30 days hath Septemnber, April June and November, but National Poetry Month hath as many days as we want it to hath.
______________________ studio practice with italicized Michael Ondaatje quote
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
Playing alone, the artist’s child says,
“You have snappy eyes” & at that moment
she notices her placemats: round
bamboo eyes on the stone table. Crumbs stick
in the swirls her son is sometimes mesmerized by,
like she was by the pinwheel of hair
at the center of his brown head,
black and soft as when he was born,
squalling, damp, rooting for milk. An art object
does not always do as much, as universality
(the myth) crows on old street corners
she could not have stood on untouched
in previous centuries, or now, no matter how she dresses
the natural critic, although she has ensconced herself
into a possessive luxury of mind. She buys little
but books, therefore, in the same way
assassins come to chaos neutral
-Khadijah Queen
Khadijah Queen holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She is the author of two poetry collections: Conduit (Black Goat/Akashic 2008), and Black Peculiar, which won the 2010 Noemi Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the Switchback Books Gatewood Prize.
