Allison Hedge Coke

Mortitude

 

In an inkling, what was manifest
was never really crucial, just
a fiction someone dreamed machined,
missiled malicious industry into. 

Now, when each eave of night weighs heavily,
every roll of moon, each eyelid rubber-split wide,
every narrowing pulse thrum to touch,
clasp on fingered reason 

just bleeds out anyway

       soaks cement wet, or caliche –
never mind disparities – 

when ebbing away what could have been

what could have lived long after,
leaves mortitude, undertaken      mean
hurled down, felled      to raggedy funerary spoils 

– so sadly simple, human States –

Tired now.

The Dictator’s Hands

Hand over hand, over mouth, over earth,
between legs, between blouse, between eyes, what it’s worth.
Filled with clubs, filled with pens, filled with mics with no end.
On the keys to the empire, the palace, the beast
with its head all in tangles, wrought up without peace.
Waving about without reason nor time,
hands without purpose running wildly unkind.
Signing parcels of death, inking fresh kill till bled.
No caring for country, nor caring for dead.
Could shoot someone on 5th street and no one would care
Could wipe out the whole country if happen to dare.
Midasing miser, the people be damned,
nothing and no one adhere his demand.
Nothing and no one adhere his demand.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke came of age working in fields, factories, and waters. She was raised and spent her early adult life primarily in North Carolina, but also in Canada and across the Great Plains US. She was a sharecropper by the time she was mid-teens and continued manual labor in mostly rural settings until retraining for former fieldworkers after her disabilities precluded continuation. Her books include The Year of the Rat, Dog Road Woman, Off-Season City Pipe, Blood Run, Burn and Streaming as well as a memoir, Rock Ghost, Willow, Deer. She is the editor of the anthologies Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas, Effigies, Effigies II and Effigies III. She recently served in a Fulbright to Montenegro and in the Dan & Maggie Inouye Chair in Democratic Ideals. Has served as Reynolds Chair of Poetry, as an NEH Chair in Creative Writing/Critical Studies, as an Artist in Residence (Writer) and a Distinguished Visiting Writer. She has received several fellowships and honors and teaches for the University of California at Riverside where she directs Writers Week and Along the Chaparral: memorializing the enshrined, federal outreach project with K-12 schools. She is the founder/organizer of the Sandhill Crane Retreat.