I-70 Review
Writing and Art from the Middle and Beyond
Stan Banks
Stan Banks is an Assistant Professor & Artist-In-Residence
At Avila University in Kansas City, Missouri. His awards include The Langston Hughes Prize for Poetry and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship/Grant. His four books are Blue Beat Syncopation (2003), Rhythm and Guts (1992), Coming from a Funky Time and Place (1988), and On 10thAlley Way (1981). Stan Banks is an Assistant Professor & Artist-In-Residence
At Avila University in Kansas City, Missouri. His awards include The Langston Hughes Prize for Poetry and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship/Grant. His four books are Blue Beat Syncopation (2003), Rhythm and Guts (1992), Coming from a Funky Time and Place (1988), and On 10thAlley Way (1981).
A BARBEQUED LIFE (1967)
(For My Grandmother)
At Georgia's bootleg-beer house
on 10th and Vine, every holiday
the smell of sizzling beef and
its juices roasting in garlic, onions
and tomato sauce floated through
10th , 11th, and 12th streets
Georgia's husband, a World War I
veteran from 1917 to 1919,
grilled in the backyard showing the skills
he learned while serving in France.
As folks woke up on Vine Street,
Georgia already would be boasting
with her bull-horn voice,
“Y'all can steal my sauce,
but if I run upon you,
I'm gonna be your boss.”
Jay Bone, Georgia's son, set up
his four piece horn section early
so the fellas could eat biscuits, barbeque,
and practice in between their greasin'.
Six Bits, the barber, would holler back
from his next door porch,
“Georgia, my thick hot-peppered brisket
is what every Vine Street heifer needs
when I fix it.”
The days of barbequing
freed the air for the black folks
of Vine Street who lived
lives hungry for
Jim Crow liberation.
For the whole of these days
Georgia and Six Bits would battle
for barbeque bragging rights
playing the dozens on each other's momma
trying to come up
with the coolest insult.
Georgia always got the last lick,
“I told you clowns
once you taste my voodoo
hickory barbeque
baby, you'll lose your damn mind
and beg to call me, divine.”
AFTER KATRINA: THE BODIES ARE RISING
Unjust death can never be
contained in a crypt.
Bodies rising tend to expose
the truth about the remains
of Jim Crow days.
Atrocities are historic in Louisiana.
Ghosts of old Creoles
are again trying to speak:
“Where have y'all been?”
“Why did y'all leave us?”
We are witnessing the
sins of the last century
as mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons rise.
Anti-Civil Rights Dixiecrats
never wanted anyone to
bother with the horrors
that lie just under the surface.
How many times will America allow
the ugly issue of skin color
to hemorrhage in our hearts.
New Orleans, you've always been a
showy and Jazz mad city.
Please “Satchmo” come back
and jam with Wynton Marsalis ⏤
blow the life back from
smithereens to New Orleans.
“Oh, Susanna … don't you cry for me”
and don't ever forget Emmett Till
beaten so savagely his momma
didn't know him.
“I'm going to Louisiana”
not you, Dred Scott, unless you go back
as a slave because the 1857 Supreme
Court decision sealed your fate.
“With my banjo on my knee.”
It's time America,
the bodies are rising.
THE DEATH OF A KC JITTERBUG
(For My Father)
Poking around where his
humiliated body dropped
I felt a double freeze
there in the snow
where a thick puddle
of his blood made a
dark purple design.
In my dreams
my stomach folds
over and over as
his body curses me
while a siren roars
in my head.
Five shots insulted his body ⏤
two in his upper back,
one through his spine,
one in his left shoulder,
and one in his right ear to
hollow out his point of view.
Everytime I remember
how his body was left
perverted in the
Charlie Parker projects,
it's the beat, the slide,
the skip, the hard back-riff,
the idea of his death
that won't fade away
and like Jazz his
haunting is impromptu
Birthers: A Decayed Reflection
Logical people ask is
a lie true or false ⏤
they don't relish
in the perversion of it.
Birthers weren't even relieved
after forcing President
Barack Husan Obama to
show his papers
as in the early centuries
of American Slavery
when Africans were forced
to show their papers to
pass from place to place.
Birthers have always been obvious
attempting to hide their true nature
with fake outrage, white sheets and
now suits and ties, business dresses
and Supreme Court robes.
Birthers used to rule in the
time of Plantation owners
who cooked up schemes to
forever brand and lock in
the belief that dark skin equals
the identity of a slave
who is eternally alien.
Birthers are just a new version
of the Ku Klux Klan and
Southern Segregationists.
In the light of day
when a lie can smell
as rotten as it is,
Birthers don't ever want to die
because maybe they know
that Jesus is tan
like Barack Obama.
DYSFUNCTIONING BABY
(Based on a true event)
In the first few seconds
of his innocent life,
his mother tried several times to
flush him down a McDonald's toilet,
but the baby fought against the
surge of filthy rushing water.
Blood, urine, tears, feces and
pieces of umbilical cord
streamed by his puny body,
but he held on tight with a grace
few adults find in a lifetime and
learned one of the profound lessons
of this lowly existence --
when you're born in crap,
you can either sink willingly
or swim against the tide.