Langston Hughes Tribute Issue
Volume 12:1, Winter 2011
Ooth Jazz
A good song can enter
church sweaty
sea-skinned
can wake Sunday
morning still swollen
from having been sliced
in the wee hours
by a blade dipped
in curiosity, the notes
replicating like antibodies.
A good song can croon
god being that same love
whollified by two. It moans
for salvation’s on-time arrival
and awaits the organ’s throat singing
with penitence. A good song
is song, neither father nor son
nor mother. It is the Rubik’s
of a zygote turning-turning,
straining to decide
which of its faces will be blue.
Kyle G. Dargan is an Associate Professor of Literature and Director of Creative Writing at American University, as well as the founding editor of Post No Ills. His four poetry collections are Honest Engine (2015), Logorrhea Dementia (2010), Bouquet of Hungers (2007), and The Listening (2004), all from the University of Georgia Press. His nonfiction has appeared in The Star-Ledger, Ebony and The Root. His work has been awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and he was named one of Washingtonian Magazine's "Forty Under Forty: Young Washingtonians to Watch." Dargan serves on the advisory committees of Split This Rock Poetry Festival, The American Poetry Museum, and Torch. To read more by this author: Museum Issue, Five Poems, Volume 8:1, Winter 2007, Wartime Issue