Search All Winners

In Lima, dying is the local sport. Those who die in phantasmagoric fashion, violently, spectacularly, are celebrated in the fifty-cent papers beneath appropriately gory headlines: DRIVER GETS MELON BURST or NARCO SHOOTOUT, BYSTANDERS EAT LEAD. I don’t work at that kind of newspaper, but if I did, I would write those headlines too. Like my father, I never refuse work. I’ve covered drug busts, double homicides, fires at discos and markets, traffic accidents, bombs in shopping centers. I’ve profiled corrupt politicians, drunken has-been soccer players, artists who hate the world. But I’ve never covered the unexpected death of a middle-aged worker in a public hospital. Mourned by his wife. His child. His other wife. Her children.

My father’s dying was not news.

A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.

A nightingale is recorded in a field

where finally we meet to touch and sleep.

A nightingale attests

as bombers buzz and whir

overhead enroute to raid.

We meet undercover of brush and dust.

We meet to revise what we heard.

The year I can’t tell you. The past restages

the future. Palindrome we can’t resolve.

But the coded trill a fever ascending,

a Markov chain, discrete equation,

generative pulse, sweet arrest,

bronchial junction, harmonic jam.

For as long as we could remember we had been together in the house which established the center of the known world. When we were younger we woke in the mornings while it was still dark. Grandad would be clumping out of his back room and down the hall to the bathroom, phantom-like in his long underwear. He wore it because he was a farmer, which was why he got up before first light to do the chores. In the two iron beds in the attic room there were the four of us—Celia and Jenny, who were sisters, Anne and Katie, sisters too, like our mothers, who were sisters. Sometimes we watched each other, knew differences. But most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal.

Dear Yu Honor

Yu may rmember me when yu visits prison

here I am Walter Boyd Leadbelly #42738

yo best big niger from Sugarland Farm

wit my stella guitar and songs yu like

I play it all like a black machine for yu loud an slow

Down in the valley    What a frend we have in

Jesus an I Sugarland shuffle like pickin cotton far as

eye cn see I need my freedom like yu said yu was gone give me

yur honor all I need a second chance rmembr me

yu sed I was som niger   som niger need they pardon

GOVERNOR

thank yu for yo kind kind hand yo wisdum.

Copyright 2004 by Tyehimba Jess. Published by Verse Press. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books. 

Breaker, trick rider, picador, and the heavyweight ring’s fastest jockey, Ali has made ring time canter and canter, bow, leap over giant bushes, and move so much in his own terms that time became mutual with his grace, Truly the Professor of Boxing, he elasticized his profession, made daring and cunning and mystery part of the craft. Did we ever wonder as much during anybody else’s fights what the champ was thinking?

Our culture is based in the profundity things carry. We’re always trying to see the world the way our ancestors did—we feel less of a relationship to the natural world. There was a time when we dictated our beliefs and told ourselves what was real, or what was wrong or right. There weren’t any abstractions. We knew that our language came before the world.