Becky Thompson
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Currently, I am an associate professor at Simmons College where I teach sociology, African American Studies and Gender and Cultural Studies. I have also taught or been in residency at Duke University, Princeton University, Wesleyan University, Bowdoin College, and at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. In my previous life (before I started focusing on poetry) I wrote a number of scholarly books including A Promise and A Way of Life, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep, Mothering without a Compass and two co-edited volumes, Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity, and Beyond a Dream Deferred: Multicultural Education and the Politics of Excellence. I began tentatively to write poetry in 2002 and have been taking poetry workshops and poetry classes since. While I come to this craft late, I bring much energy and admiration for the work/practice. I recently finished co-editing Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the African Diaspora (with Randall Horton and Michael Harper, forthcoming, Third World Press). My poems have recently appeared in Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, Amandla, Illuminations, The Teacher’s Voice, and In Women’s Hands.
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Crying into the night
On the greyhound bus
a woman with pneumonia
threw up into a white plastic bag
at every bridge from San Francisco
to Sacramento.
A lady with a lipstick red coat
passed around a photo of her Pekinese
to everybody twice.
An old guy with Elvis hair
got locked in the bathroom
until the driver rescued him.
A man with two teeth in front
and four teeth in back snored
so loud the bus driver turned up the Muzak.
An eighteen year old with belly fat
urged from playing offensive guard
with the Oakland high school football team
tried to sleep
checking his cell phone
like it was his heart.
Everyone got to get off the bus at every stop
for clean air, smoking, snore less sound.
Only I stayed on,
unfolding myself
onto the warmth of the football player’s seat.
Wondering, how did my life come to this?
More comfortable on the bus than with my
oysters on the half shell grandmother
and gated community brother.
Still looking for my saltine and sardine father
who used to twirl my sister and me in the air
like we were sped-up sundials.
Who sat against Phoenix lamp posts
with a pack of beer as his afternoon project.
Who disappeared when I was five…
Crying into the night.
Daddy did you take this bus?
Get hauled into that jail?
Work in this town?
Find a new family in that one?
Are you caught in the smell of this bus?
In the tread of this coach?
Did you know I fall asleep in operas
and miss you in diners?
Daddy, are you the drops of rain
weeping on the windshield?
Spring, 2006
Catch
It starts in my toes
straight from the earth
up through my calves
swirling swirling
around my knee caps
riding up the roller coaster
of the longest state of my leg
up to my hips
zig zag zig zag
ping pong ball
back and forth
from my hip bone to my hip bone
up to the generations
of my heart, my lungs
up to my breasts
a momentary nestling spot
then on to my nipples
energy packets
up to my neck
circling and circling
the electrical connection
to my mouth
round and round
to my lips
across to your lips
on the other side of this world.
July , 2006
History in the water
The policeman takes dog
from young boy’s hands
“Snowball” he cries
eyelashes rain
a man holds his wife and son
son and wife
water storms the steeples
she says: let me go
he does: grief streaming
woman with skin dressed in wrinkles
rocks on a superdome cot
people flood the stadium
three now beside her waiting
no blood between them
soldier calls home to Biloxi
CNN his only connection
water drowns phone lines
dust hijacks his memories of safety
he grounds the butt of his gun in the sand
Bush views bottom of a slave ship
from his bubble in the sky
terrorists take notes
Black people still traveling
middle passage on buses
Rosa Parks stands up
her spoken word to the wind
blow to the middle of the sea
save these brave people from your moods
The next world war will be about water
September 2005
Published in: Amandla. Fall, 2005.
