Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend July 21, 2016   Incendiary Art   Patricia Smith

The city’s streets are densely shelved with rows of salt and packaged hair. Intent on air, the funk of crave and function comes to blows   with any smell that isn’t oil—the blare of storefront chicken settles on the skin and mango spritzing drips from razored hair.   The corner chefs cube pork, decide again on cayenne, fry in grease that’s glopped with dust. The sizzle of the feast adds to the din   of children, strutting slant, their wanderlust and cussing, plus the loud and tactless hiss  of dogged hustlers bellowing past gusts   of peppered breeze, that fatty, fragrant bliss in skillets. All our rampant hunger tricks us into thinking we can dare dismiss   the thing men do to boulevards, the wicks their bodies be. A city, strapped for art, delights in torching them—at first for kicks,   to waltz to whirling sparks, but soon those hearts thud thinner, whittled by the chomp of heat. Outlined in chalk, men blacken, curl apart.   Their blindly rising fume is bittersweet, although reversals in the air could fool us into thinking they weren’t meant as meat.   Our sons don’t burn their cities as a rule, born, as they are, up to their necks in fuel.            Copyright © 2016 Patricia Smith. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “After the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, following the murder of Michael Brown, I heard many versions of this sentiment: ‘It’s so stupid for them to burn down their own neighborhoods.’ I thought back on my own first neighborhood in Chicago, torched to its bones after the King assassination, and how everything—before and after that moment—smelled on the verge of ignition. I wanted to explore the ways our streets, our homes and our bodies strain toward fire.” —Patricia Smith   Patricia Smith is the author of Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017). She teaches at CUNY College of Staten Island and lives in Howell, New Jersey.   Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths Poetry by Smith   Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017)  "The Fist" by Derek Walcott "Proem" by Octavio Paz "Making History" by Marilyn Nelson Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038