Ann's Winter

The year was 1997. A pale classroom in
the Ivy League of the Mid-West,
a leftist poetry teacher
cums over Ginsberg.
A Student of Lowell
future tense Guggenheim recipient,
writer of immigrants
maids, janitors
and other red topics and less than people.


One brown militant student:

in a green garbage man jumper,

long, black ringlets hanging over
cha-cha intonations

panther-like leather jacket,

combat boots, Che buttons,

cherry red lipstick,

and fuck the 5.0 patches


There were poems of Puerto Rican revolutionaries
Ann mistook for soccer players.
Phrases she likened to magical realism
if food or el guiro
(Maybe even el cuatro)
were mentioned.
Footnotes she overlooked
(“because poems should not have to contain explanations”).

One Indian friend
mastered stanzas on the postcolonial--
where cows and Bombay folks
shat near the same buses. And the smell
slipped in a history of
British fish, chips, cheap scotch.

The genuine poet/students
wrote like learned ethnographers,
not lived (in)ner city youth.
Spoke so damn good
Or well?
And chose rhyme and meter
over real cleaning lady moms,
illiterate dads and the feeling faces
of the glum
colonial reality
present.

Ann is a Marxist. A word stylist
put out by Capitalism’s
unwashed hands.
The worker is not
mute. But silence is a syndrome.
Ann shifted the
same muzzle on the
Brown Girl’s
confessional poem--
enunciated with tattered blacks
and blues.

Ann’s enjambments stayed erect.
She never realized the Brown Girl
through all the cotton colored mutterings.

But Ann just wanted to talk
(no harm in theory, right?)
about cleaning toilets.
Mild revolutions taped to her tail
as she
Spic(ed) and span(ed) her way into
guilty remedy,
faking the funk

Brown Girl
just
hunched down
at a snail’s pace
and rode the windpipes
of someone else’s value.
She imagined
prostituting Ann
in front of her peers;
shredding her poems
like Plath to Hughes;
spitting on her
Understanding Poetry Book,
making sure to land on Keats
while keeping Langston resistant, dry.

But utopia loomed low
and “el paseo boricua”--
A Division Street Meditation Poem,
thrown under its
Rican low-rider
when Ann thought the
neo-independista members
were kicking balls around.

Gooooooooool
Gooooooooool

Brown girl
never
played anything
but softball, tennis.
She remembers those
clean matches
of working class, urban
savings.

Ann: Hüsker dü?