Category: studio

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Aubade: East

Harlem, a.m.

Today’s the day, I can taste it.

Got my gray sweats pouting in a breeze

so soft, I feel like I’m still wrapped for sleeping

as I head uptown in my undercover power-suit,

bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.

This morning there ain’t nothing I can’t do.

This is my territory, I know all of it—

ten long blocks flanked by mighty water.

Walking any Avenue is like riding

a cosmic surfboard on the biggest wave

of the goddam century, the East River

twerking her bedazzled behind

while sky spills coin like a luck-crazed

Vegas granny flush at the slots. Today

I’m gonna make out like a bandit myself:

hook up with my buds to drop

a few shots on the courts, ogle the ladies,

then play the rest of the day

as it comes                see where it goes

feeling good

feeling good

somewhere over the Hudson

the sun                      heading home

Rita Dove, via The Georgia Review, Spring 2016 and Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems.

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““Aubade East,” is set in Harlem, N.Y. The cocky speaker, out for a walk, squints into the “bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.” This is a hat-tip to Toni Morrison, who famously — famously in my house, anyway — wrote in “Sula,” “The sun was already rising like a hot white bitch.”” Dwight Garner, Houston Chronicle.

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“… one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a [enchanted] lever, a means of inspiring fear” (JB)

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lulled by the numb languor of that divine emptiness,

[…]

driven either by ambition or adrenaline, by morbid curiosity or necessity,