ROCK CREEK

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

-for Roberta Flack

Today Roberta Flack reunites with Donny Hathaway at a Carter Barron concert among crowds of Washington’s famed cherry trees peeper frogs visiting dignitaries

Marvin Gaye in attendance an alternate inauguration out of doors among glorious birds

Ben Shahn might paint a syrinx chorus oh how the capital creek flows Amanda Gorman

Richard Blanco Robert Frost Maya Angelou read their work

 

I grew up here and I’ve strolled the park with the crows and the deer

watching winter turn to spring  

from far away its song of the public good is still softly killing me

 

Roberta Flack is about as well known among the mandarins in the Maison Blanche

as Richard Wright James Baldwin and Ralph Bunche Emmanuel Macron comes to town

and between correcting facts and straightening records he says France isn’t just a remembrance

of past things like the Somme the Ardennes and Maginot it’s also Nina Simone Josephine Baker

 

I grew up here have often wondered  

where is the love?

not among trees and flowers natives and exotics imperial gifts and the green thumbs

of Lady Birds in our quondam swamp of Camelot the Brain Trust on the Potomac

Rather within those amnesiacs who cannot see what it takes to get to be how great we already are

the ranging octaves and ingenious melodies rhapsody of a people who keep offering everything 

after every betrayal because getting my own means putting it out but as Ms. Flack asked

Compared to what?

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in the Great Lakes Region of Canada. His latest book is the short fiction collection, Captain's Kismet (Alien Buddha Press, 2025). You can follow him @Sandcounties on Substack.

EVICTIONS

by James Penha

In 1968 an evicted Josephine Baker
sat outside the kitchen door of her
Château des Milandes behind which
she had hid Jewish refugees and
arms for the Resistance, reared a rainbow
of twelve adopted children, and, yes,
squandered millions of francs on parties
that would have humbled even Gatsby.
Neither her légion d'honneur nor croix
de guerre could unlock that kitchen door.
And so she sat petting her cat upon
a quilt keeping her warm where once
a belt of bananas was all she required
to heat the whole of Paris with jazz. Now
Le Château est un musée en hommage
to the Black Pearl but not far away
amidst forests in Saint-Paul-de-Vence
tractors ready to raze the simpler maison
where Jimmy Baldwin lived and died

and left unfinished on the doorstep
his memoir of murdered Black heroes,

            Remember This House.

“[Monday’s] New York Times reports, falsely, that our efforts have failed. We are close to knowing, either way, whether we still have a chance to see a residency for writers and artists on the site of James Baldwin's former house, as he wanted, instead of an apartment complex. Very soon we will have the answer, no doubt about it. But it's still far too early to give up and go home. How the world responds in the coming weeks will have everything to with whether the answer is yes or no." —Les Amis de la Maison Baldwin, November 29, 2017

James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News.