Staceyann Chin

Hollow Inn

I am at the desk of one Quraysh Ali Lansana. Bad ass writer- good friend. Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center.

Today has been a day of Communing with other writers. The conference is Amazing. The conversations all around literature and the smell of words on the breath of authors we love.

I love being in the wry rant of odd poets and novelists and essayists and general individuals who live to see new books printed, to hear another interpretation of Dubois' work. Harlem and renaissance

and inked leaves crisp with hope
and old stories

I am at peace here in Chicago again
Chicago will always hold me

hungry with the need for a poem or a woman or maybe just a place with the wind upon a face and a history of writers who wrote regardless of family and funds and friends who did not understand the rapid click of keys

and how it makes us wet
and wound up
with the thought of bringing the tale to a climax

Chicago State University
warmer than it should be

must be the hands weaving terror
and survival and photographs of faces who look like who they were before they died and left us with the best parts of them
breaking like lines
in the middle of some haiku

not Japanese anymore
just black bodies creating a new sound for literature
and defining the small edges of our world
stretching across the atlantic
and Atlanta
to Chicago
and New York is where they all ran to
when Tubman was begging her husband

John come with me
I done come all this way back for you
John if you don't come with me

I might have to take some other man
or maybe his child
or his wife will want to come too
John
you
ain't never gonna leave this place

and I ain't never gonna stay here

better to be alone

and free
better to be

than be here with you and these dark wires holding you
tight

John
I gotta go

all that inspired by Quraysh's book coming out
Black man
with two children
writing about a woman who died long before I ever wrote anything about slave

or sex or food or journeys made into the thick cloud of a swamp
damp fog is always harder to see through

I love the sound of writing
I could make all kinds of love to the fingers of a woman writing on keys
scratching odes
sonnets onto the smooth white of some page
smudged now
with the impurity of thoughts
againt God and state

Fuck the state of things not seen
feelings not felt because you lost the wisp
of self
in the arms of a dream you thought
you were both having
simultaneously

Chicago at night is you
and me
and the way we loved against all odds

odd how we loved like that
regardless

and now I am content with the mere hedge of these small steps
we are taking

I am learning to love you slow
this time
alone most nights

the canter of you is beautiful in memory
the quiet in between
is precious
savored for the sweet draw of the thin streak of blood
no danger in that small leak of life

flatlining
I know you are there
and I am comforted by that

I like loving you like molasses
never thought I would

love Chicago
like summer and poetry
and conferences where I am sitting alone

mapping out journal entries
for faces I cannot see

I love every crease in the notes you send
unexpected
but always on time

I am sorry there is not more to give

words are all I have
these mean more to me than bellies
upturned for consumption

alone in Chicago is sometimes good
and I own Chicago too
without
her breath caught in her throat
when I came through the door

Chicago is mine
without her
without the rain
and the way she smelled the first time I heard her laughter
uncontained

we were small girls
before we were lovers

we were friends first
and Chicago
will always me mine
and hers

and all the years we have spent here
together
or alone

Chicago is brutal
and gray and winter
and summer gone mad with the pace of love and ache
and the horror of the ends of things

things do not end

they just change
like the sky
and her face

when she gets me
when I get her

when the world is one big enigma
and we are caught

laughing out loud
because we just figured that out

in the spirit of change
and embracing
what it brings

Staceyann

Posted by staceyann at October 31, 2003 11:58 PM