Thank you for making our celebration of National Poetry Month a smashing success! Going into April, I hadn't written a poem in well over a year. But the talented writers, photographers and artists who submitted their work inspired me to the point that I began to write poems again - with a fury.The result? Apotheosis, a chapbook of seven poems. Order your copy today!

Grateful to the artists of the world,

Tamryn Spruill

By Jesi Bender

As I lay me down to sleep

Perfumed

With a voice that burns off like smoke

In the dark, under grey-blue sheets

I look at the outline,

How your face cuts the air

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

All I see is the pink, fleshy insides of your eyes

And the memories projecting from therein

The corners from where every tear was torn

Veins pressed against the white, like hollow/hallowed reeds

Sick and tired from this modern discontent

And if I should die before I wake

Retract into youth

As I fall asleep

Originality/A purity escaping, gasps and grasps

Sometimes I feel carved out

Like a silhouette, skin over air

I pray the Lord my soul to take

An artist from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Jesi Bender graduated with a B.A. in English and Fine Arts from Cornell University in 2007. Her first book, entitled Oppressed by the Notion of Beauty, will be released by December 2009.

Contact: Jesi Bender * Email: jesibender@gmail.com.

By Cedric Tillman

I am

missing you a bit,

More than I thought,

and more than I should.

But your spirit hovers over me.

Impish.

You must stop playing with my halo.

I should stop letting you.

Shoo, gone now.

You know me well.

It was the melanin, I’m afraid

It was watery,

It leaked all over you.

No mixing, no adulterating.

Grain alcohol blackness

saturated even the tangled,

sovereign curls

you idly twisted in daydreams

It simmered on your cheeks,

a veiled emotion.

It seeped onto your breasts,

where it burst at their conclusions.

It dove into your lips, where...

Those lips.

Your lips were grey.

They were like black after pink lost out.

They were softly corrugated and nice.

Your tongue was neon

against night’s background

It was easy to see between teeth.

You were better for shadow

like poems for solitude

The bad lighting to finish good novels to,

There were secrets in your stare

that made it worth the strain to see you

I could you make you out

in basements with no light.

I could feel for the warmth

that had blown out the bulbs,

and follow the heat of an urge

that could rip out a pull string

Or you would usher me down,

slowly

compelling exploration

until I could not stay

the night.

Cedric Tillman received a BA in English from UNC Charlotte and an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. He lives in Charlotte.

Contact: Cedric Tillman * Email: juggsmurf@yahoo.com

By Jesi Bender

To break it in, to love something enough

He is formed in the shape of number 9

Ripped from the white, beating [w]h0le

A blessing, this wound seems

Coagulated grape jelly encrusted

To the disconnected lid

The cover of innumerable insides

This deep red, myriad

Bubbled dissonant paradise

Burns like an omnipresent hell

When you amputate part

Still feel where it should be

The happy violence of love

When she saw him saw

To cleave can both stick and split

Our bodies are the same

Evil and Good coalescing

To make it whole again.

An artist from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Jesi Bender graduated with a B.A. in English and Fine Arts from Cornell University in 2007. Her first book, entitled Oppressed by the Notion of Beauty, will be released by December 2009.

Contact: Jesi Bender * Email: jesibender@gmail.com.

By Cedric Tillman

1.

In this movie,

the browner people are the more spiritual people.

This is a old convention, one seen in films

such as Imitation of Life and Driving Ms. Daisy

and in the work of writers like Hemingway

whose infrequent black characters

were generally wise. The white girl,

blonde, thin, happy and definitely

better off than her immigrant Indian lover,

has opulent parents

who we know, deep down, must make

campaign contributions to Democratic candidates.

Her parents have “a place,”

perhaps in the Catskills,

given the movie’s New York City setting.

Inevitably,

Gagan finds the religion-oblivious Jacki annoying.

Though Gagan is hardly a devout Hindu,

he feels he ought to have been less aloof

from his family and its traditions

after the loss of his father.

Jacki seems almost genetically incapable

of plumbing the requisite depth of empathy

for Gagan. For her, death is just that- death;

She wants him to move on

so that they can return to their extra-Indian,

Columbia University utopian urbaneness,

but he realizes only now that he’s been a sellout,

ethnically derelict, initially afraid

to even introduce Jacki to his family.

Eventually, Jacki’s whole Ivy-League, stock whiteness

is inadequate next to Gagan’s latent but effervescent

brown spirituality, and we understand that Gagan

must leave her for a new flame,

a necessarily more Indian one....

2.

But after being inculcated with the notion,

with apologies to Lionel Richie,

that common ethnicity, not just love,

conquers all, Gagan’s well-traveled

worldly Indian wife leaves him

for an old flame, a French guy,

which leaves the audience,

particularly perhaps the brown audience, wondering

What white man said he wouldn’t release this film

if good down home white heathenism didn’t trump

brown Holy-Ghostness at some point along the way?

In the end, it’s not just that the film succumbs to a

stereotypically Hollywoodish, nebulous agnosticism

(the audience is gently beat over the head

with a rhetorical God/religion-is-not-the-answer throw pillow

when Gagan’s wife cheats on him)

which is, as they say, a whole ‘nother topic,

but it’s that the story’s resolution is false, or at least untrustworthy

because it reeks,

because it is positively redolent,

of demographic determinism...

Cedric Tillman received a BA in English from UNC Charlotte and an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. He lives in Charlotte.

Contact: Cedric Tillman* Email: juggsmurf@yahoo.com