National Poetry Month: Harmony Holiday

Handlers 3-7

Mama and them      cleft     death note repetition as a spur in the eyes       a buckled blueblack pupil
Til her buccal fat        went away      on its      own      &      the waif       is beautiful as a wife
The wage          her youth      her antics      his mischief     outsourced       to wish            Her revenge
     She threatens to love them like this forever    in pieces  flabby patchwork of his  lost sheet music
Found in the basement    beneath a stack of    dead board games   the house smells like Candyland
and    layaway electronics     I am enrolled    in lessons   and given sympathy pets      I watch the girl
rabbit eat  her young alive in the cage    after I make the mistake of touching the babies they were never
meant to have      misgendered bunnies      the mother  swallows   all 6 of them whole one-by-one   it was the
predatory scent of human touch that provoked her     she died of sorrow shortly thereafter     it was the angel
crushing my illusion of being new to this             I’m true to this, I scream into the endless error
Bunny looks back with a      you’re in danger girl glare
I am enrolled in more lessons       Am I being groomed for slaughter or a fame disorder?      Same shore,
our shore                                          The devotee reaches the heart of the lord       in meek burlesque
provinces
                                         I am encouraged to      be great

Ballad of the Child Nomad

No words, no subjects, no sources, no hybrids, no set birds, no child stars, no obsession with owls, no western, no northern, no light, no forge, no presiding, no Wideman, no Whitman, no winter, no hunger, no hurry, no weeping willow in boat with lace, no lattice, no listless erratic road to eros and back to logos and back, no inflating folklore into epics, no folk hero, no epic hero, no road, no traveler, no worker, no networth, no status, no star, no access, no gateskept, no real coons, no bonafides, no signifiers, no fires, no fires, no fires, no fires, no Ford Motors, no Detroit, no Motown, no Hollywood, no Gertrued, no Warhol, no intruder in the dust, no Paris, no Baldiwn, no Baldwin Hill negroes, no intruder in the studio, no accusations, no extortion, no work-for-hire, no father, no mother, no ballad for them, no mineral deal, no discounted rate, no endorsement, no velvet underground, no breakthrough, no black market, no refugee camp, no comeuppance, no market for niggas, no ecomony, no priest, no male siren, no mesmerism, no afterglow, no gloating of the simps, no locusts of note, no floating graveyards, no works on paper, no disembodied voices to narrate the former works on paper, no nobles, no griots, no peasants, no dear reader clenching at the start of something, no headlands, no gathering with our friends to wish death on niggas, no Diddy, no spam here, hooray!, no world hunger, no known rivers for Langston or Lorca or Ginsberg or Spillers, no genocide, no mercy, no IDF, no strip tease, no suffering, no sickness, no resentments, no utopia, no Pete and Pete where she was so beautiful and strange, no Americana, no academia, no surrealism, no burdens, no leverage, no Balkan Penninsula, no public intellectual, no show, no winter tour, no anna wintour, no Azealia, that’s not her, no licorice, no bliss to follow, no beef tallow, so much beef though, there you go, you broke your own spell with the cow, no bull, no taming, no wool in the bin of silk for touching, so how do you live, how do you start living? I pretend like I don’t need money, I pretend like I don’t need the af ection and my family, I pretend like there’s only me and the world

***

Author photograph courtesy of Harmony Holiday

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Harmony is a writer and interdisciplinary artist working across dance, film, music and archives of black culture. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and Maafa (2022, UK Spring 2025). She curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at LA’s music and archive venue 2220arts. She’s a staff writer for LA Times’ Image and 4Columns and has work in New Yorker, Bookforum, Harper’s, Paris Review, The Drift, etc. Her first solo exhibition, Black Backstage, exploring the aspects of black performance culture that cannot be spectacularized through film, and sound sculpture, opened at The Kitchen in New York, Spring 2024. She ‘s won a 2025 Creative Capital Award as well as fellowships from Poetry Foundation, Silver’s Foundation, The Rabkin Foundation, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among other awards for her writing. She’s currently working on a biography of Abbey Lincoln for Yale University Press and, a book of memoir and music criticism, and her next collection of poems, among other writing, film, and curatorial projects.

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