for the bondswomen at the corner of 138TH and willis ave who begin each day with lord please don’t let me haveta who raise 9 kids and 4 grands without leave who prone beg prison guards to release her sanitary pads who as mule of the world make a drop to cop who make change at any laundromat & any cafeteria who leave the lite on & hopes her sons will not be stopped by 5-0 who quote malcolm in howard beach who remind me where i came from & why i will return whose lyricism is memoried in muh dear’s back who read by remembering the shapes who write by tracing them who make biscuits with lard & buttermilk who swell from diabetic sores who on sundays wears a peacock feather in her crown who are blinded by ms justice flinging her headlong through steel scales leaving tattoos of the TRIANGULAR TRADE who collect bottles of love & acid & sell them side by side whose still van der zee is hottentot & maisha around the way whose gaze leave that well of loneliness who be badu but cries like nina who wake up on the 9th month of mother’s day & burns his shit whose beloved mama is etched in stone who bleed without cycle & drinks straight no chaser when she conjure bessie & get brittney whose genesis is her exodus who bind meatloaf with utz potato chips who buy pickled pigs’ feet pickled eggs & lil’ debbies @ the bodega for a dollar who at jesus will save you church of god in christ pledge her allegiance to the holy ghost whose power is living in spite of who go where everyone is her friend but no one is my poem bes a bluespoem for the sistahs at the corner of ahunnard and thirtyeighth and will/is
this here aint a allen ginsberg poem!
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- April 22, 2022
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“this here aint a allen ginsberg poem!” from DAUGHTERS OF HARRIET: by Cynthia Parker-Ohene.
Published by Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University March 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Cynthia Parker-Ohene.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Cynthia Parker-Ohene is a three-time Pushcart nominee, abolitionist, cultural worker, and therapist. She is an MFA graduate in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California, and the Chester Aaron Scholar for Excellence in Creative Writing. She is a winner of the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Poetry Prize. Her recent work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Kweli, Green Mountains Review, West Branch and Best American Poetry 2022, among others. She has received fellowships and support from Tin House, Callaloo, Juniper, and elsewhere, as well as work in the anthologies, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature, and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. She is also a Poetry Reader for The Adroit Journal. Her book Daughters of Harriet is published by The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University.
Fort Collins, Colorado
Colorado State University
"These poems sing in the key of Harriet, an aria for all of us—daughters and mothers—both ancestral and contemporary. Daughters of Harriet is a book that balances our collective mothers’ legacies—joy, trauma, history, and emotional landscape at once. The Black South comes alive and is shone new in these poems—our grandmothers’ very existence shimmers; their bodies held up in sacred homage in the sure hands of Cynthia Parker-Ohene. These poems are bright and stunning and allow us to see and touch and be touched and remember."
— Crystal Wilkinson, author of Perfect Black: Poems and The Birds of Opulence
"Cynthia Parker-Ohene’s 'mad song' is sung from one place that touches everywhere. The 'Black clarities' that build the song occur not purely as a sonic happening, but as a private world of being, a moment to swoon and sashay amongst the pines. Daughters of Harriet is an anatemporal cistern for pleasure, irreverence, and memory that invites the reader to enter into the wild lineage of those who walked on water, whose crossing meant a rupture in language. Ohene speaks from that rupture with righteous derision and humor, though the speaking is more akin to an incantation that reanimates those Black stories lost in the slip of time."
— Taylor Johnson, author of Inheritance
"In poems full of oracular fire, Cynthia Parker-Ohene proclaims the beauty of Black life across complex terrains of time and space. These intimate, yet wide-ranging lyrics move with virtuosity from the remembered 'sheen of buttercups' in a beloved grandparent’s garden to the 'disturbed wavelets' of the Middle Passage still resonating, as collective memory, in the Black body. Daughters of Harriet is a work of deep remembrance and song-craft, drawing innovative poetic language from the luminous, multidimensional network of Black consciousness. Richly textured and keenly observed, these are poems to keep close."
— Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Witch Wife, and Black Genealogy
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