Cutting Outside the Lines | R. SHAWNTEZ JACKSON

Cutting Outside the Lines

poetry by R. SHAWNTEZ JACKSON

Cut down your stone temples Make room for the river to be seen beyond all the breaks. Your water flows from deep places like your belly. Nourish it.

Cut down the vines that held you stuck in your thoughts of freedom. What it might feel like against your skin. Make room for the move, throw away everything you can't afford to carry.

Cut loose the bitter edges of your tongue, because fear affects the deepness of this blade's folly & destruction. You are more than what you feel. Sight takes time to catch up to believing, especially in storms.

Catch your breaths, Count them Sink into the motions of rising tides, ready yourself for elevation.

For what you seek you must prepare room for, in every corner of your heart and home.

Sweeping dilemmas cost nothing as long as you keep your pruning shears handy.

Cut down & rest. Paint with your fingers in watercolors, the picture you want to live, now drown in its taste.

It's a refreshing remedy to the headaches of heartbreak or denial.

And still more to uncover in your cutting out the life you desire.

Bugalú (eso se baila así)

poetry by SEN RUIZ

Hustler cornered on 22nd and Bartlett headed toward the Transfer Night Club for trans- actions, main line home, line dances, lines of coke. Panas, pofis and prixis he got broders on the inside, the outside, the flipside. They come from largos caminos and viejos tiempos when the word resistance was a lyric in a song, a rhythm in a cry. Piks in fros they slide denim flairs to Héctor Lavoe, Willie Colón, Rubén Blades, Pete Rodriguez, Tito Puente, Joe Cuba— all Kings

that just like them, had learned clave and congas before they learned

their own names.

Self Portrait: Scream, NOREIA RAIN