Listen Up, Liberals: In the Matter of Eric Garner vs NYPD by Angela Consolo Mankiewicz

Beware establishment’s media –
Yes, of course, you know all about it
Of course, nothing they say/print/read would surprise you
Of course, you rail against it day after day

I repeat: Beware the scourge of establishment’s media

Like sweet sounding cicadas
until they transform into locusts, soft tapping
sounds into scratching sounds into sounds
too deafening to be heard.

Listen up, Liberals, before you’re enveloped
by pods of active verbs becoming passive phrases,
where limbs are animated like a cop’s “arm find(ing)
its way around” a black man’s neck*; where scenes
are painted of “noisy” “throngs of (protesters)
scream(ing) at (cops)”…. “who had nothing to do
with this case”, who “feel betrayed” and “demoralized,,
misunderstood and ‘all alone’”**
.
I repeat: Beware the scourge of establishment’s media

Sleep just a moment today, another moment
tomorrow, a little more next week,
and they will consume you until you believe
that cop’s arm was finding its way around
a black man’s neck, until, betrayed, you’re no longer sure
who is demoralized, misunderstood and all alone.

They can get you – It can happen
I know.

*New York Times, 12/3/14 and **Associated Press, 12/5/14, both as reported in EXTRA! Jan-Feb 2015

Pantoum Chant For Ferguson: 20 Miles a Day by Angela Consolo Mankiewicz

 

The marchers march on, twenty miles a day
to Jefferson City, the latest Selma.
They trudge through the years, they know the way
from fifty years past, twenty more miles

to Jefferson City, the latest Selma.
Where will we be – who will we be
in fifty more years? After twenty more miles,
child of today, what will you see?

Where will we be? Who will we be?
Dreamers redeemed? Roads without lives without sticks without stones?
Or, child of today, is what you will see
the night chanting names on slicked over roads

trudging though years, knowing the way;
still dreaming and marching, twenty miles a day.

My Mother At 80: the Day She Fell In Love by Angela Consolo Mankiewic

It happened one afternoon
in melancholy heat

I was in no mood to hear
no mood to be compensated
no mood

She was waiting inside the front door,
waiting to hear my knock, waiting
to hear herself say:

“Use your key … why don’t you ever
use your key ….?”

Inside this house of unflinching indifference
I bent down to kiss her cheek and felt a tremor
through her shoulder, saw what seemed a near-blush,
a self-conscious smile and then:

“You’d think I was in love with you.”

I turned away, laid the bag of my better grapefruit
on the kitchen table, requested the afternoon’s itinerary.

“Oh,” she said, “just the market today”
and something else, something other than
You’d think I was in love with you.

I looked at the words
then looked again
before putting them away
one sound at a time
into a secret box
at the farthest corner
of the highest shelf
I could reach

POETACMANK,blogspot.com

Invisible – “That’s what’s wrong with ‘im”* by Angela Consolo Mankiewicz

The man had bedded down on the sidewalk
in the middle of a short block.

His head angled west toward middling class houses,
his feet pointed to the grittier east.

His face was the color of  urban dust, years of it;
his hair clung to his neck.

He wore the exterior clothes of most of his assumed
gender:  pants, shirt, shoes.

An untattered, buttoned blazer caressed him,
tightly; it was July, mid-afternoon.

There was no shopping cart nearby, no soulful
canine companion, no beer cans.

The man had elected to rest on pavement, rather than
the strip of grass on his street side or the cooler dirt-row
of untended palm trees on the other.

This is, after all, Los Angeles, during high-tourist season,
Hollywood Boulevard just a few blocks north,
Paramount a dream away south, on Melrose.

He knew it made no difference where he rested,
but maybe he thought this particular place
would be more memorable
to the few walking locals
who might pass by.

This is, after all, Los Angeles.

*From the James Whale film, “The Invisible Man”

I Keep This List by Angela Consolo Mankiewicz

I keep this list
of faces

that I’ve lost
over some years
some places.

A few come back
more than once;
the heartier ones don’t

they stay away
or dial wrong numbers
from hardened spaces

like I do.

A few send sand
to fill the holes
they left behind.

Most do nothing.

I check regularly
for milestones
to update my list

and note the dates
of traces, however
scant, of faces
looking for me.