WHEN A BLACK BOY WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT by A. D Winans

He wrote 65 books of poetry and prose, work has been published in more than 2000 journals and Anthologies, he was founder and publisher of Second Coming press that published a whole host of beats poets like Bob Kaufman, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Linda King, Jack Micheline etc... He is one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century, and still at it. For more check his wikipedia page.
He gave me this poem to publish in the Anthology.

WHEN A BLACK BOY WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

Who would have thought skittles and icetea
Was a death sentence
Not even Doctor Oz.

When a black boy with a dream
walks home alone at night

Hard rain falling
Lady Death whisper in the air
A boy with a dream walks home at night
To watch an all-star basketball game
Gunned down by a wanna-be-cop
And Florida’s “stand your ground”
License to kill law

When a black boy with a dream
Walks home alone at night

Justice denied by a poor
Prosecution Team
And a judge’s tortured
Jury instructions

When a black boy with a dream
Walks home alone at night

No appeal for Trayvon
No appeal for the dead
In the State of Florida where
A young black boy must forever fear
To walk home alone
In the dark of night
Always within a legal sniper’s
Gun sight

When a black boy with a dream
Walks home alone at night

Lock and load the chamber
No safety on the gun
Make it as black as the night
Holster it at the back hip
To keep it from sight

Know the law is on  your side
Black is black white is white
It’s OK to shoot on sight
when a black boy with a dream
Walks home alone at night

Black Man by C.Liegh McInnis

“[i]’m testing positive for the funk.
[i]’d gladly pee in anybody’s cup.
And if your cup overflows,
[i]’m testing positive and pee somemo’.”
from “We Can Funk” by Prince and George Clinton

“Black Man” from The Black Book of Linguistic Liberation
by C. Liegh McInnis

[i] apologize for marching my muddy waters feet
on your pale pat boone carpet, but my steps have been
made dusty from dancing in the dirt of the Delta.
So, allow me to straighten your crooked records.
[i] am history.  My name is Black,
but you can call me “Daddy Pop”
‘cause [i]’m father to the rainbow.
[i] got more child-nations than Skittles got colors
all birthed from the rich womb of Alkebu-lan.
Even my outhouse produces flowering countries.
My loins are the kaleidoscope of life.
[i] am the prism that creates the spectrum of humanity.
My black body is as fertile as the Nile reservoir,
and my soul shines like the son’s Aton.
[i] was a Muslim before you submitted,
Christ-like before the crucifixion, and a mason before the codes.
[i] created remedial education for Socrates.
[i] was the one who suggested the elephant to Hannibal,
the donkey to Jesus, and the Cadillac to Reverend Ike.
[i] was the one who taught Merlin
that damn sleight of hand trick;
still you call me witch doctor and call him magician;
as the government works its hoo doo,
hell, [i] need some voo doo jus’ to stay sane.
If you don’t think that [i]’m a magician
jus’ check me out on bill day.
How does fourteen percent of the population
give a whole nation so much soul?
If the one drop rule applies,
then the complete commonwealth is colored.
[i] was the one who did the driving
and parallel parking for Columbus.
[i] tried to warn my carmine brothers
‘bout smoking that pipe with Captain Smith.
[i]’m Nat Turner on my best day and Clarence Thomas
on my worst, but even my worst makes me supreme.
[i]’m B. B. King on Saturday night
and Martin Luther King on Sunday morning.
[i]’m the beautiful fiery Truth of Richard Pryor
and the communal Wisdom of Baba Cosby.
[i] am Frederick Douglass with a Kangol slightly tilted
to the side, still refusing to give up my plantation house.
[i]’m Booker T. Washington in a red, pinstriped
double-breasted suit with red silk socks
and a pair of shiny Stacey Adams.
[i]’m gon’ pull myself up by my wingtips
and look good doing it.
[i]’m the double talking, double consciousness of Du Bois
and the glorious, steadfast rock of Garvey.
[i]’m the “New Negro”—of every ten years.
[i] made the peanut give birth to things that
you wouldn’t believe, and [i] coordinated red, yellow, and green
to keep white folks from running into each other.
By the way—how you gon’ invent a cotton gin
when you ain’t picked no cotton?
If necessity is the mother of invention,
then every patent in America should be mine.
[i] tried to tell Custard not to go in betwixt them rocks.
[i] took on wings at Tuskegee
and taught America how to fly.
[i] pumped electrifying, orgasmic life
into your comatose language.
[i]’m the same man who cut Malcolm’s conk
and gives Reverend Sharpton  his touch-up.
[i] was the one who said, “Run, Jesse, run.”
[i]’m Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, Thelonious Monk,
Miles Davis, Little Richard, Jackie Wilson, James Brown,
Jimi Hendrix, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder,
Marvin Gaye, and Tina Turner all rolled into one.
That’s right.  [i]’m  !
But above all else, [i] am forever here
like a stain on the silk shirt of white supremacy.
[i] have survived more wars and famines than McDonald’s
has sold over priced and over processed scamburgers.
[i] have survived more conspiracies than an
Oliver Stone movie and more cliffhangers than
Dynasty, Falcon Crest, Dallas and General Hospital.
That’s why my Young are so damn Restless.
[i] am the bulging, pounding phallic anxiety of a nation.
You don’t know whether to
emasculate me, incarcerate me, infect me, or ejaculate me.
That’s alright ‘cause [i] can’t help but
touch myself when [i] walk.
The music in my rhythm gives me more bounce to my beat.
[i] am JSU and Tougaloo, the public and private HBCU.
And one day [i]’m gon’ use my education
to engineer my sovereignty.
Until then [i]’ll keep funking my blues on the one.
Poverty and oppression are
jus’ more opportunities to be great.
[i]’m too bad to die, too proud not to live
and too funky not to enjoy it all.
The only time that [i] give up my wooly existence
is so that others may have everlasting life.

C. Liegh McInnis is an instructor of English at Jackson State University, the former publisher and editor of Black Magnolias Literary Journal, the author of eight books, including four collections of poetry, one collection of short fiction (Scripts:  Sketches and Tales of Urban Mississippi), one work of literary criticism (The Lyrics of Prince:  A Literary Look at a Creative, Musical Poet, Philosopher, and Storyteller), one co-authored work, Brother Hollis:  The Sankofa of a Movement Man, which discusses the life of a legendary Mississippi Civil Rights icon, and the former First Runner-Up of the Amiri Baraka/Sonia Sanchez Poetry Award sponsored by North Carolina State A&T.  He has presented papers at national conferences, such as College Language Association, the Neo-Griot Conference, and the Black Arts Movement Festival, and his work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Southern Quarterly, Konch Magazine, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Down to the Dark River:  An Anthology of Poems on the Mississippi River,  Black Hollywood Unchained:  Essays about Hollywood’s Portrayal of African Americans,  The Pierian, Black Gold:  An Anthology of Black Poetry, Sable, New Delta Review, The Black World Today, In Motion Magazine, MultiCultural Review, A Deeper Shade, New Laurel Review, ChickenBones, Oxford American, Journal of Ethnic American Literature, B. K. Nation, Red Ochre Lit, and Brick Street Press Anthology.  In January of 2009, C. Liegh, along with eight other poets, was invited by the NAACP to read poetry in Washington, DC, for their Inaugural Poetry Reading celebrating the election of President Barack Obama.  He has also been invited by colleges and libraries all over the country to read his poetry and fiction and to lecture on various topics, such as creative writing and various aspects of African American literature, music, and history.  McInnis can be contacted through Psychedelic Literature, 203 Lynn Lane, Clinton, MS  39056, (601) 383-0024, psychedeliclit@bellsouth.net.  For more information, checkout his website www.psychedelicliterature.com.

Primary Facts by Allan Horwitz

Our very first entry into Africa Vs North  America Anthology is from the Veteran South African Poet and Publisher with Botsotso Arts Link, Allan Horwitz

PRIMARY FACTS
‘Introduction to Marxism’ – workshop for civic activists held in a junior school classroom at Bramfischerville, Johannesburg (December, 2012)


Faces alert     but after the first words      
        turn away     regard other things       other sights  
distant but close  thoughts      take over     the classroom

who can understand  this life
beyond the needs for    food     shelter     warmth     power
and the great mating emotion?  

     
Outside      a running      a screaming for means     masses marching for basics
police and lawyers bargain with teargas and half-truths
    the new black  rulers legislate predatorial combat
                  deny sharing is more efficient and useful
           than hoarding and lording

the faces in front of me now swing to the mine dumps
next to their small houses
       the shacks on which
             dumps spew dust at spring’s start
               mining company will not grass them       nor give them  up
                                but the community is organized
                     and here i am    in this place of glaring need  
                  to play a part in   widening
                        breaking the bounds
`            the want        the absence      the  still-born       the limping
barely believed ambition

and i wonder:   can i really add?
          spin concrete from theory for spiritual grandeur
build it on                 funeral-meat      queues       joblessness
                      fatty chicken soggy with brine      rat shit       random fathers    
soap opera               cheap washing powder  
despite the handshakes of old neighbours
and the hurried breathing of first love and some success
in keeping blacklisting from the door

and can i fill out and bring to life words
                     class       privilege      corruption        revolution
                                       resistance      decay      decency      pride      
having regard to generations of anointers and usurpers
                  hero worshippers and betrayers  
                generations of take       and take more  
                genocide     migration    stock theft and insurrection


Looking about the room
i imagine Marx and Engels watching the white drawn
faces of the sons and daughters of working England
those armies of stunted black toothed laborers
trudging back to their hovels in the gloom of gaslight
the two grey bearded emancipators silently counting the thin ribs
under their coal-stained rags

and then facing this class room
what would they say to this gathering of Africans
newly freed of the yoke of slavers and kings?
                    how would they advise these newly commoditized?
these workers and their managers
                        still laughed at by the captains of spice ships
                               oil tankers and the mineral world

would they still urge a dictatorship of the dispossessed?
the centralized certainty of enlightened self- interest?
would they have the strength to thrash the comprador class as it cruises?
and to make certain
train a bald security service to guard the Liberation?


Mention of Fanon has driven talk to revolutionary violence

Azania has many martyrs
the rhetoric canonizing their blood-soaked vests
cannot tarnish their heroism
even as the Big Men  Mbeki   Zuma
self-destruct

then talk turns to tenderpreneurship
those dining out business class/affirmative class
                           on the gravy train
is that not first choice for the ‘colonized mind’
                      ignorant of  Biko’s Black Consciousness?

but what has this to do with you     white boy?
you who cannot tolerate the notion of killing for freedom
can your philosophy free people of colour?  
                    can there be colour-blind bondage?
what right have you to speak?
             you
                             with your silver spoon and degrees

                     
An hour before lunch the citizen-workers of Bramfischerville talk
about what they wish
to change    and so
                heal the stress lines fracturing
                                        their lives
thereafter
the soul will digest policy  
              plan sewers and tar roads  
many other ‘deliveries’
to this township on the edge of Africa’s grandest ‘boom and bust’city
this township pledging loyalty to a legacy
                      naming itself in his honour

but who was Bram Fischer?
who was the man who carried this name?

and i describe that    white Afrikaner  
  Marxist who lived his principles
spent many years above and underground
defying the racists
        spent many years in jail once they caught him

and affirm:    he is with us today in spirit         and he is still saying:

‘What is needed is for White South Africans to shake themselves out of their complacency, a complacency intensified by the present economic boom built upon racial discrimination. Unless this whole intolerable system is changed radically and rapidly, disaster must follow. Appalling bloodshed and civil war will become inevitable because, as long as there is oppression of a majority, such oppression will be fought with increasing hatred.’

and i add:                accept nothing blindly from figures of authority
           spend time with your family      organize your community
          find the powers that make you objective
                                 free of sentiment and greed
                   build the power that delivers the good(s)

emulate Bram Fischer    he of impeccable character
   
as Nelson Mandela declared

"Bram was a courageous man who followed the most difficult course any person could choose to follow. He challenged his own people because he felt that what they were doing was morally wrong. As an Afrikaner whose conscience forced him to reject his own heritage and be ostracised by his own people, he showed a level of courage and sacrifice that was in a class by itself. I fought only against injustice not against my own people."

but even as these ghosts speak      
           i wonder:

          Bram      
 bourgeois lawyer      son of the nationalist elite
        man in mourning for the death of the woman he loved
man almost broken by her death by drowning in a river when their car hit a cow
in the middle of the night on their way to their eldest daughter’s twenty-first birthday
there in the karoo on the road to Cape Town
and how was he to live without her and the struggle for freedom so long and hard and the odds so
unbearably high?
(this being 1964)

would you be at ease sitting in a small corner with a smoky fire
               lives counted    coin by coin
     till there isn’t even taxi fare to go and look for a job?
would you sip Coke and eat fried chicken and white bread with your bare hands?
         would you sit with the child-mother and her widowed mother
and speak of their historic duty
                           while the buzz of crony capitalists drowns out the mandate?”    

and i ask this
as i mourn the fact of your passing
before that day twenty years later when there came an end to the cruelest forms of domination


Afternoon darkens
air fills with the scent of coming rain
at the edge of the city-sprawl     houses begin to close doors
the group yawns     stretches its legs
the date for the next session left to the chair of the civic association

i get into my car

i will drive back to my book-lined house in the city    thinking
of the comment made by a young man in a yellow t-shirt
sitting near the back next to a very quiet girl with small breasts

   “thanks    thank you for coming
we are learning      but make no mistake
you leave us  here with our problems
not even God can solve because he made us
          and we humans are rotten with the apple we ate”

driving back to my island in the green belt of the city
i think:
perhaps we haven’t eaten enough



Dim light over the slime dumps
      rows of serrated edges     yellowy and trapezoid
       wind will come up       offer minute flecks of gold dust
                  gristle that blinds    that lines the throat
so the people of Bramfischerville can’t see or swallow their porridge

there will be follow ups ongoing sessions
maintaining a core of activists will not be easy
but right now i must be careful
ahead  is a road block     the cops are looking for cooldrink

i open the window
             
in the distance the lights of Joburg’s twin towers blink    
 i drive towards them
  foot on the accelerator

the past and the present stumble into each other
i smile   and    salute  
as my foot presses down    
                                                 slowly

Call for submissions

Africanization and Americanization: Searching for Inter-racial, Interstitial, Inter-sectional, and Interstates meeting spaces, Africa Vs North America, Volume 1  

These two continents were under the colonial hammer that changed them completely. They went through the worst recorded cases of slave trade, human trafficking, sexual abuses, racial abuses, genocides…. They have several races, tribes and groups in each, which they also share between each other, that has been the site of tensions. As we find our feat in the 21st century a lot of us have become colour blind, have grown beyond sections, even states and this anthology is invaluable as it would try to dissect where we came from (pre-colonial, colonial, postcolonial, post racial etc), where we are now, where we want to head toward, especially the meeting points between or among the racial lines, sectional lines, states lines in trying to find spaces we have built or want to built among ourselves (in each of the continents, or between the countries in these continents, or between these two continents) as we move into the future.  We are looking for writing that delves or tackles these issues in any genre, any topic, any style.... Send us your best essays, literary fictions, non-fictions, plays, poetry, mixed genres etc, in English language(s) (or English translations). Send work in only one genre of your choice!
Poetry (3 poems per poet, preferably short poems but we are still open for long poems)
Prose, plays and mixed genres (I piece per writer, of not more than 5000 words)
Work must be sent in only one attached document, also include your contact details in this document, i.e., Postal address, Tel no, Email address and a bio note of not more than 100 words.

Please sent your entries to Tendai R. Mwanaka at mwanaka13@gmail.com
Closing date for entries is 30 June 2017
No free contributors’ copies, no royalties but contributors will benefit immensely through publicity into both continents and worldwide.
Please adhere to submission guidelines!!