Everyone On Screen Has Tested Negative: On Enjoying Basketball in 2020
In a deep, official voice, the announcer told the fans to exit the arena and promised, “You are all safe… We are all safe.” With that, the crowd emptied out; no more basketball.
Category Archives: Poetry
The Dark Lady
Nighttime rubs against windows
Like the same black cat
Who slinked out of language
Punched black-&-blue by fists
Eve From Above
Hit play below to hear Kate Partridge read her poem “Eve from Above” and scroll down for the full text. “Eve From Above” is featured in MQR’s Summer 2020 issue. Eve From Above Enter dipping close to the mountains, the sheep bouldering their positions along the ridge. As
Monologue While Watching the Rain Fall
Next morning, the kitchen is
still flooded. I drive Michelle to the factory
where she assembles sprinklers all day. The streets
are dark, and the rain is still pouring down.
From the Diary of Sally Hemings
“White waves—a bitter dream—my mother’s mother in the lower deck—wet and cold in the blue-black night.
Dahomey child, betrothed when she was young, before she knew of white men or the sea.
A thin veil of fog. Her family brings a farmer, a boy not yet a man, to marry with the business of the home. Each dawn she climbs the palm tree and touches wine with her hands. A feast prepared. The gods must have a hand in this! A young goat sacrificed, okra, oranges, a basket of yams laid at her feet. She stands with old friends in new finery, her buba and iro an odd-colored blue, hair in beads, piled to the sky, tapping the palm wine from the palm tree.
Kidnapped before the roast meat was cold, snatched away to America; she was a stranger to the sea. White waves in the blue-black sea. Now a voyage of a different sort. Maria won’t go unless I come along. White waves in the blue-black sea till we land in port.”