Sun shines through Douglas fir trees in the Willamette National Forest in Oregon. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman, File)
WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service on Tuesday finalized revisions to its rules governing oil and gas development on National Forest System lands, a move the Trump administration says will speed permitting and boost domestic energy production but that has drawn concern from officials in the Pacific Northwest over potential environmental harm.
The updated regulation, published in the Federal Register, streamlines how federal agencies manage oil and gas leasing across millions of acres of public land. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the changes align with President Donald Trump’s executive orders declaring a national energy emergency and calling for expanded U.S. energy production.
“President Trump has made it clear that unleashing American energy requires a government that works at the speed of the American people, not one slowed by bureaucratic red tape,” Rollins said in a statement. She said the revisions would give energy producers more certainty while “safeguarding forests and communities.”
Burgum said the rule replaces what he described as delays under the previous administration with a more efficient system that will “boost production, slash energy costs, and guarantee our global leadership.”
The final rule, known as 36 CFR 228 Subpart E, updates federal oil and gas leasing procedures to allow the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to coordinate more closely when issuing permits. It establishes a single leasing decision point and reduces duplicative environmental reviews, steps the agencies say will reduce backlogs and speed decisions on applications to drill.
Under federal law, the Forest Service manages the surface of national forest lands, while the BLM oversees subsurface mineral rights. The agencies jointly develop permitting conditions under their separate authorities.
According to federal data, 5,154 oil and gas leases currently cover about 3.8 million acres — roughly 2% — of National Forest System lands. About 2,850 of those leases, spanning 1.8 million acres across 39 national forests and grasslands, have producing oil or gas wells.
Officials in Oregon and Washington, however, have expressed concern that faster leasing and permitting could threaten the region’s natural beauty and sensitive ecosystems, arguing that federal policies should prioritize environmental protection and recreation alongside energy development in the Pacific Northwest’s forests and public lands.
CAPITAL REGION, N.Y. (NEWS10) — June 27 is National HIV testing day, and the New York State Department of Health says New York is at an all-time low of new infection rates. NEWS10 speaking with a local group on their efforts here in the capital region to help eradicate the disease.
New York has hit historic lows in HIV new infection rates since the pandemic’s height in the 1990s. However local HIV specialists say now is not the time to relax.
“The battle is not over. There are places and populations that are increasing in rates of infection, and we need to get those individuals identified and we need to help them get into the care that they need. Because there are things that we can do now that’ll make life normal and long lived,” said Kim Atkins, Executive Director Alliance for Positive Health.
New York’s new infection rates have plummeted 42% since 2011 from nearly 4000 new infections a year down to just over 2000 a year in 2022. 18% of new infections tested positive for AIDS and 69% of new infection rate diagnoses are people under the age of 40.
The Alliance for Positive Health has been providing free testing for nearly 40 years. “Testing needs to continue, and we need to identify people because people are still getting infected,” said Atkins.
And now, the Alliance for Positive Health teams can get to more people in further away places with their new mobility fleet. “This is the newer one we have a larger one that we could test two people at once. Recover 15 counties so we go all the way up to Plattsburgh and all the way down to Hudson and anywhere in between,” said Testing Supervisor Alliance for Positive Health, Niurka Diaz Gonzalez.
Chris Francis has been with the Alliance team for over 10 years and is part of the Care Coordination. He tells NEWS10 Reporter James De La Fuente about the importance of testing.
“I suggest people get tested every couple, of every two to three months. Especially if they’re sexually active.” Francis says testing is personal. “I care about my physical and mental health. It can take a toll on your mental health if you don’t get tested not knowing what you have or if you’re clean.”
As black and brown communities are adversely affected Chandler Hickenbottom, co-founder of Saratoga BLM says her organization is taking focus on testing, as well.
“As of right now we don’t have anything posted. But I think that is something that after having this conversation, I think it would be really great and important for us to start getting more involved in. So, joining the campaign to show the importance of not just getting tested in general, not just even for HIV, but for all sexually transmitted infections and STD’s. That is definitely very important,” said Hickenbottom.
A spokesperson with NYDOH says, “HIV in New York State has fallen to historic lows. At its peak in the mid-1990s, New York diagnosed nearly 15,000 new cases per year; that number was down to 2,318 in 2022.”
The Black literary tradition is rich and exhaustive, and 20 poems could never hope to scratch its surface. But each one of these poems also contains a world within itself—a refracted look at one’s wounds or visions of new ones or, often, both bound up together in the ways only American poetry can achieve.
These are laments, songs of revolution (both internal and societal), and recipes for change. Some feel like prophecies for the current moment and others feel like visions of even bigger seismic shifts. They speak best for themselves but they call all of us to join them. From Amiri Baraka to Octavia E. Butler, black poetry is truly something amazing to behold. In honor of Black Lives Matter, here are 20 revolutionary poems by black poets.
1. Poem About My Rights by June Jordan
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can’t go out without changing my clothes my shoes my body posture my gender identity my age my status as a woman alone in the evening/ alone on the streets/alone not being the point/ the point being that I can’t do what I want to do with my own body because I am the wrong sex the wrong age the wrong skin and suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/ or far into the woods and I wanted to go there by myself thinking about God/or thinking about children or thinking about the world/all of it disclosed by the stars and the silence: I could not go and I could not think and I could not stay there alone as I need to be alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own body and who in the hell set things up like this and in France they say if the guy penetrates but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me and if after stabbing him if after screams if after begging the bastard and if even after smashing a hammer to his head if even after that if he and his buddies fuck me after that then I consented and there was no rape because finally you understand finally they fucked me over because I was wrong I was wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong to be who I am which is exactly like South Africa penetrating into Namibia penetrating into Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland and if after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to self-immolation of the villages and if after that we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they claim my consent: Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what in the hell is everybody being reasonable about and according to the Times this week back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba and before that it was my father on the campus of my Ivy League school and my father afraid to walk into the cafeteria because he said he was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong gender identity and he was paying my tuition and before that it was my father saying I was wrong saying that I should have been a boy because he wanted one/a boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and that I should have had straighter hair and that I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should just be one/a boy and before that it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me to let the books loose to let them loose in other words I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A. and the problems of South Africa and the problems of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white America in general and the problems of the teachers and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very familiar with the problems because the problems turn out to be me I am the history of rape I am the history of the rejection of who I am I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of myself I am the history of battery assault and limitless armies against whatever I want to do with my mind and my body and my soul and whether it’s about walking out at night or whether it’s about the love that I feel or whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or the sanctity of my national boundaries or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity of each and every desire that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic and indisputably single and singular heart I have been raped be- cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic the wrong sartorial I I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable this poem is not consent I do not consent to my mother to my father to the teachers to the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in cars I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name My name is my own my own my own and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this but I can tell you that from now on my resistance my simple and daily and nightly self-determination may very well cost you your life
2. A Journey by Nikki Giovanni
It’s a journey . . . that I propose . . . I am not the guide . . . nor technical assistant . . . I will be your fellow passenger . . .
Though the rail has been ridden . . . winter clouds cover . . . autumn’s exuberant quilt . . . we must provide our own guide-posts . . .
I have heard . . . from previous visitors . . . the road washes out sometimes . . . and passengers are compelled . . . to continue groping . . . or turn back . . . I am not afraid . . .
I am not afraid . . . of rough spots . . . or lonely times . . . I don’t fear . . . the success of this endeavor . . . I am Ra . . . in a space . . . not to be discovered . . . but invented . . .
I promise you nothing . . . I accept your promise . . . of the same we are simply riding . . . a wave . . . that may carry . . . or crash . . .
Disembark the Turners seem to say, those starburst barges glowing in the dusk, but I can’t read old Rembrandt, his guarded eyes are jewels, like black men. Even the loaned, marble busts of kings and soldiers fail to arrest you. It’s nearly closing time. The elderly linger, rapt. Who has looked at either of you lately with such tenderness? Entering the narrow hall, I ignore my favorite portraits, their ruffles and bodices, carnations and powder puffs, afraid to share my joy with you, yet your bearing in this space—the procession of your shoulders, the crowns of your heads— makes them sing anew. You are both good men. Walk into the Fragonard Room. You both seem bored still. It’s fine. Perhaps we can progress like these panels, slowly and without words, here—the city where I first knew men in the dark— in this gold and feminine room.
In the head, and I will not shoot myself In the back, and I will not hang myself With a trashbag, and if I do, I promise you, I will not do it In a police car while handcuffed Or in the jail cell of a town I only know the name of Because I have to drive through it To get home. Yes, I may be at risk, But I promise you, I trust the maggots Who live beneath the floorboards Of my house to do what they must To any carcass more than I trust An officer of the law of the land To shut my eyes like a man Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet So clean my mother could have used it To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will Do it the same way most Americans do, I promise you: cigarette smoke Or a piece of meat on which I choke Or so broke I freeze In one of these winters we keep Calling worst. I promise if you hear Of me dead anywhere near A cop, then that cop killed me. He took Me from us and left my body, which is, No matter what we’ve been taught, Greater than the settlement A city can pay a mother to stop crying, And more beautiful than the new bullet Fished from the folds of my brain.
5. Sci-Fi by Tracy K. Smith
There will be no edges, but curves. Clean lines pointing only forward.
History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance,
Just like the dinosaurs gave way To mounds and mounds of ice.
Women will still be women, but The distinction will be empty. Sex,
Having outlived every threat, will gratify Only the mind, which is where it will exist.
For kicks, we’ll dance for ourselves Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs.
The oldest among us will recognize that glow— But the word sun will have been re-assigned
To the Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device Found in households and nursing homes.
And yes, we’ll live to be much older, thanks To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged,
Eons from even our own moon, we’ll drift In the haze of space, which will be, once
with a second chance: The blue jay hawks his pretty wares and the oak still stands, spreading glorious shade. If you don’t look back,
the future never happens. How good to rise in sunlight, in the prodigal smell of biscuits – eggs and sausage on the grill. The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open to a blank page. Come on, shake a leg! You’ll never know who’s down there, frying those eggs, if you don’t get up and see.
7. Between the World and Me by Langston Hughes
And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me….
There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly upon a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt finger accusingly at the sky.
There were torn tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves, and a scorched coil of greasy hemp;
A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat, and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.
And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches, butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a drained gin-flask, and a whore’s lipstick;
Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the lingering smell of gasoline.
And through the morning air the sun poured yellow surprise into the eye sockets of the stony skull….
And while I stood my mind was frozen within cold pity for the life that was gone.
The ground gripped my feet and my heart was circled by icy walls of fear—
The sun died in the sky; a night wind muttered in the grass and fumbled the leaves in the trees; the woods poured forth the hungry yelping of hounds; the darkness screamed with thirsty voices; and the witnesses rose and lived:
The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves into my bones.
The grey ashes formed flesh firm and black, entering into my flesh.
The gin-flask passed from mouth to mouth, cigars and cigarettes glowed, the whore smeared lipstick red upon her lips,
And a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that my life be burned….
And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth into my throat till I swallowed my own blood.
My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as they bound me to the sapling.
And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from me in limp patches.
And the down and quills of the white feathers sank into my raw flesh, and I moaned in my agony.
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs
Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot sides of death.
Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in
yellow surprise at the sun….
8. A Litany for Survival by Audre Lorde
For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children’s mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours;
For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid
So it is better to speak remembering
we were never meant to survive.
10. RIOT by Gwendolyn Brooks
A Poem in Three Parts
A riot is the language of the unheard. —Martin Luther King, Jr.
John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe, all whitebluerose below his golden hair, wrapped richly in right linen and right wool, almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff; almost forgot Grandtully (which is The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s, the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri. Because the “Negroes” were coming down the street. Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty (not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka) and they were coming toward him in rough ranks. In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud. And not detainable. And not discreet. Gross. Gross. “Que tu es grossier!” John Cabot itched instantly beneath the nourished white that told his story of glory to the World. “Don’t let It touch me! the blackness! Lord!” he whispered to any handy angel in the sky.
But, in a thrilling announcement, on It drove and breathed on him: and touched him. In that breath the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili, malign, mocked John. And, in terrific touch, old averted doubt jerked forward decently, cried, “Cabot! John! You are a desperate man, and the desperate die expensively today.” John Cabot went down in the smoke and fire and broken glass and blood, and he cried “Lord! Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do.”
THE THIRD SERMON ON THE WARPLAND
Phoenix “In Egyptian mythology, a bird which lived for five hundred years and then consumed itself in fire, rising renewed from the ashes.” —webster
The earth is a beautiful place. Watermirrors and things to be reflected. Goldenrod across the little lagoon.
The Black Philosopher says “Our chains are in the keep of the Keeper in a labeled cabinet on the second shelf by the cookies, sonatas, the arabesques. . . . There’s a rattle, sometimes. You do not hear it who mind only cookies and crunch them. You do not hear the remarkable music—’A Death Song For You Before You Die.’ If you could hear it you would make music too. The blackblues.”
West Madison Street. In “Jessie’s Kitchen” nobody’s eating Jessie’s Perfect Food. Crazy flowers cry up across the sky, spreading and hissing This is it.
The young men run.
They will not steal Bing Crosby but will steal Melvin Van Peebles who made Lillie a thing of Zampoughi a thing of red wiggles and trebles (and I know there are twenty wire stalks sticking out of her head as her underfed haunches jerk jazz.)
A clean riot is not one in which little rioters long-stomped, long-straddled, BEANLESS but knowing no Why go steal in hell a radio, sit to hear James Brown and Mingus, Young-Holt, Coleman, John on V.O.N. and sun themselves in Sin.
However, what is going on is going on.
Fire. That is their way of lighting candles in the darkness. A White Philosopher said ‘It is better to light one candle than curse the darkness.’ These candles curse— inverting the deeps of the darkness.
GUARD HERE, GUNS LOADED.
The young men run. The children in ritual chatter scatter upon their Own and old geography.
The Law comes sirening across the town.
A woman is dead. Motherwoman. She lies among the boxes (that held the haughty hats, the Polish sausages) in newish, thorough, firm virginity as rich as fudge is if you’ve had five pieces. Not again shall she partake of steak on Christmas mornings, nor of nighttime chicken and wine at Val Gray Ward’s nor say of Mr. Beetley, Exit Jones, Junk Smith nor neat New-baby Williams (man-to-many) “He treat me right.”
That was a gut gal.
“We’ll do an us!” yells Yancey, a twittering twelve. “Instead of your deathintheafternoon, kill ’em, bull! kill ’em, bull!”
The Black Philosopher blares “I tell you, exhaustive black integrity would assure a blackless Amrica. . . .”
Nine die, Sun-Times will tell and will tell too in small black-bordered oblongs “Rumor? check it at 744-4111.”
A Poem to Peanut. “Coooooool!” purrs Peanut. Peanut is Richard—a Ranger and a gentleman. A Signature. A Herald. And a Span. This Peanut will not let his men explode. And Rico will not. Neither will Sengali. Nor Bop nor Jeff, Geronimo nor Lover. These merely peer and purr, and pass the Passion over. The Disciples stir and thousandfold confer with ranging Rangermen; mutual in their “Yeah!— this AIN’T all upinheah!”
“But WHY do These People offend themselves?” say they who say also “It’s time. It’s time to help These People.”
Lies are told and legends made. Phoenix rises unafraid.
The Black Philosopher will remember: “There they came to life and exulted, the hurt mute. Then is was over.
The dust, as they say, settled.”
AN ASPECT OF LOVE, ALIVE IN THE ICE AND FIRE
LaBohem Brown
In a package of minutes there is this We. How beautiful. Merry foreigners in our morning, we laugh, we touch each other, are responsible props and posts.
A physical light is in the room.
Because the world is at the window we cannot wonder very long.
You rise. Although genial, you are in yourself again. I observe your direct and respectable stride. You are direct and self-accepting as a lion in Afrikan velvet. You are level, lean, remote.
There is a moment in Camaraderie when interruption is not to be understood. I cannot bear an interruption. This is the shining joy; the time of not-to-end.
On the street we smile. We go in different directions down the imperturbable street.
Plant twelve date palms in a ring around the tarmac. Make them
tall, slight towers, leaning into the wind as princes do. Fear that the sweetness of dates will churn your stomach. Plant them anyways.
Plant the pudge of his fuzzless face in the arrested time of a school portrait. Plant his exotic name—found in a book that spelled dreams of eminence and hope for an uncertain coupling—in your ear.
Know that whether it leaches into the soil or not, this ground was watered with his blood. This tarmac turned a rioting red. Strike that. There was a screech of brakes, and sirens howling like a cliché, then
a volley of pops that might have been a game if only what came next was not such utter silence. The tarmac was red. There was no riot.
Build a circle of palms and something to keep them safe. Build a greenhouse around the twelve palms. Yes, a green house. This land is not our land.
Dig up the tarmac, the dark heavy loam of this side of town. Be sure to wear gloves as you dig through the brownfield’s mystification. Once the Cuyahoga River was a wall of fire.
God knows how rain melts metal. Dig into that earth and build a foundation. Quarry it.
Let the little boys and little girls of Shaker Heights and Orange bring a Game Boy or cellphone, or other toy made our of coltan that, chances are, a little boy or little girl dug up by hand in the DRC.
Let the children lay their shiny toys in the foundation. Seal up ground with molten lead. Die-cast its melted weight. Yes, make a typecaster’s mold, and leave it a dull grey, like flint.
Stamp out a broadside, only set it in the foundation’s floor. Let us read the letter that says this officer was unfit. Let us go over it step by step, every time we walk toward the green
house of imaging what this boy’s boyhood should have been, the fulfilling of his name, his promise. Plant an oasis here. How is not my problem.
*
Let someone who remember how cook de rice. Let she cook de rice with palm oil ’til is yellow an sticky. Of course dem have palm oil in Cleveland. Dis no Third World we livin in.
Let she cook she rice an peas. Let she say how she know to do it from a film she seen. In de film, dem people from de sea island gone to Sierra Leone and dema find dey people,
dey people dat sing de same song with de same words. Come to find out dem words is not jes playplay words, dem words for weeping. So dema sit down together, an weep together, dey South Carolina an Sierra Leone family.
Dey weep over de war, an de water, an de fresh and de forgotten, an dey cook dat rice ’til is yellow and sticky. Dey nyam it with dey hand, outta banana leaf and de old, old man, him say,
you never forget the language you cry in.
Let all dem little girls from Shaker Heights skip the gymnastics meet. Let dem come and eat rice and eat rice ’til they don’t want to eat rice no more an let dem still have rice to eat. Let them lose their innocence.
Let horizons settle low. Let dates and raisin and apples and nuts seem a strange mockery of the new, the sweet, the hoped for. Let us share the matter.
Let us sit here under these date palms, and haggle over whose fault it is. Let the rage that says tear this shit down tear this shit down.
Let us start with the glass walls of the greenhouse, as a demonstration. Let the rage that says I cannot speak not speak. Let it suck speech into its terrible maw and leave us shuddering in silence.
Let the rage that says, black lives matter matter. Let that other rage that says all lives matter be torn down. Let the matter with how we don’t all matter in the same way churn up a monumental penitence.
Let the date palm offer us shade. Let us ask why we are still here. Let us lower eyes as we face his mother, his father, his sister.
“Give your daughters difficult names. Names that command the full use of the tongue. My name makes you want to tell me the truth. My name does not allow me to trust anyone who cannot pronounce it right.” —Warsan Shire
Many of my contemporaries, role models, But especially, Ancestors
Have a name that brings the tongue to worship. Names that feel like ritual in your mouth.
I don’t want a name said without pause, muttered without intention.
I am through with names that leave me unmoved. Names that leave the speaker’s mouth unscathed.
I want a name like fire, like rebellion, like my hand gripping massa’s whip—
I want a name from before the ships A name Donald Trump might choke on.
I want a name that catches you in the throat if you say it wrong and if you’re afraid to say it wrong, then I guess you should be.
I want a name only the brave can say a name that only fits right in the mouth of those who love me right, because only the brave can love me right
Assétou Xango is the name you take when you are tired of burying your jewels under thick layers of soot and self-doubt.
Assétou the light Xango the pickaxe so that people must mine your soul just to get your attention.
If you have to ask why I changed my name, it is already too far beyond your comprehension. Call me callous, but with a name like Xango I cannot afford to tread lightly. You go hard or you go home and I am centuries and ships away from any semblance of a homeland.
I am a thief’s poor bookkeeping skills way from any source of ancestry. I am blindly collecting the shattered pieces of a continent much larger than my comprehension.
I hate explaining my name to people: their eyes peering over my journal looking for a history they can rewrite
Ask me what my name means… What the fuck does your name mean Linda?
Not every word needs an English equivalent in order to have significance.
I am done folding myself up to fit your stereotype. Your black friend. Your headline. Your African Queen Meme. Your hurt feelings. Your desire to learn the rhetoric of solidarity without the practice.
I do not have time to carry your allyship.
I am trying to build a continent, A country, A home.
My name is the only thing I have that is unassimilated and I’m not even sure I can call it mine.
The body is a safeless place if you do not know its name.
Assétou is what it sounds like when you are trying to bend a syllable into a home. With shaky shudders And wind whistling through your empty,
I feel empty.
There is no safety in a name. No home in a body.
A name is honestly just a name A name is honestly just a ritual
A certain doubleness, by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another.
— Henry David Thoreau
i I didn’t choose the word — it came pouring out of my throat like the water inside a drowned man. I didn’t even push on my stomach. I just lay there, dead (like he told me)
& “I” came out. (I’m sorry, Father. “I” wasn’t my fault.)
ii (How did “I” feel?)
Felt almost alive when I’d get in, like the Trojan horse.
I’d sit on the bench (I didn’t look out of the eyeholes so I wouldn’t see the carnage).
iii (Is “I” speaking another language?)
I said, “I” is dangerous. But at the time I couldn’t tell which one of us was speaking.
iv (Why “I”?)
“I” was the closest I could get to the one I loved (who I believe was smothered in her playpen).
Perhaps she gave birth to “I” before she died.
v I deny “I,” & the closer I get, the more “I” keeps receding.
vi I found “I” in the bulrushes raised by a dirtiness beyond imagination.
I loved “I” like a stinky bed.
While I hid in a sentence with a bunch of other words.
vii (What is “I”?)
A transmission through space? A dismemberment of the spirit?
More like opening the chest & throwing the heart out with the gizzards.
viii (Translation)
Years later “I” came back wanting to be known.
Like the unspeakable name of God, I tried
my 2 letters, leaving the “O” for breath,
like in the Bible, missing.
ix I am not the “I” in my poems. “I” is the net I try to pull me in with.
x I try to talk with “I,” but “I” doesn’t trust me. “I” says I am slippery by nature.
xi I made “I” do what I wasn’t supposed to do, what I didn’t want to do — defend me, stand as an example, stand in for what I was hiding.
I treated “I” as if “I” wasn’t human.
xii They say that what I write belongs to me, that it is my true experience. They think it validates my endurance. But why pretend? “I” is a kind of terminal survival.
xiii I didn’t promise “I” anything & in that way “I” is the one I was most true to.
I am now at the age where my father calls me brother when we say goodbye. Take care of yourself, brother, he whispers a half beat before we hang up the phone, and it is as if some great bridge has unfolded over the air between us. He is 68 years old. He was born in the throat of Jim Crow Alabama, one of ten children, their bodies side by side in the kitchen each morning like a pair of hands exalting. Over breakfast, I ask him to tell me the hardest thing about going to school back then, expecting some history I have already memorized. Boycotts & attack dogs, fire hoses, Bull Connor in his personal tank, candy paint shining white as a slaver’s ghost. He says: Having to read the Canterbury Tales. He says: eating lunch alone. Now, I hear the word America & think first of my father’s loneliness, the hands holding the pens that stabbed him as he walked through the hallway, unclenched palms settling onto a wooden desk, taking notes, trying to pretend the shame didn’t feel like an inheritance. You say democracy & I see the men holding documents that sent him off to war a year later, Motown blaring from a country boy’s bunker as napalm scarred the sky into jigsaw patterns, his eyes open wide as the blooming blue heart of the light bulb in a Crown Heights basement where he & my mother will dance for the first time, their bodies swaying like rockets in the impossible dark & yes I know that this is more than likely not what you mean when you sing liberty but it is the only kind I know or can readily claim, the times where those hunted by history are underground & somehow daring to love what they cannot hold or fully fathom when the stranger is not a threat but the promise of a different ending I woke up this morning and there were men on television lauding a wall big enough to box out an entire world, families torn with the stroke of a pen, citizenship little more than some garment that can be stolen or reduced to cinder at a tyrant’s whim my father knows this grew up knowing this witnessed firsthand the firebombs the Klan multiple messiahs love soaked & shot through somehow still believes in this grand blood-stained experiment still votes still prays that his children might make a life unlike any he has ever seen. He looks at me like the promise of another cosmos and I never know what to tell him. All of the books in my head have made me cynical and distant, but there’s a choir in him that calls me forward my disbelief built as it is from the bricks of his belief not in any America you might see on network news or hear heralded before a football game but in the quiet power of Sam Cooke singing that he was born by a river that remains unnamed that he runs alongside to this day, some vast and future country, some nation within a nation, black as candor, loud as the sound of my father’s unfettered laughter over cheese eggs & coffee his eyes shut tight as armories his fists unclenched as if he were invincible
The war said let there be peace and there was war.
The people said music and rain evaporating against fire in the brush was a kind of music and so was the beast.
The beast that roared or bleated when brought down was silent when skinned but loud after the skin was pulled taut over wood and the people said music and the thump thump thump said drum. Someone said war drum. The drum said war is coming to meet you in the field. The field said war tastes like copper, said give us some more, said look at the wild flowers our war plants in a grove and grows just for us.
Outside sheets are pulling this way and that.
Fields are smoke, smoke is air.
We wait for fingers to be bent knuckle to knuckle,
the porch overrun with rope and shotgun
but the hounds don’t show. We beat the drum and sing
like there’s nothing outside but rust-colored clay and fields
of wild flowers growing farther than we can walk.
Torches may come like fox paws to steal away what we plant,
but with our bodies bound by the skin, my arc to his curve,
we are stalks that will bend and bend and bend…
fire for heat fire for light fire for casting figures on a dungeon wall
fire for teaching shadows to writhe fire for keeping beasts at bay fire to give them back to the earth
fire for the siege fire to singe fire to roast fire to fuse rubber soles to collapsed crossbeams fire for Gehenna
fire for Dante fire for Fallujah fire for readied aim
fire in the forge that folds steel like a flag fire to curl worms like cigarette ash fire to give them back to the earth
fire for ancient reasons: to call down rain fire to catch it and turn it into steam fire for churches fire for a stockpile of books fire for a bible-black cloak tied to a stake
fire for smoke signals fire to shape gun muzzle and magazine fire to leap from the gut of a furnace fire for Hephaestus fire for pyres’ sake fire licking the toes of a quiet brown man fire for his home fire for her flag fire for this sand, to coax it into glass
fire to cure mirrors fire to cure leeches Fire to compose a nocturne of cinders
fire for the trash cans illuminating streets fire for fuel fire for fields fire for the field hand’s fourth death
fire to make a cross visible for several yards fire from the dragon’s mouth fire for smoking out tangos fire to stoke like rage and fill the sky with human remains fire to give them back to the earth fire to make twine fall from bound wrists fire to mark them all and bubble black any flesh it touches as it frees
They took the light from our eyes. Possessive. Took the moisture from our throats. My arms, my lips, my sternum, sucked dry, and lovers of autumn say, Look, here is beauty. Tallness only made me an obvious target made of off-kilter limbs. I’d fall either way. I should get a to-the-death tattoo or metal ribbon of some sort. War took our prayers like nothing else can, left us dumber than remote drones. Make me a loyal soldier and I’ll make you a lamenting so thick, metallic, so tank-tread-hard.
Now make tomorrow a gate shaped like a man. I can’t promise, when it’s time, I won’t hesitate, cannot say I won’t forget to return in fall and guess the names of the leaves before they change.
The war said bring us your dead and we died. The people said music and bending flower, so we sang ballads
in the aisles of churches and fruit markets. The requiem was everywhere: a comet’s tail disappearing into the atmosphere,
the wide mouths of the bereft men that have sung… On currents of air, seeds were carried as the processional carried us
through the streets of a forgetting city, between the cold iron of gates. The field said soil is rich wherever we fall.
Aren’t graveyards and battlefields our most efficient gardens? Journeys begin there too if the flowers are taken
into account, and shouldn’t we always take the flowers into account? Bring them to us. We’ll come back to you. Peace will come to you
as a rosewood-colored road paver in your grandmother’s town, as a trench scraped into canvas, as a violin bow, a shovel,
an easel, a brushstroke that covers burial mounds in grass. And love, you say, is a constant blade, a trowel that plants
and uproots, and tomorrow will be a tornado, you say. Then war, a sick wind, will come to part the air,
straighten your suit, and place fresh flowers on all our muddy graves.
19. For My People by Margaret Walker
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power;
For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding;
For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss Choomby and company;
For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;
For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and play and drink their wine and religion and success, to marry their playmates and bear children and then die of consumption and anemia and lynching;
For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy people filling the cabarets and taverns and other people’s pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and land and money and something—something all our own;
For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;
For my people blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies, associations and councils and committees and conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by false prophet and holy believer;
For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control.
See! There he stands; not brave, but with an air Of sullen stupor. Mark him well! Is he Not more like brute than man? Look in his eye! No light is there; none, save the glint that shines In the now glaring, and now shifting orbs Of some wild animal caught in the hunter’s trap.
How came this beast in human shape and form? Speak man!—We call you man because you wear His shape—How are you thus? Are you not from That docile, child-like, tender-hearted race Which we have known three centuries? Not from That more than faithful race which through three wars Fed our dear wives and nursed our helpless babes Without a single breach of trust? Speak out!
(THE VICTIM SPEAKS🙂
I am, and am not.
(THE MOB SPEAKS AGAIN🙂
Then who, why are you?
(THE VICTIM SPEAKS AGAIN🙂
I am a thing not new, I am as old As human nature. I am that which lurks, Ready to spring whenever a bar is loosed; The ancient trait which fights incessantly Against restraint, balks at the upward climb; The weight forever seeking to obey The law of downward pull—and I am more: The bitter fruit am I of planted seed; The resultant, the inevitable end Of evil forces and the powers of wrong. Lessons in degradation, taught and learned, The memories of cruel sights and deeds, The pent-up bitterness, the unspent hate Filtered through fifteen generations have Sprung up and found in me sporadic life. In me the muttered curse of dying men, On me the stain of conquered women, and Consuming me the fearful fires of lust, Lit long ago, by other hands than mine. In me the down-crushed spirit, the hurled-back prayers Of wretches now long dead—their dire bequests. In me the echo of the stifled cry Of children for their battered mothers’ breasts.
I claim no race, no race claims me; I am No more than human dregs; degenerate; The monstrous offspring of the monster, Sin; I am—just what I am. . . . The race that fed Your wives and nursed your babes would do the same Today. But I—
(THE MOB CONCLUDES🙂
Enough, the brute must die! Quick! Chain him to that oak! It will resist The fire much longer than this slender pine. Now bring the fuel! Pile it round him! Wait! Pile not so fast or high! or we shall lose The agony and terror in his face. And now the torch! Good fuel that! the flames Already leap head-high. Ha! hear that shriek! And there’s another! wilder than the first. Fetch water! Water! Pour a little on The fire, lest it should burn too fast. Hold so! Now let it slowly blaze again. See there! He squirms! He groans! His eyes bulge wildly out, Searching around in vain appeal for help! Another shriek, the last! Watch how the flesh Grows crisp and hangs till, turned to ash, it sifts Down through the coils of chain that hold erect The ghastly frame against the bark-scorched tree.
Stop! to each man no more than one man’s share. You take that bone, and you this tooth; the chain, Let us divide its links; this skull, of course, In fair division, to the leader comes.
And now his fiendish crime has been avenged; Let us back to our wives and children—say, What did he mean by those last muttered words, “Brothers in spirit, brothers in deed are we”?
If I was President The first thing I would do is call Mumia Abu-Jamal. No, if I was president the first thing I would do is call Leonard Peltier. No, if I was president the first person I would call is that rascal John Trudell. No, the first person I’d call is that other rascal Dennis Banks. I would also call Alice Walker. I would make a conference call. And I would say this: Yo, you troublemakers, it is time to let all of us out of prison. Pack up your things: Dennis and John, collect Alice Walker If you can find her: In Mendocino, Molokai, Mexico or Gaza, & head out to the prisons where Mumia and Leonard are waiting for you. They will be traveling light. Mumia used to own a lot of papers but they took most of those away from him. Leonard will probably want to drag along some of his canvases. Alice who may well be shopping in New Delhi will no doubt want to dress up for the occasion in a sparkly shalwar kemeez. My next call is going to be to the Cubans all five of them; so stop worrying. For now, you’re my fish. I just had this long letter from Alice and she has begged me to put an end to her suffering. What? she said. You think these men are the only ones who suffer when Old Style America locks them up & throws away the key? I can’t tell you, she goes on, the changes this viciousness has put me through, and I have had a child to raise & classes to teach & food to buy and just because I’m a poet it doesn’t mean I don’t have to pay the mortgage or the rent. Yet all these years, nearly thirty or something of them I have been running around the country and the world trying to arouse justice for these men. Tonsillitis hasn’t stopped me. Migraine, hasn’t stopped me. Lyme disease hasn’t stopped me. And why? Because knowing the country that I’m in, as you are destined to learn it too, I know wrong when I see it. If that chair you’re sitting in could speak you would have it moved to another room. You would burn it. So, amigos, pack your things. Alice and John and Dennis are on their way. They are bringing prayers from Nilak Butler and Bill Wapepah; they are bringing sweet grass and white sage from Pine Ridge. I am the president at least until the Corporations purchase the next election, and this is what I choose to do on my first day.
Former President Donald Trump drew cheers at a rally on Saturday after touting his endorsement from a “representative of Black Lives Matter” (BLM), despite the activist’s disputed affiliation within the decentralized movement.
Trump is currently among the packed field of candidates seeking the GOP nomination for president in 2024. In nationwide polling averages, he has consistently led the crop of candidates by significant margins, regularly garnering around 50 percent support from likely Republican voters, leading many to consider his nomination by the party next year inevitable.
Earlier this week, activist Mark Fisher appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss his endorsement of Trump, with the show touting him as a “BLM leader.” During his appearance, Fisher claimed that Trump has done “more for the Black community than any president I can think of in my lifetime” and decried the Democratic Party as “racist.”
BLM is a decentralized social movement focused on racism and other issues faced by Black Americans that has been more often associated with progressive politics, rather than the socially conservative policies embraced by Trump. While decentralized, the movement is represented by various prominent organizations at the national and state level, many of which have dismissed Fisher’s involvement with them and called his endorsement a “publicity stunt.”
Former President Donald Trump is seen at a campaign event. Trump on Saturday touted a recent endorsement from an activist who has claimed affiliation with the BLM movement. Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images
Black Lives Matter of Rhode Island, which Fisher has touted his involvement in, told Newsweek in a prior statement that he was “no longer associated” with the group. Fisher is also the founder of an organization in Maryland called “BLM Inc.”
“Did you see where a very respected representative of Black Lives Matter, new England?” Trump asked. “New England endorsed Trump, he said. He didn’t necessarily say the Republican Party, he said Trump because what we have done in terms of opportunity zones, and jobs and jobs, historically, if you look at the black colleges and universities, 10 year funding.”
Newsweek reached out to the national arm of Black Lives Matter via email for comment.
In a joint statement to The Providence Journal, BLM Rhode Island and the BLM Rhode Island Political Action Committee denounced Fisher as an “imposter.”
“This is a publicity stunt,” the statement read. “The right-wing continues to use and amplify fringe Black voices to create an idea of broad support for their corrupt candidates.”
It added: “Continuing to call Mark Fisher a Black Lives Matter leader is disingenuous and inappropriate. Both the founder of BLM Rhode Island and BLM Rhode Island PAC have denounced Mark and have made it clear that he is an imposter.”
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
OKLAHOMA CITY, December 20, 2021 (Newswire.com)
– Chris Hammons of Laird Hammons Laird Law firm and Liquidfish Productions announce the release of System Breakdown: The Tragedy of Marconia Kessee.
Innocent lives lost in jail cells is not an uncommon occurrence, yet their stories are seldom told.This short-form documentary chronicles the untold story of Marconia Kessee, a mentally ill homeless man who tragically lost his life in 2018 in Oklahoma’s Cleveland County jail. System Breakdown goes beyond just the tragic outcome of Kessee’s fate at the hands of police, and examines the preventable medical and law enforcement process failures that ultimately contributed to Kessee’s death.
On Jan. 17, 2018, City of Norman police officers responded to a seemingly common hospital transport request and unexpectedly arrested Kessee after he was unable to leave of his own free will due to symptoms of overdosing. The questionable events and mistreatment leading to his death have led to further investigation and the reexamination of both the Norman Police Department and the legal system as a whole.
“It blew my mind that these events happened more than three years ago and it’s not more widely known,” said Cody Blake, Producer of System Breakdown: The Tragedy of Marconia Kessee. “Once this story begins to spread within the community, we’ll gain the support and the audience needed to help create the change that we all want to see in how we treat vulnerable people.”
According to a Reuters investigative study conducted in 2020, approximately 4,998 people died in U.S. jails without making it to their court day, many of whom experience neglect or suffer from the effects of unsubstantial staff training. This documentary sheds light on the gray area between lack of training and desensitization amongst authoritative figures, one story and conversation at a time.
“This project is a chilling in-depth exploration into a broken system that affects innocent citizens and law enforcement alike,” said Logan Walcher, Director of System Breakdown: The Tragedy of Marconia Kessee. “Marconia’s case highlights the flawed training and procedures that need to be adjusted to defend all members of American society.”
To learn more about the case, contact LHL Law at (405) 703-4567 or by visiting lhllaw.com.
