Winner of  2017 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Prize, the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize in 2016, and a Master Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles for 2015-16, poet Lynne Thompson is the author of Start With a Small Guitar and Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award.  Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, African American Review, Poetry, as well as the anthology Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Thompson is Reviews and Essays Editor for the literary journal, Spillway.

To Blackness

As it happens, I have never tired of blackness—its Marcus Garvey,
Raisin in the Sun, Tuskegee airmen. Its Strivers Row and liver lips;

its Dred Scott, Freedman’s Bureau, Scott Joplin. Some say black is
swarthy, gloomy, evil, fiendish, but we all spring from the tribes—

Ashanti, Bobo, Fulani, Wolof—the cowrie shells and krobo beads sewn
into our fading fabric. I don’t know much about my native blackness;

my daddy he say Igbo, the only word he can give me, but it’s the only word
I need to get the old folks to remembering that in Igbo ututu is morning,

abali is night, and in any mirror, my ihu—my face—is always black.


Published in Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press, 2007)


The Mollusk Museum

              I

         Family

is and is not
a velveteen pillow

theater

a dinner hour mistake
with candied yams on the side

a box at the bottom of
flightless penguins
hitchhiking through town

footprints in a cemetery

               II

        Symmetry

two moon pies per gypsy

greedy art and dirigible need

rushes and reeds
tracing paper on papyrus

the solo, the ensemble

wood ticks
wax moths

hand-drum, thrum-
thrumming the hand

a river, a poplar,
the same old questions

             III

           War

I come to struggle,

                      to eat the edges of;

to abrade the chemical
& the alchemical

in the falling night, always
a souvenir wrapped in a rigmarole;
Vivaldi versus Jay-Z.

  I’m rapt in biblical passages but never
             in any Book of Revelatons or
                       Koran or Green Hornet.

All is taboo. Every day like any other
habit. A telegram never opened.


Published in Ploughshares, Winter 2010-11


Who Giveth This Girl?

She took the name Toy Cow.

She was aware of her milk.

Re-naming > privilege.

At play =  desire even when

day after year (don’t forget
  your January birthday!)

she took the name she was given—

shredded it,
ate some,
sent the rest to a church were the nuns were a little ballsy.

What’s in a name
is a confoundment,
is alkaline,
is sky torn down like wallpaper.

Who giveth this name in wedded agony?

Sticks and names
do not honor thy father
but at bequesting time…

Toy Cow is the name she took.

The boys called her ____________.
The girls called her _________________.

When she began,
she began to call herself.


Published in Fourteen Hills (2015)


 

Lynne Thompson

 

 

© 2018 Lynne Thompson


 

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