Dolls
Ajibola Tolase
Afraid of getting blood
on the furniture, Yusef
put my finger in his mouth.
We were seven and nine years
clueless of first aid treatments.
He traced the cut with his
tongue. There was so much
water I thought I must be
drowning. Earlier that day
we were suspended
from school so, we folded
paper into airplanes and boats.
When Yusef asked what
I was doing with the knife,
I said I was making art.
Then I was not, at the sight
of the ballooned white tissue
before my finger was overran
with blood. Yusef pinned me
to the wall before lowering my finger
into the tank of the kerosene
lamp. He wrapped the dangling
half of my finger to its root
with a rag from his mother's
sewing kit. The whole afternoon
I thought about my sister's
dolls lying in their boxes and
what their still bodies can teach
about dying. I was not a kid
who paid attention until Yusef
lost a tooth to an infection.
I was scared the opening in his mouth
was a faucet and that he would always
try to drown me. So, I pushed him off
the playground into the puddle. I pushed
him down until he stayed there.
from the book 2000 BLACKS / University of Pittsburgh Press
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The poem began from a childhood memory that I hold dear because it's an instance of a child caring for another, then it turned towards creative possibilities that only poetry has room for.

Ajibola Tolase on "Dolls"
"Nikki Giovanni’s Poetry was a Platform for Truth-Telling"

"Giovanni was African American from the peel to the core, but she reminded me of my Jamaican mother and the resilient women of her church who spoke simply, with gravitas. From her poems, it’s clear that Giovanni had an aversion to pretension. Form was important but fundamentally her poetry was a platform for truth-telling. She was a straight shooter and would take her argument to the man, black or white."

via THE GUARDIAN
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Cover of Cynthia Cruz's book, Back to the Woods
What Sparks Poetry: Cynthia Cruz on Reading Prose

"With capitalism, this constructive destruction is perverted and, instead of constructivity arising from destruction, we have only pure destruction. Stanzas four through six speak to this destruction, capitalism’s contamination. In, for example, the lines, 'Damage/from the inside,' the contamination occurs through subject formation which means it happens internally, through the mind."
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