#Nikky Finney

[cascos-e-caricias]

 ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡

[spoke9]

Dancing with Strom

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By Nikky Finney

            I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there’s not enough             troops in the army to force the southern people to break             down segregation and accept the Negro [pronounced Nigra]             into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes,             and into our churches.                                     —Strom Thurmond, South Carolina                                     Senator and Presidential Candidate                                          for the States’ Rights Party, 1948               I said, “I’m gonna fight Thurmond from the mountain to             the sea.”                                     —Modjeska Monteith Simkins, Civil                               Rights Matriarch, South Carolina, 1948  

The youngest has been married off.

He is as tall as Abraham Lincoln. Here, on his

wedding day, he flaunts the high spinning laugh

of a newly freed slave. I stand above him, just

off the second-floor landing, watching

the celebration unfold.

Uncle-cousins, bosom buddies, convertible cars

of nosy paramours, strolling churlish penny-

pinchers pour onto the mansion estate. Below,

Strom Thurmond is dancing with my mother.

The favorite son of South Carolina has already

danced with the giddy bride and the giddy bride’s

mother. More women await: Easter dressy,

drenched in caramel, double exposed, triple cinched,

lined up, leggy, ready.

I refuse to leave the porch.

If I walk down I imagine he will extend his

hand, assume I am next in his happy darky line,

#427 on his dance card. His history

and mine, burnt cork and blackboard chalk,

concentric, pancaked, one face, two histories,

slow dragging, doing the nasty.

My father knows all this.

Daddy’s Black Chief Justice legs straddle the boilerplate

carapace of the CSS H. L. Hunley, lost Confederate

submarine, soon to be found just off the coast of

Charleston. He keeps it fully submerged by

applying the weight of every treatise he has

ever written against the death penalty of

South Carolina. Chanting “Briggs v. Elliott,”

he keeps the ironside door of the submarine shut.

No hands.

His eyes are a Black father’s beacon, search-

lights blazing for the married-off sons, and

on the unmarried, whale-eyed nose-in-book

daughter, born unmoored, quiet, yellow,

strategically placed under hospital lights to

fully bake. The one with the most to lose.

There will be no trouble. Still, he chain-

smokes. A burning stick of mint & Indian

leaf seesaws between his lips. He wants

me to remember that trouble is a fire that

runs like a staircase up then down. Even

on a beautiful day in June.

I remember the new research just out:

What the Negro gave America

Chapter 9,206:

Enslaved Africans gifted porches to North

America. Once off the boats they were told,

then made, to build themselves a place—to live.

They build the house that will keep them alive.

Rather than be the bloody human floret on

yet another southern tree, they imagine higher

ground. They build landings with floor enough

to see the trouble coming. Their arced imaginations

nail the necessary out into the floral air. On the

backs and fronts of twentypenny houses,

a watching place is made for the ones who will

come tipping with torch & hog tie through the

quiet woods, hoping to hang them as decoration

in the porcupine hair of longleaf.

The architecture of Black people is sui generis.

This is architecture dreamed by the enslaved:

Their design will be stolen.

Their wits will outlast gold.

My eyes seek historical rest from the kiss-

kiss theater below; Strom Thurmond’s

it’s-never-too-late-to-forgive-me chivaree.

I search the tops of yellow pine while my

fingers reach, catch, pinch my father’s

determined-to-rise smoke.

Long before AC African people did the

math: how to cool down the hot air of

South Carolina?

If I could descend, without being trotted

out by some roughrider driven by his

submarine dreams, this is what I’d take

my time and scribble into the three-tiered,

white créme wedding cake:

Filibuster. States’ Rights. The Grand Inquisition

of the great Thurgood Marshall. This wedding

reception would not have been possible without

the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (opposed by

you-know-who).

The Dixiecrat senator has not worn his

sandy seersucker fedora to the vows.

The top of Strom Thurmond’s bald head

reveals a birthmark tattooed in contrapposto

pose: Segregation Forever.

All my life he has been the face of hatred;

the blue eyes of the Confederate flag,

the pasty bald of white men pulling wooly

heads up into the dark skirts of trees,

the sharp, slobbering, amber teeth of

German shepherds, still clenched inside

the tissue-thin, (still marching), band-leader

legs of Black schoolteachers, the single-

minded pupae growing between the legs of

white boys crossing the tracks, ready to

force Black girls into fifth-grade positions,

Palmetto state-sanctioned sex 101.

I didn’t want to dance with him.

My young cousin arrives at my elbow.

Her beautiful lips the color of soft-skin

mangoes. She pulls, teasing the stitches

of my satin bridesmaid gown, “You better

go on down there and dance with Strom—

while he still has something left.”

I don’t tell her it is unsouthern for her

to call him by his first name, as if they

are familiar. I don’t tell her: To bear

witness to marriage is to believe that

everything moving through the sweet

wedding air can be confidently, left—

to Love.

I stand on the landing high above the

beginnings of Love, holding a plastic

champagne flute, drinking in the warm

June air of South Carolina. I hear my

youngest brother’s top hat joy. Looking

down I find him, deep in the giddy crowd,

modern, integrated, interpretive.

For ten seconds I consider dancing with

Strom. His Confederate hands touch

every shoulder, finger, back that I love.

I listen to the sound of Black laughter

shimmying. All worry floats beyond

the gurgling submarine bubbles,

the white railing, every drop of

champagne air.

I close my eyes and Uncle Freddie

appears out of a baby’s breath of fog.

(The dead are never porch bound.)

He moves with ease where I cannot.

He walks out on the rice-thrown air,

heaving a lightning bolt instead of

a wave. Suddenly, there is a table set,

complete with 1963 dining room stars,

they twinkle twinkle up & behind him.

Thelonious, Martin, Malcolm, Nina,

Dakota, all mouths Negro wide &

open have come to sing me down.

His tattered almanac sleeps curled like

a wintering slug in his back pocket.

His dark Dogon eyes jet to the scene

below, then zoom past me until they are

lost in the waning sugilite sky. Turning

in the shadows of the wheat fields,

he whispers a truth plucked from

the foreword tucked in his back pocket:

Veritas: Black people will forgive you

quicker than you can say Orangeburg

Massacre.

History does not keep books on the

handiwork of slaves. But the enslaved

who built this Big House, long before

I arrived for this big wedding, knew

the power of a porch.

This native necessity of nailing down

a place, for the cooling off of air,

in order to lift the friendly, the kindly,

the so politely, the in-love-ly, jubilant,

into the arms of the grand peculiar,

for the greater good of

the public spectacular:

us

giving us

away.

[travelingasafamily]

"Instruction, Final: To Brown Poets from Black Girl with Silver Leica" by Nikky Finney

Be camera, black-eyed aperture. Be diamondback terrapin, the only animal that can outrun a hurricane. Be 250 million years old. Be isosceles. Sirius. Rhapsody. Hogon. Dogon. Hubble. Stay hot. . . . Become the lunations. Look up the word southing before you use it in a sentence. Know southing is not a verb. Imitate them remarkable days. Locate all your ascending nodes. Chew eight times before you swallow the lyrics and lamentations of James Brown, Abbey Lincoln, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, and Aretha. Hey! Watch your language! Two and a Quarter is not the same as Deuce and a Quarter. Two-fisted is not two-faced. Remember: One monkey don’t stop no show. Let your fat belly be quilts of quietus. Pass on what the great winemakers know: The juice is not made in the vats but in the vineyard. Keep yourself rooted in the sun, rain, and darkly camphored air. Grow until you die, but before you do, leave your final kiss: Lay mint or orange eucalyptus garland, double tuck these lips. Careful to the very end what you deny, dismiss & cut away. I have spoken the best I know how.

Art: Amy Sherald, "All Things Bright and Beautiful", 2016

[elwenyere]

Cattails

One woman drives across five states just to see her. The woman being driven to has no idea anyone's headed her way. The driving woman crosses three bridges & seven lakes just to get to her door. She stops along the highway, wades into the soggy ground, cuts down coral-eyed cattails, carries them to her car as if they might be sherbet orange, long-stemmed, Confederate roses, sheared for Sherman himself. For two days she drives toward the woman in Kentucky, sleeping in rest areas with her seat lowered all the way back, doors locked. When she reaches the state line it's misting. The tired pedal-to-the-metal woman finally calls ahead. I'm here, she says. Who's this? The woman being driven to, who has never checked her oil, asks. The driving woman reminds her of the recent writing workshop where they shared love for all things out-of-doors and lyrical. Come, have lunch with me, the driving woman invites. They eat spinach salads with different kinds of dressing. They talk about driving, the third thing they both love and how fast clouds can change from state line to state line. The didn't-know-she-was-coming woman stares at she who has just arrived. She tries to read the mighty spinach leaves in her bowl, privately marveling at the driving woman's muscled spontaneity. She can hardly believe this almost stranger has made it across five states just to have lunch with her. She wonders where this mad driving woman will sleep tonight. She is of two driving minds. One convertible. One hardtop. The driving woman shows her pictures of her children. Beautiful, the other does not say. Before long words run out of petrol. The woman who is home, but without pictures of her own, announces she must go. The driving woman frets & flames, May I walk you to your car? They walk. The driver changes two lanes in third gear, fast. The trunk opens. The Mario Andretti look-alike fills the other woman's arms with sable-sheared cattails. Five feet high & badly in need of sunlight & proudly stolen from across five states. The woman with no children of her own pulls their twenty pounds in close, resting them over her Peter-Panning heart. Her lungs empty out, then fill, then fill again with the surge of birth & surprise. For two years, until their velvet bodies begin (and end) to fall to pieces, every time the driven-to woman passes the bouquet of them, there, in the vase by the front door, she is reminded of what falling in love, without permission, smells like. Each time she reaches for her keys, she recalls what you must be willing to turn into for love: spiny oyster mushroom, damson, salt marsh, cedar, creosote, new bud of pomegranate, Aegean sage blue sea, fig, blueberry, marigold, leaf fall, fogs eye, dusty miller, thief-of-the-night.

-- Nikky Finney

[manwalksintobar]

Cattails // Nikki Finney

One woman drives across five states just to see her. The woman being driven to has no idea anyone's headed her way. The driving woman crosses three bridges & seven lakes just to get to her door. She stops along the highway, wades into the soggy ground, cuts down coral-eyed cattails, carries them to her car as if they might be sherbet orange, long-stemmed, Confederate roses, sheared for Sherman himself. For two days she drives toward the woman in Kentucky, sleeping in rest areas with her seat lowered all the way back, doors locked. When she reaches the state line it's misting. The tired pedal-to-the-metal woman finally calls ahead. I'm here, she says. Who's this? The woman being driven to, who has never checked her oil, asks. The driving woman reminds her of the recent writing workshop where they shared love for all things out-of-doors and lyrical. Come, have lunch with me, the driving woman invites. They eat spinach salads with different kinds of dressing. They talk about driving, the third thing they both love and how fast clouds can change from state line to state line. The didn't-know-she-was-coming woman stares at she who has just arrived. She tries to read the mighty spinach leaves in her bowl, privately marveling at the driving woman's muscled spontaneity. She can hardly believe this almost stranger has made it across five states just to have lunch with her. She wonders where this mad driving woman will sleep tonight. She is of two driving minds. One convertible. One hardtop. The driving woman shows her pictures of her children. Beautiful, the other does not say. Before long words run out of petrol. The woman who is home, but without pictures of her own, announces she must go. The driving woman frets & flames, May I walk you to your car? They walk. The driver changes two lanes in third gear, fast. The trunk opens. The Mario Andretti look-alike fills the other woman's arms with sable-sheared cattails. Five feet high & badly in need of sunlight & proudly stolen from across five states. The woman with no children of her own pulls their twenty pounds in close, resting them over her Peter-Panning heart. Her lungs empty out, then fill, then fill again with the surge of birth & surprise. For two years, until their velvet bodies begin (and end) to fall to pieces, every time the driven-to woman passes the bouquet of them, there, in the vase by the front door, she is reminded of what falling in love, without permission, smells like. Each time she reaches for her keys, she recalls what you must be willing to turn into for love: spiny oyster mushroom, damson, salt marsh, cedar, creosote, new bud of pomegranate, Aegean sage blue sea, fig, blueberry, marigold, leaf fall, fogs eye, dusty miller, thief-of-the-night.

[anuwrites]

The On1y One (2024) | The Aureole by Nikky Finney

[dewdroppixie]

heard today is trans day of visibility so I'm posting my favourite trans icons.

Yazmin Finney and Bel Priestly

Nikkie Tutorials and

Hunter Schafer 💙💗

[clancyycat]

beloved may i please have some poetry recs?

hi honey yes of course you may <3

some collections that i love:

faithful and virtuous night - louise glück

the wild iris - louise glück

deaf republic - ilya kaminsky (especially poignant with the current state of political affairs)

dancing in odessa - ilya kaminsky

head off & split - nikky finney (attended a reading for this collection and it was the inciting incident that made me pursue poetry)

bestiary - donika kelly

wound from the mouth of a wound - torrin a. greathouse (tw this has speaks on violence towards queer people and can be a little hard to read at times. beautiful collection though)

and this isn’t a collection per se, but still good to read if you’re interested in writing poetry:

letters to a young poet - rainer maria rilke

and as a bonus, my current favorite poem, by margaret atwood:

[iaurencin]

Dionne Brand - Poetry/Fiction/Non-Fiction

Brand is a pretty beloved Canadian poet, author, and essayist! She's also a lesbian! Inventory was my introduction to her work, and 12 years out I still think about it all the time.

Nikky Finney - Poetry

Finney is primarily an educator and academic, but she has published several books of poetry which are revelatory. I personally started with Head Off & Split.

hello fellow non-Black tumblr users. welcome to my saw trap. if you'd like to leave, please name one (1) Black woman author who is not Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, or N.K. Jemisin. bonus points if she's published a book in the last five years.

[apexart-journal]

Hanna Saarikoski in NYC #Day 13, Trip to Washington DC

The next morning I had a late breakfast before leaving the hotel. I walked along the streets towards the National Mall and made a first stop at the Smithsonian Pollinator Garden. Since I love gardening and plants, I relaxed by just exploring everything that was growing there and noticing little nuances in flowers I knew from home, how they are the same but different here.

Then I visited the National Museum of the American Indian, the Washington Monument, and finally the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Both museums were full of interesting objects, information and strong emotions. The Trail of Tears and the story of Pocahontas was something I knew a little about, but the museum made it all come alive. I had a second thought about Thomas Jefferson's book collection and how even the most educated person can be blinded and led by conventional thinking fostered in the time one lives.

At the NMAAHC, I especially liked how the vast collection was displayed. Below the street level were the history galleries, and as you climbed higher through floors of interactive Explore More and community galleries, you came to the 4th floor, the culture galleries. There they had permanent exhibition Cultural expressions, examining style (identity, political expression, and attitudes expressed in clothing, dress, hair, and jewelry), food and foodways, artistry, and creativity through craftsmanship, social dance and gesture, and language. It was so fantastic and rich in detail, and it made the connections. Poet Nikky Finney's acceptance speech (or probably just an excerpt of it) at the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry ceremony, touching on race, reading, and writing, was incredible. I stood there and listened to it several times. I need to find and read more of her writing.

After this cultural concentrate, the return trip was quite extreme. It was already dark when the bus left Washington Union Station. I was prepared to read and write, but no one turned on the lights, and I didn't dare either, thinking it might interfere with the driver's work. The bus was packed with passengers. At some point the driver took a short break to get some coffee. In the dark, mindlessly scrolling through my phone, the miles and hours seemed like an eternity.

I tried to write something on my phone, texted Casey as well. Suddenly I realized something was wrong. I heard worried voices and understood that the bus wasn't staying in its lane, but drifting off to the side of the highway. Then the sirens and blinking red and blue lights of the policecar, our bus slowed down and stopped. Apparently our driver was too tired to drive and had fallen asleep while driving. Some of the passengers probably called the police to stop the driver. He was frustrated and angry, claiming he could still get us to NYC safely. "Take a plane if you don't dare take the bus". The police investigated the situation for a long time, but finally let him drive again.  Even that was scary and anything could have happened, I felt so sorry for him. I am pretty sure that no one wants to drive that tired. He probably didn't have a choice.

[finishinglinepress]

FLP POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: Traveling Mercy by Jennifer Bartell

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/traveling-mercy-by-jennifer-bartell/

Traveling Mercy navigates the journeys of a #black #woman from rural South Carolina. Her travels transcend time as she encounters #history, nature, and grief. She sits with the eldest residents before her birth, with the first ancestor who came to these shores, with her parents through their marriage, and through her own loneliness in the wake of their deaths. Planting as she harvests, this book is a lament and a love story to survival.

Jennifer Bartell is a poet and teacher from Columbia, SC. She was born and raised in Bluefield, a community of Johnsonville, SC. She received the MFA in Poetry from the University of South Carolina. Her poetry has been published in Obsidian, Callaloo, pluck!, As/Us, Jasper Magazine, the museum americana, Scalawag, and Kakalak, among others. An alumna of Agnes Scott College, Jennifer has fellowships from Callaloo and The Watering Hole. She teaches high school English. This is her first full-length book of poetry.

PRAISE FOR Traveling Mercy by Jennifer Bartell

After reading a single magnificent poem in Traveling Mercy, “the sapling in your chest floods with too much water and light.” Read a handful of poems, and find yourself on the poet’s ferry crossing the river “between thens and tomorrows.” Every magical, existential line is an iteration of Jennifer Bartell’s dextrous poetics. This accomplished debut elegizes human loss while celebrating the resilience that persists through witness and language. Traveling Mercy is a dazzling first book.

–Terrance Hayes

Bartell’s Traveling Mercy is such an intimate history of a Black girl raised by Black women, raised by church fans and magnolia memories, dream-hymns of Black people pushing through mud and disease and held together by traditions. This rich collection of poems, by a Black girl who knows how and why to style okra seeds in her hair, spills with fat oysters and a community’s petrified pounded grace. Bartell assures she will never give us one chance to hold our breath, as we jump into this never-ending deep end of blazing life, therefore, prepare to be drenched.

–Nikky Finney

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #read #poetrybook #poems #blackwoman #blackpoet

[travelingasafamily]

Love Poems by Black Poets

I recently had a love poem I wrote for my girlfriend published in the Tuskegee Review. I had the long tradition of Black poets writing about love in mind - some writing for friends, for new lovers, for long term partners, for communities, for historical figures, etc. I've included a short list of love poems by Black poets below, some of which have appeared on Traveling as a Family before. Which poems resonated with you, and what else would you add to this list?

To Be in Love by Gwendolyn Brooks

Love Poem in the Black Field by Ariana Benson

Love Poem: Centaur by Donika Kelly

Love Poem: Mermaid by Donika Kelly

The Aureole by Nikky Finney

Cozy Apologia by Rita Dove

Heart to Heart by Rita Dove

My Lover is a Woman by Pat Parker

Love on Flatbush Avenue by Angel Nafis

American Wedding by Essex Hemphill

acknowledgements by Danez Smith

Regular Black by Danez Smith

[lunchboxpoems]

CATTAILS

One woman drives across five states just to see her. The woman being driven to has no idea anyone's headed her way. The driving woman crosses three bridges & seven lakes just to get to her door. She stops along the highway, wades into the soggy ground, cuts down coral-eyed cattails, carries them to her car as if they might be sherbet orange, long-stemmed, Confederate roses, sheared for Sherman himself. For two days she drives toward the woman in Kentucky, sleeping in rest areas with her seat lowered all the way back, doors locked. When she reaches the state line it's misting. The tired pedal-to-the-metal woman finally calls ahead. I'm here, she says. Who's this? The woman being driven to, who has never checked her oil, asks. The driving woman reminds her of the recent writing workshop where they shared love for all things out-of-doors and lyrical. Come, have lunch with me, the driving woman invites. They eat spinach salads with different kinds of dressing. They talk about driving, the third thing they both love and how fast clouds can change from state line to state line. The didn't-know-she-was-coming woman stares at she who has just arrived. She tries to read the mighty spinach leaves in her bowl, privately marveling at the driving woman's muscled spontaneity. She can hardly believe this almost stranger has made it across five states just to have lunch with her. She wonders where this mad driving woman will sleep tonight. She is of two driving minds. One convertible. One hardtop. The driving woman shows her pictures of her children. Beautiful, the other does not say. Before long words run out of petrol. The woman who is home, but without pictures of her own, announces she must go. The driving woman frets & flames, May I walk you to your car? They walk. The driver changes two lanes in third gear, fast. The trunk opens. The Mario Andretti look-alike fills the other woman's arms with sable-sheared cattails. Five feet high & badly in need of sunlight & proudly stolen from across five states. The woman with no children of her own pulls their twenty pounds in close, resting them over her Peter-Panning heart. Her lungs empty out, then fill, then fill again with the surge of birth & surprise. For two years, until their velvet bodies begin (and end) to fall to pieces, every time the driven-to woman passes the bouquet of them, there, in the vase by the front door, she is reminded of what falling in love, without permission, smells like. Each time she reaches for her keys, she recalls what you must be willing to turn into for love: spiny oyster mushroom, damson, salt marsh, cedar, creosote, new bud of pomegranate, Aegean sage blue sea, fig, blueberry, marigold, leaf fall, frog's eye, dusty miller, thief-of-the-night.

NIKKY FINNEY

[wintryblight]

Hi, love your blog! Any poems you could recommend about travel in general or, a bit more specific, road trip poems from contemporary poets?

thank you anon! here are some travel poems, some of whom are more specifically about road trips. i added a Whitman poem at the end even though he’s not necessarily contemporary, but i still think you’d really enjoy it.

Sally Wen Mao, “Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles” | the trees twitch / and the clouds wane and the tides / quiver and the galaxies tilt and the sun / spins us another lonely cycle

Nikky Finney, “Cattails” | Each time she reaches for her keys, she recalls what you must be willing to turn into for love

Megan Fernandes, “Amsterdam” | immune to / time shifts, I just wander and buy fruit / and almonds and a good loaf / of bread

Jenny Xie, “Rootless” | Can this solitude be rootless, unhooked from the ground?

Lidija Dimkovska, “Journey” | You dreamt in snatches an unending dream of how / the nineteenth century travels around with a beard / like a drunk loser

Nate Klug, “Lonely Planet” | “We’re here now,” you say, / holding out the book I bought / with its dog-eared maps and lists

Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road, 4″ | O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you

[the-final-sentence]

This native necessity of nailing down a place, for the cooling off of air, in order to lift the friendly, the kindly, the so politely, the in-love-ly, jubilant, into the arms of the grand peculiar, for the greater good of the public spectacular: us giving us away.

Nikky Finney, from “Dancing with Strom”

[biandlesbianliterature]

10 Poetry Collections by Black Queer Women

10 Poetry Collections by Black Queer Women

Poetry has always been an artistic expression. From declarations of love to contemplating the meaning of life, poetry has a way of putting the human experience into words. It’s also an effective way to take a political stance or spark compassion for others’ cultures and ways of life. Here are 10 poetry collections that delve into the experience of Black bisexual, lesbian, and queer writers.

How…