Beltway Poetry Quarterly

Volume 14:2, Spring 2013

DEAR DOROTHY/DIANA

dedicated to Michael Jackson

Dorothy, it was always about the Scarecrow. It was never about you
and your tired red shoes, clicking themselves into a wish, sparkling

into darkness. You whined about Auntie Em and Uncle Henry while he
wished for more between his cranium walls than spaghetti. You loved him then

as you do now. His fuzzy afro and yellow dandelion straw sticking out
of his pants like a dream. Even the child in me saw the whimsical way he gazed

at you, his brown fingers interlocked with yours. I loved watching you two
skip down those bricks, unstoppable, headed for the wizard. It was

your quest to be more than shooting stars leaving behind a trail
of stardust. And perhaps the wizard didn’t know, but you did Diana.

You knew how fleeting his star was. Even if he found his brains,
his bright light was already beginning to wane. Not you, the tin man, lion,

or dancing trashcans could save the scarecrow’s delicate orb of light.
He was always a constellation speeding non-stop towards heaven.

 

BLACK LOTUS

dedicated to Michelle Obama

Lotus rising out of South Side water & night
Gifting the world with your brilliant fruitful flower
We marvel at your beauty; bless your seeds with light

You bloom ivy, league that is, grow tall in their sight
Defying every shallow pond with fierce power
Lotus rising out of South Side water & night

Your floral family hails from a deep southern plight
Ancestors fertilize the A.M.E. church hour
We marvel at your beauty; bless your seeds with light

For three days your petals bloom gallant as a knight
Picture that – Monet paints you in sun or shower
Lotus rising out of South Side water & night

How many six foot stalks revel in their rare height?
Dark pods don’t flinch; stand stoic as a light tower
We marvel at your beauty; bless your seeds with light

Stem of Third World Center, Egyptians know your rite
We pray you never wane or retreat to bower
Lotus rising out of South Side water & night
We marvel at your beauty; bless your seeds with light

 

FOR “WATUSI (HARD EDGE)”

Painting by Alma Thomas picked by Mrs. Obama for her office, but then later removed

Draped in disparate blues Maya, Tiffany, Azure, Celeste, all play
against each other; their melodies Miles, harmonies Thelonious

A few greens, a mint or sea-green sandwiched under a wicked marigold,
the yellow of the daffodils Mariah tried to convince Lucy to adore,
the hue so alluring

In the right hand corner, a baby pink barely brushing a grey
like a familiar lover, or raindrops falling over brownstones in Brooklyn

A red, its backbone pressed against the right hand wall, a tall drink
of water, bold, unwavering, reverberating off its partner orange
across the way      But the stand out is the lone black panel,

surrounded by white spaces, deeper than the earth’s mantle,
an inner core hard as steel wool, and complex as an aria
The letters on a book not yet written, the pepper in the pot of soup,
a quarter note on a five bar staff, a whisper turned into a shout

 

 

THE FIRST TIME I HEARD THE F WORD

Buckled in at six, my brown legs rest against the velvety back seat
of their eighty’s black van speeding down Chapin Street, I am
a Little Miss Muffet watching the maples pass like one long smear
of green. Up front Auntie fires words at Uncle Gene and their voices
rise and fall like summer thunderstorms. Her hands flutter
on and off the steering wheel as Uncle lights a white stick,
raises it to his mouth between insults. He cranks down the window
hard with his right hand, as she rants about some woman
at Scottsdale Mall who grinned too long and called him Geney.
He flicks embers out his window and they fly back into mine,
spiral to the seat, burning a hole so deep that the metal coils
sprang up like angered gargoyles.

 

DROPPED BROWN EGG

“Everything becomes public in a small town”
from Funes the Memorious by Jorge Luis Borges

Without the tiny scar on my right arm to remind me,
nothing would reel me back to that humid June day
when the air stood and did not move.  Momma was busy
scrambling daddy’s royal breakfast and Old Spice snuck out
the bathroom door where daddy put the blade to face. That day I was
assigned to mind baby brother; and I arm-cradled him
on the front porch, bouncing him knee to knee, dreaming
of a taffy-colored baby girl. She would be my carmel icing,
my symphony of sugar. But when I awoke he was splayed
on concrete cracked and oozing, a brown egg frying,
sizzling so loud that momma flew from the kitchen,
and daddy’s shaving cream plopped to the ground,
a fallen white cloud, as he switched my one guilty limb.

 

 

celeste doaks is the recipient of a 2012 Lucille Clifton Scholarship to attend Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. Her work has garnered a 2010 AWP WC&C Scholarship and the 2009 Academy of American Poets Graduate Prize; she has also been awarded residencies at Atlantic Center of the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her journalism has appeared in the Huffington Post, Village Voice, and Time Out New York. doaks received her MFA from North Carolina State University in 2010 and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective (CAAWC). Her poems have been published in the Asheville Poetry Review, and Tidal Basin Review. Doaks currently lives in Washington, DC and teaches creative writing at Morgan State University.