George Moses Horton
A Slave’s Reflections the Eve Before His Sale

O, comrades! to-morrow we try,
The fate of an exit unknowing—
Tears trickled from every eye—
’Tis going, ’tis going, ’tis going!

Who shall the dark problem then solve,
An evening of gladness or sorrow,
Thick clouds of emotion evolve,
The sun which awaits us to-morrow,
O! to-morrow! to-morrow!
Thick clouds of emotion evolve,
The sun which awaits us to-morrow.

Soon either with smiles or with tears,
Will the end of our course be completed.
The progress of long fleeting years,
Triumphant or sadly regretted.

In whom shall the vassal confide,
On a passage so treacherous and narrow,
What tongue shall the question decide,
The end which awaits us to-morrow?
O! to-morrow, to-morrow!
What tongue shall the question decide,
The end which awaits us to-morrow?

The sun seems with doubt to look down,
As he rides on his chariot of glory,
A king with a torch and a crown,
But fears to exhibit his story.

What pen the condition makes known,
O! prophet thy light would I borrow,
To steer through the desert alone,
And gaze on the fate of to-morrow;
O! to-morrow, to-morrow!
To steer through the desert alone,
And gaze on the fate of to-morrow.

George Moses Horton (1797–1883) is the author of The Hope of Liberty (1829), The Poetical Works of George M. Horton (1835), The Colored Bard of North-Carolina (1835), and Naked Genius (1865).

Thomas March
Ideal Weight

On viewing Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA)” 1991

Remembrance is no solitary art.
So this is Ross, this multicolored mound
of candies in a heap against the wall,
to serve the curious, who cross the room
where, swindled by the promise of a sweet
distraction, as they kneel to choose a piece
then rise to peel the cellophane away,
they mimic the devotion of a prayer,
dismantling his body absently.

Whoever reads the card can understand
the sad and strange communion they have had.
But from all hands, the empty wrappers fall,
and sounds of crinkling plastic overwhelm
impatient crunches and astonished gasps,
like beetles clearing flesh from silent bone.

It’s what you’d hope the one you love would do
when you have no more spirit left to stand—
collect you in the corner of a room,
to brace the fading traces of your form—
prolong, somehow—unable to forestall
the brief, indifferent sweetness of release.

Thomas March’s recent poetry has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Account, The Common Online, Confrontation, Pleiades, and RHINO. His poetry column, “Appreciations,” appears regularly in Lambda Literary Review and seeks to promote new poetry by offering close readings of poems from recent collections. He is a past winner of the Norma Millay Ellis Fellowship, awarded by the Millay Colony for the Arts, and he has received an Artist Grant from the Vermont Studio Center. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, he has also reviewed for American Book Review, The Believer, and New Letters, among others. Learn and read more at www.thomasmarch.org.

This poem appeared in RHINO.

Georgia Douglas Johnson
Black Woman

Don’t knock at the door, little child,
I cannot let you in,
You know not what a world this is
Of cruelty and sin.
Wait in the still eternity
Until I come to you,
The world is cruel, cruel, child,
I cannot let you in!

Don’t knock at my heart, little one,
I cannot bear the pain
Of turning deaf-ear to your call
Time and time again!
You do not know the monster men
Inhabiting the earth,
Be still, be still, my precious child,
I must not give you birth!

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880 – 1966) was an American poet, one of the earliest African-American female playwrights, and a member of the Harlem Renaissance. She published four volumes of poetry, beginning in 1916 with The Heart of a Woman. Johnson was a key advocate in the anti-lynching movement and a pioneering member of the lynching drama tradition. She was involved in the NAACP’s anti-lynching campaigns of 1936 and 1938 and a member of the Writers League Against Lynching, which advocated for a federal anti-lynching bill and included Countée Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Alain Locke. Her long-running series of Saturday Salons hosted Harlem Renaissance luminaries including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer, Richard Bruce Nugent, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké and Eulalie Spence.

This poem is in the public domain.

Paul Lawrence Dunbar
We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was an American poet, novelist, and playwright. Born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky before the American Civil War, Dunbar began to write stories and verse when still a child and was president of his high school’s literary society. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in a Dayton newspaper. Dunbar was one of the first African-American writers to establish an international reputation. He wrote the lyrics for the musical comedy, In Dahomey (1903), the first all-African-American musical produced on Broadway. Suffering from tuberculosis, Dunbar died at the age of 33.

This poem is in the public domain.

Keith Leonard
Ode to the Grotesque

Predawn cold, and the jet stream of breath
jumps from the snout. The skin’s final form
could be blistered. So say the hands. So says
the bark that half moons the split log.
So says the axe head and sweat lacquered shaft.
A whole cauldron of steam can rise
from the humped shoulders when the body
becomes the blade. One can look villainous,
but what if beauty is the beginning of a terror
we can barely stand? So says Rilke. So say
the Cyclops, the ogre, and the monster
taunted by flame. There was a time
I was afraid of him—this father
carrying wood in his arms like a babe.

Keith Leonard is the author of Ramshackle Ode (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 2016) and the chapbook, Still, the Shore (YesYes Books, 2013). Keith is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Indiana University.

This poem appeared in The Paris-American.

James Weldon Johnson
Prayer at Sunrise

Now thou art risen, and thy day begun.
How shrink the shrouding mists before thy face,
As up thou spring’st to thy diurnal race!
How darkness chases darkness to the west,
As shades of light on light rise radiant from thy crest!
For thee, great source of strength, emblem of might,
In hours of darkest gloom there is no night.
Thou shinest on though clouds hide thee from sight,
And through each break thou sendest down thy light.

O greater Maker of this Thy great sun,
Give me the strength this one day’s race to run,
Fill me with light, fill me with sun-like strength,
Fill me with joy to rob the day its length.
Light from within, light that will outward shine,
Strength to make strong some weaker heart than mine,
Joy to make glad each soul that feels its touch;
Great Father of the sun, I ask this much.

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) is best remembered for his leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). During the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson established his reputation as a writer of poems and novels and an anthologist of black spirituals. During the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, Johnson he served as US consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 1934 he became the first African-American professor to be hired at New York University. Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University.

This poem is in the public domain.

Phillis Wheatley
On Imagination

Thy various works, imperial queen, we see,
How bright their forms! how deck’d with pomp by thee!
Thy wond’rous acts in beauteous order stand,
And all attest how potent is thine hand.

From Helicon’s refulgent heights attend,
Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:
To tell her glories with a faithful tongue,
Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song.

Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,
Till some lov’d object strikes her wand’ring eyes,
Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,
And soft captivity involves the mind.

Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
Th’ empyreal palace of the thund’ring God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind:
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul.

Though Winter frowns to Fancy’s raptur’d eyes
The fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise;
The frozen deeps may break their iron bands,
And bid their waters murmur o’er the sands.
Fair Flora may resume her fragrant reign,
And with her flow’ry riches deck the plain;
Sylvanus may diffuse his honours round,
And all the forest may with leaves be crown’d:
Show’rs may descend, and dews their gems disclose,
And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose.

Such is thy pow’r, nor are thine orders vain,
O thou the leader of the mental train:
In full perfection all thy works are wrought,
And thine the sceptre o’er the realms of thought.
Before thy throne the subject-passions bow,
Of subject-passions sov’reign ruler thou;
At thy command joy rushes on the heart,
And through the glowing veins the spirits dart.

Fancy might now her silken pinions try
To rise from earth, and sweep th’ expanse on high:
From Tithon’s bed now might Aurora rise,
Her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies,
While a pure stream of light o’erflows the skies.
The monarch of the day I might behold,
And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold,
But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy’s flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) was the first African-American woman to publish a collection of poems. She was born in West Africa and sold into slavery at the age of seven, becaming the property of the Wheatley family of Boston. The publication of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) brought her fame both in England and the American colonies. She was emancipated from slavery upon the death of her master John Wheatley and married John Peters shortly thereafter. They had three children, all of whom died in infancy. Peters was imprisoned for debt in 1784. An impoverished Wheatley worked as a domestic servant until she became ill and died at the age of 31.

This poem is in the public domain.

Chris Emslie
Steak Night

on the stairs behind
my apartment, he kissed me
like a bad movie: mid-sentence.

nothing shivered
on the tip of his tongue. nothing
ached to hop the space

between our mouths.
we burned there
in effigy, a gift

to that wide nothing. we burned
despite the moths alighting
on his shoulders,

despite how later, we’d curl
ourselves into the remainder,
an open quotation.

we burned too soft to see by.
seared but still bloody
even as we were swallowed.

Chris Emslie (also called Kit) is assistant editor at ILK journal. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, PANK, and NANO Fiction, among other journals. Chris lives in Tuscaloosa, AL, where they are an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama.

This poem is not previously published.

Sharon Olinka
Desire Bus

Around the time Tennessee Williams died I was having
sex twelve times a day and thought
it would last forever. The Desire bus
had its route by my Eighth Ward house, down to
the Ninth Ward, past the corner grocery
with dingy brooms stacked outside, two old
men playing cards. Past Jewel’s Tavern,
all the beautiful gentle boys with their arms
around each other who would die,
my friend Girard dead of AIDS before he was thirty, cloisonné
bottles in his antiques store gathering dust.
Past Verti Mart on Royal Street, where I’d go
for fried catfish, barbequed chicken, congealed
squares of macaroni and cheese.

Didn’t know the vaults already had me.
Thought desire would last forever.
Slow dissolve. Blood clots.
Noose of beads
for tourists. Yearly
profits. And where
am I in all this? I’m a ghost,
holding my heart on a plate.
Dancing on Rampart and Dumaine.

Sharon Olinka is the author of the poetry collections Old Ballerina Club (Dos Madres Press, 2016), The Good City (Marsh Hawk Press, 2006), and A Face Not My Own (West End Press, 1995.) Winner of a Barbara Deming Memorial Award, her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Barrow Street, Poetry Wales, Jewish Quarterly, Drunken Boat, and the anthology Bum Rush the Page: a Def Poetry Jam (Broadway Books, 2001), edited by Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivera.

This poem appears in Old Ballerina Club and originally appeared in The Cafe Review.

Trenton Pollard
Bitterroot Lament

I like to think that bitterroots blossomed
from his tears and blood,
that their pink petals wrapped around his body
and lifted it to the sky,

and not that he limped
into the emergency room alone,

or that his father said it wasn’t a hate-crime
because he was drunk,

not that when I trace the metal plates
around his eye in bed,
he doesn’t feel it.

Originally from Michigan, Trenton Pollard has worked as a welder, graphic designer, massage therapist, and political organizer. His work has been published in The Chicago Quarterly Review, Paper Nautilus, Assaracus, The Cossack Review, Verdad, Codex Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in New York City.

This poem is not previously published.