems, and an idea. Part of this project is a piece that’s provisionally titled “An Extremely Incomplete History of White Affirmative Action” which wants to explore the ways in which I’ve benefitted, as a white American, from institutional racism. Right now it’s more or less a timeline. I’m also trying to gather/sequence poems about family, which I’ve been writing over the past couple of years, into a manuscript.
What’s a good day for you?
A good day is a day with as little social interaction as possible. A day in which I may accomplish something concrete (like re-pot a plant) plus score a couple or a few hours in my bed reading, leaving it only to eat or pee. Maybe there’s a slice of pizza from Carmine’s on Graham Avenue. After a day like this I wake up feeling like I’ve robbed a bank.
How long have you lived in Brooklyn? What neighborhood do you live in? What do you like most about it?
I moved to Williamsburg in 2003 when I got a job teaching at a high school on the corner of Bushwick and Grand. Twelve years later, in the same apartment, the neighborhood is my home and the place in which I’ve lived the longest including childhood homes. I have five housemates who are basically my family. I live next door to a former student whose grandfather owns the two buildings on either side of me. I’m surrounded by familiarity and it feels very much like a neighborhood—“East” Williamsburg hasn’t flipped as dramatically as the north side has. However, as it goes, I just learned that the landlord is selling my building so I’m not sure where my next home will be. My parents grew up in Bay Ridge, where I was born, so I’ve thought about moving out there. Maine and western Massachusetts are always looking good, too.
Share with us a defining Brooklyn experience, good, bad or in between.
1. I left my wallet at my sister’s apartment in Chelsea and was still able to run Sunday errands in my neighborhood: laundry at the laundromat, produce from the fruit and vegetable market, coffee from the coffee shop and beer from the bodega—all on credit! That’s what I associate with home. Knowing the folks who run the businesses in the couple-block radius of my apartment and they knowing me well enough to take my word that I’ll pay them back.
2. Q train to Coney Island: Cyclone.
3. Biking to Fort Tilden.
4. And, a defining Brooklyn experience, unfortunately: as a gentrifier, getting out-gentrified. Housing insecurity. Navigating the ethics (and confusion) of where to go next when your home can’t be your home anymore.
Favorite Brooklyn poet(s), dead and/or alive?
Bernadette Mayer because she’s outrageous and beautiful and I was introduced to her by one of my favorite poets: Lisa Jarnot (Queens!). Not surprising, I admire the writing of many friends (and friends of friends), too many to name, but to name a couple who are dear to my heart: Mirene Arsanios (formerly BK), Emily Brandt, Marina Blitshteyn, Charity Coleman, Camonghne Felix, Steven Karl (formerly BK) and Jon Sands.
Favorite Brooklyn bookstore(s)?
Greenlight, Unnameable (grateful for the readings they host) and Spoonbill & Sugartown because they are there for me in walking distance and are holding it down on an otherwise scary strip of Bedford Avenue.
Favorite places to read and write in Brooklyn (besides home, assuming you like to be there)?
Besides while riding the subway or jotting notes while walking, I really only write at home. I’ll read anywhere but I prefer the train, the beach, a park bench (I love McGolrick in Greenpoint), or the walk from the train to my apartment.
Favorite places to go in Brooklyn not involving reading or writing?
I like walking Grand Street until it ends at the East River. BAM in Fort Greene. The McCarren park farmer’s market on Saturdays. The city pool on Metropolitan and Bedford. The plant section of Crest Hardware on Metropolitan. Greenhouse Holistic. Light Industry in Greenpoint. Ahn Hardware on Grand at Leonard.
Last awesome book(s)/poem(s) you read?
Thou by Aisha Sasha John. Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Hart Island by Stacy Szymaszek. You Da One by Jennifer Tamayo. Night Conversations with None Other by Shreela Ray. A Problem of Memory: Stories to End the Racial Nightmare (collection of interviews).
Why Brooklyn?
As the rents go up, I often ask myself the same question. And I have rural fantasies. But for now, Brooklyn = Community & Home so here I am.
Poetry Project Newsletter #243: human machine animal
Originally published on The Poetry Project Newsletter #243
human machine animal
when i was nine i said hi in the mirror and was embarrassed
i hadn’t known there were so many of us
i’ve been a champion of self rule and early warning signs
i have dental anger, a tame handshake, and scotch tape
togetherness, shitting and vanity
curfews to prevent the disquiet
of her majesty’s good subjects
when everyone left i’d hang back and pet their soft sex
their wounded pink assholes
i’d rub their dumb ears
that guy at the train station
talking about his jolly green giant
what did you say? i said
he said what would you say if i told you
my jolly green giant
as if he hadn’t told me
and i’m naturally mouthing words
naturally in costume
under a car channeling
let be me the first one to say it: i wasn’t having fun
i’ll get in any body of water in front of the whole world
the thing about envy is that there’s nothing for you
i don’t want to write about how lame they are
my therapist calls me a cheater
you’re a cheater huh?
the hairdresser takes my hair in her hands like it’s a limp dick
asks how long since i washed it
my body’s changing color like the ponies of oz
and the line on the ground is a laser
is a crack
a scratch
a charcoal mass
is a ginger root
a green jaw
and nothing more
i’ll get a coffee on a friday morning
i’ll drive to west virginia with my mother
we’ll listen to all 24 books of the odyssey
in pennsylvania she’ll tell me to do
as circes does to odysseus
keep a man a cave, use medicinals
The Recluse, Issue 11
Originally published on The Poetry Project: The Recluse, Issue 11
Family, a Natural Wonder
We couldn’t agree on a location to dispose the body so we didn’t.
We’d committed a murder as a family.
We stuffed organs into Costco-sized jars of maraschino cherries.
Sensed humor where there was some.
Were haven and humanoid.
Wept collections of TNT.
We rewired circuits.
We failed before we thought to act.
Our failures came in large and manageable pieces.
Dirt
I am digging up potatoes and find the mother
Like all mother spuds it’s rotten to the core
Like it I have to be sacrificed
So that others can live
This guy says he likes when I’m sexy
He calls me Simone instead of Alex
In my mother’s dining room
The blue-ribboned wallpaper
This guy pulls out his dick
Swings it toward my stomach
I know I’m in big trouble
If I pay the slightest attention
The wall-papered room is a small rocky cliff
A peninsula surrounded by water
Someone has set up a cocktail lounge on the sea floor
I dive down and mix a drink
I am drunk with the lions
Their manes are humiliating
I spend the next ten years searching for that rocky cliff
Waiting in line for a public bathroom
I remember the girl stored in tupperware
My call to keep her alive
I’m hanging off a dead man’s leg
His body attached to the crag of a mountain
A heavy wind bends us back like a lever
We snap and crash onto the rocks
The man’s body crumbles like dry mud
I spy a living man hiking up the hill
I ask him to save me from the crag
My mother accuses me of trading danger for sex
She is naked and wrapped in saran wrap
I’m kneeling on the ground
My head between the knees of this guy
His right hand between my legs
I’m informed that I will need to die by hanging
I stress about which pants to wear for the event
I’m acutely aware of the exposure of my body
The twisting and turning of the rope are in play
My mother hangs the windows with drapes
The room fills with smoke
My daughter asks me to change into a polka dot skirt
I visit the Jefferson branch of the library
I’m confused by her request
I study the past until I am learned and silent
When the house is demolished
I let others pick up the pieces
My daughter approaches
Okay okay I’m ready now
I stack two-by-fours
A man sends me to his friend’s private library
For a white tome titled HERE AND NOW
He explains the premise
A collection of logical fallacies
I’m prohibited from reading
He says I owe him dinner for his brilliance
We like our women the way they are
I butter both sides of a roll
I double up the body bag
I follow his logic and pick up the check
I think of all the hamsters who have died for no reason
I note the past tense when I speak
All my verbs are in the subjunctive
When autumn ends I settle on winter’s length
Nothing is slated to happen for years
Chairs from my hips and doors from my wrists
I walk through the house dislodging
I stand armed in the kitchen until morning
noun noun
I have all these text messages from my father of phrases he thinks are funny because they are two nouns acting as adjective noun like store coffee store coffee is coffee that isn’t brewed at home but at a store that you drink out of a cup with a lid and the milk and sugar are provided by the store some people call this to-go coffee
he equates store coffee with loose coffee I disagree and say that loose coffee is ground before it is brewed not at all store coffee loose coffee is coffee made at home it is home coffee he says quidquid whatever I say box tea tea in a box of individually wrapped tea bags I say I am coming home to see you he says what time is your return train
I search for the phrase nouns that acts as adjectives on the internet and hope for a grammarian term something proper but the internet only says that sometimes we use a noun to describe another noun in which case the first noun acts as an adjective like ticket office race horse tennis ball
I don’t always know what to make of noun on noun and sometimes just want a descriptive word to accompany the noun like the spotted egg or the hollowed horse though I understand why some are wary of description thinking that description is not knowing not necessarily in any real sense of knowing the behind-the-scenes knowledge anyway
and now and again when someone says it is what it is I lose faith that people will ever say what they mean he says I want to be a better father but I have no money he says don’t tell your mother about the DUI you know because of her nerves he says at least I never hit you sleep socks boat shoes chicken egg
grammarians might call this a compound noun the internet warns that a car accident is not an accident of the car he says people will ask why jackie didn’t come to uncle jay’s funeral I say tell them the truth she’s not doing well I say you two should finish the steps together he says we need to be on the same page try this she didn’t come to the funeral because she is working I say but she doesn’t have a job he says we have to return all our vehicles to the neutral zone by 5:30 he says
semper mihi hillae which I translate as I am a species all to myself but he says no semper mihi hillae means hot sausages are always mine I say that’s a strange thing to say to your daughter he says coffee snack dinner foil water boots
From an Aerial View the Family Unit is Made up of Individuals Corresponding to Their Environment
Once, in a car, I told my mom that I if I opened a hotel or motel, I would call it the Sunrise Hotel or motel. I think I had been considering the Brook Motel on Sunrise Highway and was thinking of how the South Asian Patel family who went to St. Joseph’s elementary school and lived in and owned the Brook Motel didn’t call it the Patel Motel, which would have rhymed. My mom felt bad that the Patels lived in the motel off of Sunrise Highway thinking it wasn’t a nice way to raise a family. Then she told me that a motel called Sunrise Motel sounded trashy. If I had had a white Persian cat as a child, I would have named it Snowball. When I was in middle school, I wasn’t allowed to watch Fatal Attraction, Dirty Dancing, or Three’s Company. I often drink too much wine on Thanksgiving and end up in arguments about race at the dinner table. My brother who is white like me thinks I’m calling him a racist when for example the prison industry comes up. My mother changes the subject by telling me that I should not be allowed to teach sex ed to my 9th grade students because I’m not a certified health teacher. My mom’s a nurse and before my 11th grade prom, while holding her hand to shield my eyes from a shower of aerosol hairspray, she reminded me to keep my legs closed. In 2008 she gave me a navy blue floor length robe for Christmas because a bathrobe is a respectable and practical garment to wear around the house after a shower, especially if you are a grown woman living with other adults, which I am. She once sent me a newspaper clipping about a woman who was caught with 37 cats in her Brooklyn apartment. The woman gave up the cats voluntarily and wasn’t charged with any crime. My mother has given me three blue robes since. This robe has a hood, is synthetic, and I like to smoke in it so much I’m surprised I haven’t set myself on fire.
The Family: a natural wonder
The Family: a natural wonder
fate /fāt/
one or more people or things already mentioned or assumed to be common knowledge the matter at hand used to point forward to a following qualifying or defining clause or phrase the paper that rolls the wheel that turns the terrace that freezes the trend that slows the blank that blanks the road that folds she taught herself the signs used to make a generalized reference to something rather than identifying a particular instance he hoped to speak of sprawling and superior donuts if only he could find the materials enough of a particular thing the more she rode the elevator the less frightening it became adverbially indicating with comparatives how one varies in relation to another he was the facilitator in the room indicating that someone is the best known or most important of that name or type a gentle intimate comedic development an event constituting a new stage in a changing situation the end of civilization the east wing of the mall the relationship between a part and a whole this type of privacy governed by a noun expressing the fact that a category is vague a planned public or social occasion a thing that happens one of importance the time of her life she pointed toward a spot beyond the trees beyond the time a likeness was established or continuing to happen after a specified time or event when refering to someone or something for the first time in a text or a conversation a citizen dressed as a sheep in wolf’s clothing walks out of the room then into a bar indicating membership to a species to a class to a buying club he was a genius when expressing rates or ratios in to or for each of which he congratulates himself five times a day a human being regarded as an individual the elevator operator was the last person to see her the mute button on the remote control was broken influencing people's behavior and the course of events he was appointed to control all the lawns on the block to determine the behavior or supervise the running of no attempt was made to control for variations the control group was let go they regarded the discomfort as naturally occuring considering someone or something in a specified way hailstones as big as tennis balls she watched him as he pushed all the buttons to indicate that something happened during a time when something else was taking place he was a genius he dressed as he would have if he was having guests or riding down to the mezzanine having made a firm decision and being resolved to not change it he was determined to press all the buttons to indicate the means of achieving something by any means necessary the ability to act in a particular way especially as a faculty or quality she envied the power of a box tied to a piece of rope individual acts constituting group acts get covered get dressed get down- stairs to greet the guests so as to go past the elevator passed by a family of bats flew by a pack of geniuses made room on the couch as a variant spelling of bye as in by by when referring to someone or something for the last time in a text or conversation a man walks out of a bar then into a room a manifestation a force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature a super natural addition to human intuition
A Seasonal Question For You
Hi I just started shaving
my armpits in order to stay
clean I don’t live with my mom
or any women and what kind
of product should you use I really
appreciate it what about down
there how often should you shave
your private part plus what about
private part hair can you tell me
the name of any how long does
it take you to shave your armpits
and legs I'm just wondering to see
how often I should shave both
my armpits and my legs and how
long it should take thanks again
for your kind helpful answer I really
want to shave there but I’m worried
about little red bumps I really
want to shave there but Idk
how to like up or down and
the flaps what if I cut myself please
reply I’m gonna use the powder
cause my mom doesn’t really
buy me vaginal things I haven’t
touched that area with a razor I
wanna shave down there but I’m
scared of the little bumps and
the itchiness afterwards I would
trim it down with scissors but
will the red bumps still appear
should I or should I not do it
what is the current style as to hair
down there if I do I’ll start bleeding
my mom doesn’t know that I
have pubic hair should I try again
can someone answer pat’s question
totally bare or landing strip
so to speak natural unless
showing in bathing suit LOL like
not to sound promiscuous so
confused and pretty much scared of
any pain I want to start shaving
but am unsure what area
is supposed to be shaved clean
and what should just be trimmed
should the labia be shaved clean
and the area above trimmed does
anyone else get this I was told
to go with the grain so I think
that’s why I got so frustrated I am
seeing a wonderful guy
that hinted it would be better
if my area was a bit trimmed up I
cut myself during that first attempt
has anyone else ever felt that way about
the hair down there guys what should I
do or should I wax I have a bf I
might be getting some so
should I shave it all away or
just a little I have a date tomorrow
at 11 AM with a guy I’ve known
since primary school really
uncomfortable feeling like I have
some bush growing down there
should I shave my whole vagina
I’m worried it will like grow
further up onto my back is this normal
so confused and pretty much
scared of any pain there are times
that I glance at my area and I
sort of miss the hair I felt like
nothing was being accomplished
the hair makes me really nervous
A Common Amnesia
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
–Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
white butcher paper wrapping the white bagel with the white sesame seeds inside white wax paper white spray paint tagging the framing store on metropolitan before 1691 the word white did not exist white letters of Brooklyn Seoul six white people in the bagel store white napkins the white Nissan sedan parked across the street left over dirty white snow before 1691 the word white did not exist in a legal document the white help wanted sign in the bagel store window me a white girl sitting under the bright white light bulb that many things I do or do not do think or do not think say or do not say are related to this “fact” the pistachio ice cream green even though it is supposed to be white white finding a way a way to be visible or invisible when it needs to be the white coffee mug found on driggs street the white coffee mug taken from leon botstein’s dinner party the white macbook charger soon to be obsolete those fuckers plugged into the white power strip in 1691 the word white was used for the first time in a legal document previously the christian and english indentured servants in jamestown were referred to as christian and english indentured servants but then they were called white the white faux down comforter with ink stains and cat hair the white light on the white windowsill then the other indentured servants who did not have black or brown skin came to be called white white drugs all the white noise all the white pages the white backs of family pictures bayridge 1978 super white whiteness was extended to the poor whites separating their condition from those of african descent encouraging them to hold their heads a little bit higher I’d say it was a pretty successful move even today I see some white folks holding their heads a little bit higher even if they won’t remember why the large white book about the sun the white part of the eye coconut oil white when solid
ALEX CUFF was born in Bay Ridge and grew up in the suburbs of Babylon, Long Island. She currently lives in Brooklyn where she teaches tenth grade at a public school and edits No, Dear magazine. Her writing can be found online in Sink Review, Leveler and Two Serious Ladies; and in print in Diner Journal. She is a graduate of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.
Let’s Go Swimming
I.
Stories cannot repeat themselves when people are involved.
The man walking on water, rifle slung over shoulder, should serve as a warning.
Everything about the day is an inside-out yellow so establish the distance between you, your
next conversation and your executioner.
Somewhere someone is using flattery.
Somewhere someone is talking about killing a squirrel, needing a haircut, pulling a curtain
closed.
Noon is scented with these decisions.
Sounds of water like the unbuckling of a belt indicate that sex is nearer.
If you dress in disguise and enter a distressing situation, you may be obliged to remain based on
the false premise.
Somewhere an iced cake with your name waits in a wall papered kitchen while you shuffle
photographs of shape and color.
These movements are governed by the bored arms of a strong audience.
Your fans have not yet been called into being.
When they arrive, they will help us build our new room.
II.
If the water is littered with seaweed or gelatinous creatures, I will swim in it.
If the water is coated in sulphuric outer space foam – and you know what I’m talking about – I
will get in.
If the water is garrisoned with empty bags of doritos, cigarette butts and rows of voyeurs, I will
still get in the water.
An underwater reed is a quiet reed.
Events occurring in water could be described as ceremonial, like a baptism, an underwater
promissory note to god.
Baptismal fonts are not large enough to swim in.
I am often misplacing diffidence for soundlessness.
When I am tired of my things, gestures displace sound.
Everything I put in this drawer belongs to me.
If this drawer were placed in the middle of a busy intersection it would be run over before
picked over.
There would be injury before objects could be claimed for use.
Goggles and steel wool would no longer be goggles and steel wool.
Family dinners would be reduced to a plate of hostile gestures.
When trees can’t get through to people they turn their attention to buildings.
Throughout the year paper fails and ducks ascend a lake
with inquiry more logical than a recipe.
III.
Everyone is present when I undress He-man and bury him in the backyard under the swing set.
The gamble is whether he will remain underground or tunnel his way back into his armor.
The probability of this depends on whether he is able to swim.
In walking the distance between here and the storm door leading to the basement, it is easy to
lose count of your steps.
It is not important to retrace an exact path but it is to be exact in enumeration.
Walking may be the only thing left.
Carrying a sword will keep you from having to explain yourself to a group of historians when
they follow you to a snow-packed jetty and lower you slowly into the bay.
It is still winter but do not be discouraged by the temperature of the water.
There is no honest road back to autumn and its broad leaf.
If administered in sheets, water will quell the need to destroy small left over things.
If you pull all eight legs from a spider’s body counting to ten between each gentle tug, you still
will not have arrived.
The thought of coming up stands in conflict to the distance between you and the surface.
Eye contact, like smoking, is nearly impossible underwater.
I’m thinking about making important decisions for you.
If we act now, things will stay dry for a long time.
levelheaded: Let’s Go Swimming
This poem begins with an invitation: “Let’s Go Swimming.” It’s simple enough, serving as an introduction to the poem’s preoccupation with water and establishing a directly conversational connection with the reader. More importantly (and more subtly), the title tells us how to read the poem. It lets us know that as we read, we will be “swimming.” We will be moving around a realm where things are muted and blurred, where things float past us without full comprehension.
The first line of the poem also provides some guidance. The speaker starts out by telling us what “Stories cannot” do. It’s an immediate cue that we won’t be following a particular narrative, or that whatever narrative we get may not be “true” in a certain sense. For instance, “The man walking on water” in the following line brings to mind a recognizable biblical moment. But when it’s coupled with the “rifle slung over shoulder,” we are suddenly somewhere else.
Something similar happens at the beginning of the third section. We’re presented with a story about the burial of “He-man” (likely a figurine). The first three or four sentences describe and wonder about the burial. The fifth, “It’s not important to retrace an exact path but it is to be exact in enumeration,” steps away from the narrative to offer a kind of explanatory epigram. This line drops the “He-man” narrative to remind us it’s not about “story” but abstractly about “enumeration.”
The poem takes many turns like this, jumping from specificity to ambiguity. And even in moments of specificity the poem leaps from thought to thought. Take these lines in the middle of section II: “Baptismal fonts are not large enough to swim in. / I am often misplacing diffidence for soundlessness.“ There is a disconnect between these two ideas. There isn’t much immediate connection between the two lines. The poem consistently operates within this disconnect, as if the quiet area of thought between the lines is most important.
It’s also worth looking at the poem’s form, which is mostly consistent. With one exception (at the end of section II), every line break occurs at the end of a sentence or at the page’s margin. This gives each line (or each sentence, rather) a special autonomy. The sentences begin and end, then we move on to the next sentence. It all seems rather obvious, but since we’re used to poems with sentences broken up amid several lines, it feels like this poem’s doubled up on the separation between lines and ideas. That one exception in section II uses the word “logical” (and “recipe”) to reiterate that even when language is organized logically there is an immense space between the words, the phrases, and the messages.
– The Editors