#artress bethany white

[foetry]

Pancakes Keep Coming to Mind: A Sestina Commemorating the Demise of Aunt Jemima on the Pancake Box 

BY ARTRESS BETHANY WHITE

June 2020

I invoke my great-great-grandmother’s name on exhaled breath,

the vowels arranging themselves in shorts and longs,

syntax and semantics duking it out.

Mima, that could have been birthed from an African tongue.

Enee, meene, mima, mo, respectable marriage of village,

continent, and town, without a diabolic Je like a pendulum swing

to the scarlet kerchief blooming in my brain, pancakes on my tongue,

unwilling to utter that name over black families now living out

their American dream. Like reinvention, how the heart longs

to reconcile past and present, within a village

raising a newer child clawing out of epicureal stink to swing

free from stereotypes, auction block, and Aunt Jemima’s mealy breath.

Instead, pancakes every time my forebears’ syllabics touch my tongue.

Mima sans  Je, not Meema, or Mi’ma[e], coy notes stepping out

of a history where grits and flapjacks were birthed in a village

to skirt my teeth or strut ’cross my lips on exhaled breath,

that ample bosom and backside mocking me, she who longs

to rear up and bark Breakfast! and Brunch! on a revolving door swing.

You are not my Auntie or Aunt pronounced like the creature crawling out

over cadavers of supermarket boxes choking my breath

on a collapsed lung of shady marketing to keep bodies bound in a village-

cum-ghetto of stranger than strange imagined black things, girl-on-a-swing

dreams culled from western imaginings of what that colored gal longs

to do over a hot stove, flipping and flapping ’cause the griddle got her tongue.

Names as revenue monikers on revue, line dancing on a hip swing.

Oh, how daring to cogitate on destiny, each syllable a village

of preferred ubiquity, once the Ghanaian name Afua translated out

to first girl child born on a Friday, sonic genealogy on the tongue,

but changed to post-baptismal Mary, a rigid catechism of colonial breath

blowing across centuries of arid longing.

Food me, fooled me, sold me, told me, held me, bled me, tongue

afire with dreams of love, life, and freedom a profusion of days swinging

between something and more. My village compound, my village

quarters, my village a city block, each century censuring my breath.

What I seek is what I speak, not handed a script of nostalgic longing.

Jemima wrenched from shelves, but a litany in my brain still playing out.

Ain’t nothing but a jonesing to tweak culinary history so my village

knows my branches are thick, swaying and swinging with longing and breath,

rolling descendancy off my tongue, blessing consumption out. 

Source: Poetry (May 2021)

#artress bethany white #pancakes #race #intertextuality #sestina #women poets #covid poems

[therumpus]

Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Artress Bethany White

Read White’s other poem “A Black Doe in the Anthropocene” here.

#poetry #writeblr #the rumpus #lit #indie magazine

[the-final-sentence]

Dismay mourns the insurrections of the past while fearing the bitter uprising never quite going down as planned.

Artress Bethany White, from “Resurrection”

#Artress Bethany White #Resurrection

[clatteriing]

I will have the name                            because it came by way of blood                                   and stripe. Cowhide-split skin                               and parchment script the tearful separation                         of kin from ship. Prized receipt of sale                          placed on a shelf and the quartered body                      in a cabin or under an attic roof to be near at hand                               as driver or cook. I will leave behind                                the self-righteous greed birthed of the bend                             and sway of tobacco leaves & curséd wheat sheaves.

What I Will and Will Not Take From a Slaver Ancestor by Artress Bethany White

#poetry #artress Bethany white

[poetry-fiction-challenge]

The 2018 featured poet is... Major Jackson!

His work is so incredible. Full of personality, beauty, and life in the modern world. I fell in love when I read his first book of poetry, and I haven't looked back since.

Bio

Major Jackson was born and raised in Philadelphia, where he pursued his degree in accounting at Temple University.

In the late 1990s, he joined the Dark Room Collective, an organization that gave greater visibility to emerging and established writers of color and included Thomas Sayers Ellis, John Keene, Janice Lowe, Carl Phillips, Tracy K. Smith, Sharan Strange, Natasha Trethewey, Artress Bethany White, and Kevin Young, among others.

Learn more about Major Jackson.

#major jackson

[the-final-sentence]

Ain’t nothing but a jonesing to tweak culinary history so my village knows my branches are thick, swaying and swinging with longing and breath, rolling descendancy off my tongue, blessing consumption out.

Artress Bethany White, from “Pancakes Keep Coming to Mind: A Sestina Commemorating the Demise of Aunt Jemima on the Pancake Box”

#Artress Bethany White #Pancakes Keep Coming to Mind: A Sestina Commemorating the Demise of Aunt Jemima on the Pancake Box

[the-final-sentence]

Pick me a wonder, pick me a dream, how many hands does it take to make heaven, a dearth of freedom in this godforsaken land.

Artress Bethany White, from “Tradition: A Perilous Age in a Black Girl’s Life”

#Artress Bethany White #Tradition: A Perilous Age in a Black Girl’s Life