Jada Gordon is a cohost for the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series, and over the years has introduced me to many new poets. I’d like to return Jada’s wonderful selfless efforts promoting the work of others by sharing some of her poetry with you here.
A few Saturdays ago, Jada came over to my place so I could record her. Then I made toasted cheese sandwiches and along with the black bean butternut squash chili with chipotle peppers I’d prepared that morning, we had lunch and talked about all the things going on in the world that affect our lives. We live in intense times, but I think you will find some reassuring surprise and understanding listening to Jada read a few of her poems on the Vimeo below. Enjoy.
I named a landslide in your honor.
This soil is ours.
Vines blend and bleed
and never break the chain.
Losing my edges in the mirror
Losing my religion.
Death, how I want to mirror you.
Match your fleeting heart.
Melt into arms
slipping away.
This soil was going to be concrete.
Like a coffin. Finite and protective.
This garden is the beauty beaming
under the body of concrete.
Share it every season.
The fruits of my labor isn’t
the check laying on dining room tables.
It’s the way I was taught to grow
not through precision.
But through digging and finding out.
This soil needs to be turned.
You say while wrestling death,
“Don’t let them take the garden away.
I fought too hard for it.”
We are the landslide.
The force that overcomes
the gray and forces
new land to form.
I dreamt your face
was in every petal.
That your hands
were the sun
guiding my skin
through another
restless summer.
I never wanted to be the person
who sang “Landslide” in a karaoke bar.
But my voice is cracked glass,
there aren’t many notes to hit,
and the white noise of the bar
will part like the Red Sea.
Let the rocks and grass
tumble down your face.
My voice, the sky you marvel at.
This soil is you.
…
…
Together Again
I was an unfinished girl.
Watching you watching me.
Surrounded by comfort
but not truth.
I was an unfinished girl.
Because I truly wasn’t a girl.
I say to my morning blunt.
until joy overrides clouds.
A sullen spirit with everything
and nothing at all.
When did knowledge
turn into a burden?
When ignorance made
headlines and walls
of humanity made
hunger worse than desire.
If I were to take it all in,
I’d be bloated with rage.
I’m already bloated
with self-explanation and
suffocating breasts,
But I digress.
Happy woman blues
is the layers of questions
that shed when I stopped
being a woman.
The questions are the story,
the color of my skin.
The parting of thighs.
The women I love with their
heads tilted back in giggles.
The eighty five plants they water
to get through the day.
Nurturing an ecosystem
of loss as long as the
ancestry.com family tree
my cousin keeps showing me.
Carved notches in the belt
of honor.
They fill the pit of my stomach
with fire and wisdom.
The men I love sprawl their limbs.
Each movement an earthquake
to wood floors.
They live in me and have no clue.
They live in me and try to fight it.
I praise the cuts in their arms
like war stories.
Drool over them in slumber.
Hoping their testosterone
injects itself in me.
That is love.
Pieces of each other
emulsified like a fly
in amber. Inside of us.
…
After Nikki Giovanni’s passing
Stay in bed
Protect your peace
Protect your head
Stretch your hips
Under the covers
Expand your body
Like making love.
Let outside
Stay outside
The leaves will grow
Leaves will fall
Life goes on
Without your eye
The world is emptier
Without you here.
Love is lost
without your poems.
My best friend
Has your name
Inside her name
We whisper as one
the walls catch your name
like the wind
catches weightless
beings like a voice
Not in the mouth
But in the shift
of the fingers
through sunlight.
Work hard
Take that day off
Make that love
Lament that touch
Embrace the graze
Love is doing the work
Seeing into the future
How the end
is so immediate
A blank slate
of not giving up.