ETHNIC CLEANSING CALLED KATRINA

by Raymond Nat Turner

Ching-ching-ching-a-ling …

Ching-ching-ching-a-ling …

Ta-tah-ta-tah-ta-ta-tum …

Ching-ching-ching-a-ling …

Ching-ching-ching-a-ling …

Ta-tah-ta-tah-ta-ta-tum …

SOSs— frantic patterns pounded on

Pots and pans — Counterpoint

Shattering surreal quiet …

Tired hands trembled and cramped

White towels; white T-shirts; white sheets

Waved furiously. Invisible to the heart of

Dixie in confederate helicopters casually

Hovering above. Tired arms trembled and cramped

Tired voices, plaintive pleas for “HELP!” faded. 

Slipped into soup of sewage. Oil-gas-gumbo-slop.

Spewing from tanks and pipelines like some toxic

Spittle, rising to their throats from a trumpet’s spit key

Katrina square-danced ‘round New Orleans.

Went easy on The Big Easy.

So, why was the city still swamped? Why’d

The London Avenue levee break in three places?

FEMA flew over and knew on Monday. 

W’s War House knew by midnight. But

The People—salt of the earth— heard it through 

The grapevine— or on TV— sometime Tuesday

Levee built 1 and 1/2 feet lower than specs.      A capitalist

Disaster wrapped in an accident; Concealing a ticking time

Bomb. Set decades ago. Add Big Oil’s hurricane highway. AKA, MIGO—

Mississippi Gulf Outlet — 12 gauge shotgun pointing at NOLA’s heart!

BOOM! Prayers of white nationalist worshippers answered. Prayers of

Hoods concealed beneath Mardi Gras masks answered! Prayers of those

Who preyed to their god; to their profits, “Do unto Lower 9th Ward N-

Words what white sheets behind spreadsheets wet dreamed for decades.”

They’d preyed for a chocolate city bleached beignet-white … Lower

9th Ward N-words out! By any means necessary. They’d preyed to rid 

Themselves of low-wealth ones. Elderly, ill ones. The non-swimmers

Who didn’t own cars.

Their privatized Emergency Evacuation Plan was always: NOYO 

(Nigras On Your Own) Sink or swim. Water-swollen homes— “Xs”

Spray-painted on their skins. Circled numbers. Circled 3 = 3 bloated 

Black bodies pulled from bones of homes. Some pregnant. Some children.

White god was good— weaponizing water! Water raged. Rose rapidly

Ethnic cleansing Land of Louis; second line; trumpet tree roots. Made 

Martyrs of Big Chiefs, Brass band-juju Jazz conjurers. Ancestors of Blues babies

Who’d drown in their own tears with yellowed photos and decomposing dreams …

Ching-ching-ching-a-ling …

Ching-ching-ching-a-ling …

Ta-tah-ta-tah-ta-ta-tum …

Ching-ching-ching-a-ling …

Ching-ching-ching-a-ling …

Ta-tah-ta-tah-ta-ta-tum …

Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; Black Agenda Report's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC.

MAN WALKS 20 MILES TO FIRST DAY OF WORK, CEO GIFTS HIM CAR AS THANKS

by Liz Ahl 





The U.S. has finally completed
its transformation into a dystopian game show
with an elaborate and contradictory
and ever-changing set of rules
about what constitutes desperation
and what devotion; a thorough blurring
of what constitutes luck or pluck or
good timing on Twitter; about who deserves
the reward of money for necessary surgery,
the prize of the means to get to work,
the jackpot of work itself.

I imagine this young man, a student,
his sigh and maybe swearing and
the slump of his shoulders when his car
failed him. I imagine him deciding,
after all the back-up rides fell through,
to walk twenty miles in the dark.

I ponder the gravity of the choosing,
which to me feels like choosing
and to him maybe didn’t; I wonder
what I’d choose, and am stumped
because all I can think of are choices
I don’t have to make, all the invisible
freedoms not to choose I wear like skin,
like air; I imagine him google-mapping his route
to measure how long it will take him and then
I imagine him walking twenty miles in the dark
     
or most of it anyhow before the cops stopped him
and—miracle of miracles—bought him breakfast
instead of shooting him dead—in which case
this dead young man would be accused
instead of praised, called foolish
or noncompliant by those who contribute now
to an overflowing GoFundMe in his name;
those who tweet kudos for his devotion to labor
and its just reward would be tut-tutting
and finger-wagging because

—well he shouldn’t be out walking
like that in the middle of the night,
how dangerous     how suspicious
why was he even out there, are we sure?
why not just call in sick    why didn’t he call an Uber
like a normal person     he shouldn’t have
spoken moved looked   shouldn’t have been
silent shouldn’t have done the thing
that made him deserve death instead
of breakfast    what was wrong with him?
he should have known better—

What cruel trick of space-time explains
the difference between this young man
and Trayvon Martin, also black and walking
unarmed alone at night? A higher level of humidity,
a different hour past midnight, a hooded sweatshirt,
two different cops in the cruiser, the casual movement
of a hand to scratch a shoulder—which of these
or the infinite other unwritten and ever-shifting
variables of late-capitalism quantum mechanics
transforms this headline to the version of the story
it so easily could have become?
Has already become? Will become?

Liz Ahl lives in New Hampshire. Her book of poems Beating the Bounds was published in 2017 by Hobblebush Books. Previous collections include the chapbooks Home Economics and Talking About the Weather, published in 2016 and 2012 by Seven Kitchens Press. Her second chapbook Luck (Pecan Grove, 2010) received the New Hampshire Literary Awards "Reader's Choice" in Poetry Award in 2011, and her first chapbook A Thirst That's Partly Mine won the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Court Green, Crab Orchard Review, Measure, Cutthroat, and other journals. She has been awarded residencies at Jentel, Playa, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center.

KATRINA ANNIVERSARY SONG

by Diane Elayne Dees

Uptown; 2012; ©David G. Spielman; from The Katrina Decade: Images of an Altered City (THNOC 2015) Photo source: The Historic New Orleans Collection via Curbed NOLA

corrupt Corps, Federal flood
blue roofs, insurance scams
trashed car, no house
no phone, no job
abandoned pets, missing corpses
toxic water, staph infections
black mold, asthma worse
dying patients, floating caskets
gangs of looters, schools gone
Danziger Bridge, shot in the back
lead exposure, can’t think
murdered dogs, suicide
recurring nightmares, lifetime Xanax
blame the victims, heck of a job


Diane Elayne Dees is a writer and psychotherapist in Louisiana. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, including the 2006 anthology, Hurricane Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita. Diane also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog about women's professional tennis.

EMMETT TILL'S CORPSE TURNS SIXTY

by Philip C. Kolin

from Jet Magazine, September 15, 1955 via JetCityOrange.

Sixty years ago today
I started my life as a corpse,
the corpus indelicti of
America the Mournful.
I am sure you have caught me
on the tv, in newspapers,  or over the net.
Ten presidents since Generalissimo Ike
have taken my Jet photo
out of their Oval Office drawers
every time America has a nightmare
about whether black lives matter
and prayed  it would never come to this.
You may have caught me
in the  faces of black boys
whose smiles have turned to pus
because of police  clubs or stray
gangland bullets .
You could have seen  me, too,
in crowds demanding  justice
for Rodney King, Trayvon Martin
or Eric Garner. Did you hear me
in a  recent poetry slam on YouTube
protesting the death of a black man
or boy every 28 hours in a Second
Amendment America where violence
has gone through the roof?
You may have also  picked me out
weeping on CNN or Fox
when the Mother Emanuel Six
were laid to rest and
the state  flag came down
in South Carolina
and all the peckerwoods
could do about it  was whistle Dixie.
I plan to be at the Smithsonian
next year when they unveil my coffin.
Hope it does not debut on August 28th.
I am not sure America has enough tears left
for me and the ravages of Katrina.


Philip Kolin is the  University Distinguished Professor at the University of Southern Mississippi where he also edits  the  Southern Quarterly. He has published more than 40 books on Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, African American playwrights as well as  seven collections of poems. His most recent book  is Emmett Till in Different States: A Collection of Poems forthcoming in November from Third World Press.