On the Line: Poems

by Kamala Platt

Overview

With gentle yet sardonic wit, this collection of poetry considers the transcultural experience and encourages engaging with the world, both intellectually and emotionally, despite feelings of isolation. Fusing personal, sociopolitical, and ecological concerns, this compilation exposes public as well as private wounds in an accessible and thought-provoking manner. Addressing human rights and gender issues, these significant poems evaluate current predicaments and express hope for a future without them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780916727697
Publisher:	Wings Press
Publication date:	04/01/2010
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Kamala Platt is a poet, a teacher at the University of Texas–Pan American, and the author of Kinientos. For the last 25 years, she has directed the Meadowlark Center, which hosts community arts, education, and environmental and social justice projects and events. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Read an Excerpt

On the Line

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By Kamala Platt

Wings Press

Copyright © 2010 Kamala Platt
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-916727-69-7

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CHAPTER 1

Power Lines (In Wind)

    Wind is Spirit

    Put yourself where it blows


    I suppose I'll believe you both for what it's worth is not an easy ride

    for D.C.W. at 100


    I.

    Upon hearing you say
    "I will be your friend forever."

    You are 19,
    and have not known what it is
    to befriend forever —
    holding until your muscles lose feeling
    and there is nothing but a fierce madness
    holding you,
    and then to feel yourself go,
    knowing that
    s/he can never be friend to you again,
    seeing that
    love was only inside you,
    and catching that drift
    away from you
    took your greatest friend.

    Will I trust your pledge?
    Or slander your clemency
    waiting for youth to learn?


    II.

    "When biking," my neighbor said
    "You always think the wind
    is against you until
    you turn around."
    After seventy-five years,
    the old man is stronger
    than the wind on most days.


    Kansas Borderlands

    The first immigrants to the land of the south wind
    nourish her soils with their bones,
    nourish the winds with their souls,
    give the world bread,
    feed all children alongside their own.

    Before the first scripted words were pilfered from desert and jungle
    to be sequestered in European churches,
    before fire was the weapon against those words
    before Mexico fingered the edges of "Indian Territory,"
    before Guadalupe Hidalgo hounded México south of El Río Bravo,
    before the cattle trails north through the old borderlands,
    before the first treaties made by the First Peoples of the Plains,
    before the first treaties were broken,
    before peoples were forced south from the prairies of their ancestors
    in the wake of the Santa Fe's boom,
    before the people came north to lay the tracks for the trains,
    before the Kanza lived in homes of hide, brush or sod,
    settled on the Blue River banks,
    before they were presented with homes of stone
    that hung heavy on the spirit,
    before red wheat replaced multicolored corn,
    before the encroaching country dishonored its predecessors
    with betrayal, broken treaties, blood,
    before the underground railroad passed through
    and Kansas won its place as a land of emancipation,
    before the US detained the immigrant progeny of America's ancestors,
    before all this ...
    the first immigrants to the land of the south wind
    nourished its soils with their bones,
    nourished its winds with their souls,
    nourished the skies with the colors of their spirits.


    My Own Private Borderlands

    After Gloria Anzaldúa

    Born on the cusp where Mennonite meets Welt,
    an embattled terrain — despite claims to peace —
    where to one side, people are "in the world
    but, not of it" and to the other. ... My foremost claim to
    the faith, of late, clutches the hereditary nature of ethnicity —
    definitely that puts me on the border —
    less than one quarter ethnic, martyred Mennoblood,
    blood that never directly spilt another's blood,
    but perhaps a woman's. (But die Frauen bleed anyhow con la luna.)
    Sangre Pura Menonita — Nicht meine.
    Here I know the borderlands is no escape route. To escape
    such culture, one must fly out, as moneyed exile or tourist.
    Rather, leben en la frontera is a state of permanent flux
    that ties one with and simultaneously breaks one from
    a constant reshaping of something we call cultura.


    Hibiscus and Marigolds

    The green is denser than jungle this year
    under the old cottonwoods in late June.

    I know this because
    half my life back
    and half the world away
    my brother and I walked through
    ferns and bamboo,
    followed monkeys
    who galloped from tree to tree
    never touching earth.
    We climbed the rocks
    barefoot above Deogarh Falls
    where black igneous
    under shining water
    is streaked with silver,
    late in the afternoons.
    There, men in orange dhotis
    lay alters
    with hibiscus and marigolds
    and sacrifice kid goats
    with one swoop of an ax.

    Afterward, I couldn't look
    at the red of the hibiscus.
    Much later I couldn't sit still
    in white limestone churches
    with varnished oak pews
    and listen to men preach,
    men stuffed into bulging white shirts,
    swaddled in a suit, wrapped with a tie
    as if something might escape
    to move us from our pews
    to move us to the green of the jungle
    and the red of the kid goat's blood.


    Though He'd Rather Work For National Geographic

    As we drove back to town
    she told me
    that her husband makes maps for the Air Force —
    that is all she knows about his work
    because it is classified;
    the job makes them a living,
    though he'd rather work for National Geographic
    or teach geography.

    I didn't tell her
    your classified secrets,
    composed, calm inside you,
    won't destroy any woman's farmyard;
    that though we never have quite enough to last the month,
    we draw maps that will one day open dreams
    into new stands of wilderness.


    Receiving the Inheritance,


    I: Pomme de Amour

    A chill grief slips in beneath the flesh
    as a newly whetted knife cuts the wetness of a tomato.

    Seeds squirt
    onto the sweating brow of August afternoon;
    I strain pulp from seeds with grandma's sieve,
    save juice,
    toss remains on sweltering compost

    knowing that sangre del amor saved in summer
    will burst the chrysalis of Halcyon days
    with its wet, red warmth.


    II: In the Folds

    I embroider tear ducts in black lace
    with scarlet thread,
    and gather all into vaginal smiles
    that border the symmetry of birth.
    I see you there in the folds —
    remnants of great grandma's artistry,
    shadowed with Rit colors
    purpled in the tie-dyed threads
    of my self-spun, black widow web.

    Fine, but continuous, as any single strand,
    you bow to deliberate form,
    bend away from awkward fingers that demand redesign,
    spring back to study memories dreamt
    then detained by years of rude awakenings.
    You gentle my fingers into old lace
    to build new architecture.


    Mattress-Liner Triptych Plus One


    I. Without a Word in Portuguese

    Tiny ants march in vigilance
    while in the next room
    my French-Tunisian roommate sleeps
    off our feast, and across the hall French
    men who cannot pronounce my name,
    whose language sticks in my throat,
    men who can cook and do not drink
    except for Malibu coconut liqueur,
    snore lightly.

    My bed frames black
    satin against my olive flesh,
    surrounds my body,
    satiated with fondue, wine, massage
    with a moss green strength, and
    secures the boundaries
    of my night-rest.

    Within me
    the thousand words
    in foreign tongue —
    heated talk of the French-Algerian War,
    adulation for the chocolate mousse,

    the small dreams of fingers
    stirring the globe
    settling themselves on Brazil ...


    II. Half Asleep, I Thought A Mirror

    in the hollow
    of a crumpled Kleenex
    where I see a lady, her lips pursed,
    eyes tilted — one bent in mirth

    one to angst.
    Her face, split down the middle
    one side slipping sidewise

    one sliding off
    like the San Andreas fault.


    III. Three Wishes

    I wish this Saturday morning
    there were someone in bed beside me
    to answer the damn phone
    and tell those fools with cheerful voices
    that I am asleep.

    I wish there were someone in bed beside me
    to read my textbook softly
    into my ear
    so that it might record painlessly
    in my left hemisphere
    with no loud objection from my right.

    I wish this Saturday morning
    there were someone in bed beside me
    to listen to the way I breathe in my sleep.


    Synesthesia Across Hemispheres

    The mirrors cast a triple image —
    blue veins run the length of six arms,
    six hands trace a topography like a goddess of the Ganges.
    I am the one who dances with head submerged,
    in the gymnasium — an aquarium of fish,
    where sounds are warped and
    rhythms stretched, bended, obtuse.

    Fondling old times with the tongue of my memory
    I hold June's sun-yellowed warmth about us
    because then I had something
    like a box turtle shell, smooth with age,
    shining on my mind.


    Happy Valentine's Flowers from Mom in Hawaii

    This is not a poem
    about love
    not an ode
    to the fuchsia orchids
    and scarlet and pink
    little boy flowers
    on my kitchen table.
    This poem leaves behind
    the rock'n'roll
    the girl drummer
    boys with harmonica
    and guitars,
    comes home early —
    2 a.m. — sits down, feet up,
    with water and a candle, a pen
    to forestall
    fitting clean sheets
    on the icy mattress
    and sliding in.

CHAPTER 2

One Liners: Love Bites, Bread Lines, and Roses

    This Bee and I

    Our entire relationship is antagonistic
    and revolves around a sweet Jonathan
    we are both trying to eat.

    When the apple is gone,
    So is the bee.


    Gasping Air Into Song

    I feel toward you
    as the birds at 5 a.m.
    in late April
    and the air chirping.


    Fast

    Wanting nothing
    in my mouth after you
    I go to bed, hungry.


    Cat

    I feel toward you
    as I have toward all men passing through:
    I like your warm body against mine at night
    but I'm through with your incessant
    crying to be fed.


    US Currency Reformed

    This note is redeemable for illegal tenderness.


    Checkmate: Your Love Bounced

    Is it that
    your affection is
    like the check you wrote
    that returned to me
    from my bank
    Marked:
    NOT SUFFICIENT FUNDS
    Presented Twice
    Do Not Re-clear?


    consummation /communion

    Maybe we'd be more graceful lovers,
    more agile, and stronger for each other
    if we didn't drink so much elephant beer
    in these rare meetings.
    Yet I suspect we could be nothing more
    than we are —
    the elephant ale of communion
    taken with the breaking of pain
    between us as
    we share bodies, moments, memories
    and complete trust in the ritual.


    Bottom Line

    While it is good to feel your singular desire
    momentary or longstanding, it is not enough.
    I have not held out for love
    but should it come for me,
    I'll go.


    Garden Poem

    He
    Like an annual
    Seeded
    Sprouted
    Bloomed
    Died.
    Left no traces.
    Summer's carrots
    lasted longer.


    Riddle of the Daisy

    So you've moved on to the next petal?


    Postscript to the Daisy Poem:

    Conceptualize this art:
    A Daisy, no a bouquet, well perhaps a room or,
    better yet, a field full of Daisies with all the
    petals plucked. I'll call it Indecision or
    Ambivalence, and I'll dedicate it to you.


    Asymmetry

    in the rhythm
    on the dance floor
    as costumes sway
    on the dancers
    in the hairdos-
    sprays of ringlets
    spikes like steeples.
    Gold beads flap
    from Black shoulders.
    Pumps, boots stomp.
    Floorboards tremble.
    And once too often,
    I look at you.


    Sincerity over Constancy

    Due in the month of the garnet,
    I put off arrival
    till the month of the amethyst.


    Adjunct's Pledge (a.k.a. Broken Treaty)

    Whether I survive, or succumb,
    work that makes the good die young
    I won't take again.


    Class Lines

    The heartbeat familiarity of the same pitch tone cadence
    The professor's voice day after day, month after month —
    Same classroom, same time
    Same words in always new arrangements ...
    The heartbeat of the pressing need
    to field improvisations, cultivate new combinations
    dispel inertia and
    build desire
    for the familiar that is always slipping away
    into another semester
    other lives.


    A volley across the net of language:

    Looking up the Spanish for the English I don't understand,
    then the English for the Español, I begin aprender.


    November Ironies ...

    Día de los Muertos is all about life
    while sadly our lives are all about death....


    Who Says Plants Don't Move?

    when overnight my houseplant has spilled her seed
    across my drawing table.


    Who Says Trees Don't Move?

    when this Monday morning in November,
    my finely barked friend in my front yard
    has left leaves all across my newly raked lawn.


    Incommunicado

    So what do you do
    when you are up against a wall, alone and naked?
    Do you piss on it?
    Do you paint on it?
    Do you try to climb it?
    Do you take a sledge hammer to it?
    Do you bash your head against it to ease the pain?
    Does your answer depend
    on more than the tools you have at hand?


    Disjuncture

    Mojado is a word like a mushroom bomb.
    The bomb is gorgeous, as it explodes.
    Mojado, like an intimate whisper on the lips,
    wipes la boca de la alma from humanity's clutch.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from On the Line by Kamala Platt. Copyright © 2010 Kamala Platt. Excerpted by permission of Wings Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Power Lines (In Wind),
One Liners: Love Bites, Bread Lines, and Roses,
Epistolary Lines,
Engendering a Bottom Line: Over Gender Lines,
Farewell Lines,
Horizon Lines on the Prairie,
Horizon Lines: Returns to the South Land,
Over Lines in Sand: Solamente Justicia y Paz,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,

Editorial Reviews

"Measured, wise, and lyrical, these poems constitute a hard-won testament."  —John Crawford, publisher, West End Press

From the Publisher