by Tammy Melody Gomez | |
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A Collection of the Poetry and Art of Cycling
by Tammy Melody Gomez | |
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WHICH THE PHRASE red-handed, meaning caught in the act, meaning smeared with guilt, out out damned spot, is a bastardization of, given as purple-handed is the result, this time of year, of harvesting mulberries, which Aesop's ant might do with freezer bags or Tupperware, but, being sometimes a grasshopper, I do with my mouth, for that is one of the ways I adore the world, camped out like this beneath my favorite mulberry on cemetery road, aka Elm Street, aka, as of today, Mulberry Street, the wheel of my bike still spinning, as the pendulous black berries almost drop into my hands, smearing them purple and sweet, guilty as charged.
by Ross Gay
From The Book of Delights
This book of "essayettes" - sometimes prose-poems - was chosen as the 2021 Everybody Reads selection by the Multnomah County Library, and will be made available for free to all patrons beginning in early February, 2021.
We hunt here, I was shown death
at the age of seven, something dead
in my uncle’s hands.
I touched the belly of the black snake
felt its body a muscle tense.
I know nothing
of the baby birds cut
from the sour smell of its stomach,
just as I know nothing
of the sister and brother I watched cut
from the back seat of a flipped over car,
their own little cave.
My uncle tossed the thin-winged birds
into the air; lost
in the overgrown wood forever.
They never flew, never rode
their Huffy bikes from street end
to street end.
Never raced each other,
never turned a bike into a motorcycle
with an empty orange soda can. The black snake tail
will swirl until the sun goes down,
until the devil comes to get it.
I began to pray
for a new skin for my mother.
Once I cold name
all the new things.
Mutt puppies, new heads of lettuce,
my uncle’s new car, new red heart.
From River Hymns