Two Poems by M. NourbeSe Philip
This week in the PEN Poetry Series, guest editor TC Tolbert features two poems by M. NourbeSe Philip. About Philip’s work, Tolbert writes: “From the first time I read Zong! to my recent encounters with this new work in progress, I am continually trying to say what M. NourbeSe Philip has written – to vocalize and surrender to the sense that a body may make. Her work invites and insists that the reader participate in the making not just of the poem but of the fragment, word, and syllable. This is a way of (re)creating time. I have been changed by this poetry of present tense. A poetics of reclamation, responsibility, and shift. I turn to her for hope because in a language dependent on death she brings the body back to life.”
? (a work in progress)
rupert and his mother
one such family
wearing hair in dread
locks furious
fear
he will be killed
young white woman
falling apart
deeply spirit woman
aturday in august
the day of
thomas duchenne and sandra chang (san dee)
getically pursue
involved in a rel
badminton doubles and they play compe
evious
sexual assault
her place he refuses
they agreed
especially against a wom
The Shelled Conch
night-
summer of hot half-darkness
somnambulist feedings and
changings
baby is put to breast again,
against her feet
shell accretions of crustacean
cold
solid in the heat
protect the conch with the hard of white
– layered –
mother
wife
daughter inner
shell of pink aching
space … negative-
no shell cold or hard enough
to protect the conch creamed white
alive, eaten dead
or some foot
lonely in a reaching–out night
for the comfort of cold.
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