Poem of the Week

a hip, jiving poem by Reginald Harris

Poem of the Week:   

Reginald Harris                               

 

Photo by: Ocean Morisset         

      

Baltimore Uproar by Romare Bearden 

Upton / Avenue Market Metro Station, Baltimore, Maryland

Get off here. This is a story you've

been told: these streets before the trash,

the rats, the crack-heads nodding to ghost

music. That past a distant gleam of notes,

sound-magicians dreaming, rising

from these streets: diminutive

personifications of the beat, rhythm

made compact flesh; flamboyant

fly-brimmed hipsters high on hi-de-ho,

lexographers of jive; and Our Dark Lady,

transformed from turning tricks to

trickster by the music, through her songs.

From The Avenue to the after-hours you

could hear it in the changes, the shift from

working day to glittering night. Shattering

twists of phrase calling out, the turn of a gloved

hand sheathed in silver from fingertip to elbow

to hide the tracks beneath. Rising from the

platform, the scent of gardenias is in the train's

retreating roar, leaving departing commuters

in spangled shards of sound. These multicolored stones

are her petals, a frozen music always calling,

calling back, urging on -- Rise up. Get off here. Rise

up

-Reginald Harris 

(From Autogeography, Nortwestern University Press, 2013)  

Used by permission.

Reginald Harris is the Poetry In The Branches Coordinator and Information Technology Director for Poets House in New York City. He won the 2012 Cave Canem/Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for Autogeography. A Pushcart Prize Nominee, recipient of Individual Artist Awards for both poetry and fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council, and Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the ForeWord Book of the Year for 10 Tongues: Poems (2002), his work has appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and other publications. An Associate Editor for Lambda Literary Foundation's Lambda Literary Review, he lives in Brooklyn, where he pretends to work on another manuscript. 

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