PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Judy Juanita

Judy Juanita
USA

Judy Juanita is an unusual and provocative writer who crosses the boundaries of genre, utilizing narrative, dialogue and journalism in poetry, to probe social issues with a novel forthcoming from Viking. Juanita’s poetry has appeared in Obsidian II, 13th Moon,Painted Bride Quarterly, The Passaic Review, Poetry Monthly and elsewhere. Her plays have been produced in San Francisco at The Marsh, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, at Brava! plus the National Black Theater Festival Winston-Salem and elsewhere. She was awarded New Jersey Arts Council Fellowships for poetry and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She teaches writing at Laney College in Oakland, California.

bling

somebody jumped off slave ships

fr this

somebody mailed himself in a box

from slavery to freedom

fr it

somebody else ran like hell

from the paddyrollers

fr it

& somebody stood up to the koo klux

fr it

somebody rioted fr it

somebody sang their heart out fr it

somebody blew somebody’s socks off fr it

somebody blew their own brains out fr it

somebody died fr yr bling

even as julian bond wrote

look at that girl shake her thing

we can’t all be martin luther king

somebody fought just & unjust war

fr it

somebody died on parchman farm

at the whipping boss’ hand

fr it

somebody else became baraka ntozake

madhubuti sekou touré so you cd be

P, snoop, biggie, lil jon, lil kim,

lil slim, jeezy, uncle kracker

and somebody else with perfectly decent anglo-

saxon names~fred hampton and mark clark~

died shot to death at four am fr this thing

someone upheld our long tradition of thought

dudley randall wrote about the melting pot:

Shove your old pot. You can like it or not,

I’ll be just what I am.

somebody died not to be called boy

their noble deaths allow you to be “big boi”

somebody bled to learn the alphabet a to z

somebody dreamed not this dream

but a way out of nightmare

& you wake in the middle of it–bling!

thinking it’s free and clear but things

aren’t always what they appear

somebody died a ludicrous death for ludacris to appear

a son of emmett and ishmael recklessly

eyeballing everyone under the sun

somebody learned the dictionary from aardvark to the end

fr yr bling

somebody’s black titties suckled whomever they had to

fr it

somebody played maidbutlerdummymammyconvictslave

so you cd be marilyn monroe in blackface

and bring hollywood to the hood

bling

bling-bling

somebody gave one insignificant, unsung, whole wondrous

life fr it.

(bling! appears in Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry from Scarlet Tanager Books, Andrena Zawinski Editor)

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