Room 73 • Poetry Hotel
Four Poems / London Pinkney
A BLACK POEM
There is no poem to be had. There is no metaphor.
Black death is a currency. An education. A postcard.
Black death is Christmastime. Black death is a baseball card.
Run your fingers over the holographic image
of Black death face down in the street
of Black death in a cell
of Black death laying next to its pregnant wife.
The image is smooth and raised like keloid skin.
When viewed in sunlight the image
creates tiny rainbows that dance across your face.
Even in death we dance to keep from dying.
Even in death we perform.
Black death is a performance. A think piece. Black death is Black (capital B) bodies (lowercase
b).
Such small bodies. A smotheringly silent b.
-------------------------
CRICK WATER
I’ll drink from any crick
that’s kind enough to serve me.
An around-the-way boy
told me our bodies
are sixty percent water.
He told me this in earnest, thinking
this thought will better my life
like a glass of water
on a hot day.
And even though
I knew this fact
I let him go on
because I was parched.
Water is water
is water is ––
what thing shoveled land
and turned water into cricks?
A man?
-------------------------
TO
to float in water is to
trust to float is to thrust
your hips to the sky
head thrusts back into
crick water
arms thrust out legs
thrust you must trust
your you
the water
those slim calves resisting
treading, you think
back to when
this came naturally
you are a starfish you
need to need to trust
there is no side
of the pool for you to hold
-------------------------
PARADISE
Who’s to tell me
pleasure and homecoming
are not one and the same?
My pleasure (my home,
my pleasurecoming) is a ring shout,
the sound juba-like.
My pleasure
is a dam failure, a river
flowing over cracked concrete,
roaring the word Finally;
it is a water metaphor,
to be expected.
We crest and trough in tandem,
showing one another:
You
are
the
ob
ject
of
my
a
ffec
tion.
There is a pheromonic path
that leads me to you,
joy-drunk
and flustered.
Imparadise me, take me
home.
-------------------------
About the Author
London Pinkney is a writer. She is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Ana (www.wearetheana.com). Pinkney is a fiction MFA candidate at
San Francisco State University. She is the 2019 recipient of the Joe Brainard Fellowship and the 2020 recipient of the Marcus Second Year Graduate
Student Scholarship. Her work can be read in various places, including Mirage #5 / Period[ical], Seen and Heard, and OmniVerse.
She’s a lover and leftie from the Los Angeles area.
Acknowledgements: “A Black Poem” previously appeared in OmniVerse (Summer, 2020).
