I ignore the kids’ slinky arms. The dishes. They daddy. Tonight
I rush to the rink with my best friend, her fingers locked into mine.
The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath. I forget to take pictures, but trust. We fine.
Out after dark, awestruck at our own grown. Downtown
ain’t looked like ours since they landed on Woodward and mined,
hollowed the center to erect a highrise. Joke’s on them.
Everybody here Black and in love and my,
don’t we know how to reclaim what’s ours. We on beat with it.
Look how our thighs obey: backwards, glide, turn, slow whine.
The DJ cuts to Cupid Shuffle, and even on skates, we hustle. Our necks,
tilted bottles, laughter splashing and messy. Oh, how I mined
for this belonging, scythe swinging, searching for my name. So busy
hiding from selfish, I had dropped damn near everything that was mine.
What Keeps Us
Poems to Read in Community
Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Brittany Rogers‘s “Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself.
Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers here. Read poems by selecting below.
Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink
The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath.
My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field
It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him
Half-Life in Exile
I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;
Country Song (Memory of Rain)
A bruise is a promised haunting.
“Come, just this once,” I ask, disingenuously. I mean “a thousand times.”
At the Gellert Baths, Budapest
Here in the body museum,
women speaking Hungarian
rinse one another with buckets of water,
As Though It Were a Small Child
I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean,