National Poetry Month comes to an end! We hope you've enjoyed our month-long feature on Pew Fellows and their poetry. The final poet is Sonia Sanchez (1993).

Sequences

1.

today I am
tired of sabbaths.
I seek a river of sticks
scratching the spine.
O I have laughed the clown's air
now my breath dries in paint.

2. 

what is this profusion?
the sun does not burn
a cure, but hoards
while I stretch upward.
I hear, turning 
in my shrug
a blaze of horns.
O I had forgotten parades
belabored with dreams.

3.

in my father's time
I fished in ponds
without fishes.
arching my throat,
I gargled amid nerves
and sang of redeemers.
                       (o where have you been sweet
                               redeemer, sharp redeemer,
                        o where have you been baroque
                               shimmer?
                        i have been in coventry
                        where ghosts danced in my veins
                        i have heard you in all refrains.)

4.

ah the lull of
a yellow voice
that does not whine
with roots.
I have touched breasts
and buildings answered.
I have breathed
moth-shaped men
without seeds.
(O indiscriminate sleeves)

                      (once upon an afternoon
             i became still-life
             i carried a balloon
                       and a long black knife.)

5.

love comes with pink eyes
with movements that run
green then blue again.
my thighs burn in crystal.

from Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press (1999); originally published in I've Been a Woman, Third World Press, Inc. (1978)

Sonia Sanchez is the author of over 16 books, most recently Morning Haiku (Beacon Press, 2010). In addition to being a contributing editor to Black Scholar and The Journal of African Studies, she has edited an anthology, We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans. Her many honors and awards include the PEN Writing Award, the American Book Award for Poetry, the National Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the National Education Association Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has received the Peace and Freedom Award from the Women International League for Peace and Freedom, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities, the Langston Hughes Poetry Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Robert Creeley Award, the Harper Lee Award, and the National Visionary Leadership Award, among many others. In 2011, Sanchez was selected as the first Poet Laureate of Philadelphia.

Read more:
Sonia Sanchez's website >
Sonia Sanchez at the Poetry Foundation >
Sonia Sanchez at Poets.org >

April is National Poetry Month, so what better time to celebrate the work of our Pew Fellows in poetry? Today’s poet is CAConrad (2011).

Express an Interest in Listening or Flowers Won't Bother

                                        greed it
                                        seems
                                        has no
                                        memory

                                        the little
                                        bones they
                                        throw us
                                        break
                                        my heart

                                        some
                                        days
                                        i taste
                                        the world
                                        in a poem and
                               want
                          to be of
                           service
                            to that
                              taste

                              there is no doubt
                              the worst possible
                              things are possible

                                        an epic
                                        terrain of
                                        anger no one
                                        can move
                                        out of you

                                        it's best to let
                                        flowers do
                                        the talking

                              they say write
                              below your
                              century to
                              understand it

                     they say crying
                     in private helps
                     no one

         they say touch
         a gill of light
         down there

                  they say an
                  asterisk is
                  the footnote
                  to a lie

                                  they say never
                                  use "permament"
                                  in a sentence
                                  containing
                                  a noun

                        they say if
                        dancing is
                        prohibited
                        LEAVE
                        at once

from A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, Wave Books (2012)

CAConrad is the author of A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012) and The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010/Chax Press, 2009). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010).He is a 2012 UCross Fellow, a 2013 Banff Fellow, and a 2012 and 2013 visiting faculty member at the Summer Writing Program of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.

Read more:
CAConrad's website >
CAConrad at Poets.org >

Photo by Ed Hille, courtesy of the Philadelphia Inquirer.