Monica A. Hand

 

 

(USA)

 

 

 

                    after Nancy Morejón

 

Never known Coral Island

or River Senegal

still know sea is home.

Remember wreck:

 

striking, breaking, sinking,

drowning in green algae;

know the beaches of Atlantic,

Far Rockaway; know fire —

 

tenements burning

like crops of sugar cane;

hear sounds, I write,

knowing their meaning.

 

Feet and torso, like yours,

move to the rumba, swing low.

 

 

Monica A. Hand © 2014

 

 

 

South

 

Tara House sits on a hill

reminder of back doors

 

yellow throat’s south

white sycamore  ash

 

magnolia skull oak belly

barely visible south

 

flying carp and blue

ships cruising south

 

banked at the river

cross bones wave

 

no longer shallow

sea shrines burned

 

a woman’s contralto

deep sorrow south

 

 

Monica A. Hand © 2014

 

 

 

…these sites of denigration and violence

have become sites for tourism

—    James Early, Smithsonian Institution

 

Landmark

 

See there,

where grief lingers where flesh

became an obsession, drunk;

the way the ocean stunk, as if

land marked with stinky flesh

could bare the consuming.

 

 

Monica A. Hand © 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

____________________________________________

 

Monica A. Hand is the author of me and Nina, (Alice James Books, 2012), short-listed for the 2013 Hurston Wright Legacy Award and finalist for the 2012 Foreword Book of the Year. Her poems have been published in Oxford American, Spoon River Poetry Review, Black Renaissance Noire, The Sow’s Ear, The Wide Shore, Drunken Boat, American Creative Writers on Class, and Beyond the Frontier, African-American Poetry for the 21st Century. A Cave Canem Alum, she has a MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation from Drew University, and currently, she is a PhD candidate in Poetry at the University of Missouri- Columbia.

 

http://www.monicaahand.com/

 

me and Nina

 

« Monica Hand’s me and Nina is a beautiful book by a soul survivor. In these poems she sings deep songs of violated intimacy and the hard work of repair. The poems are unsentimental, blood-red, and positively true, note for note, like the singing of Nina Simone herself. Hand has written a moving, deeply satisfying, and unforgettable book. »

—       Elizabeth Alexander

 

http://alicejamesbooks.org/ajb-titles/me-and-nina/

 

“The message in the so-sick-it muse ic is all on the cover, O’Jays style. The bills are pressing but this book (a We) can help you (Now!) gain a stamp of heritage, your own postal traveling shoes, in the office of International (if not Domestic) Acceptance especially if the real tradition, a mature Langston Hughes in a hat, frames your introduction.”
—    Boston Review

 

fiercely illuminated by declaration and song

—      Terrance Hayes

 

EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE