IT'S YOUR MUG ANNIVERSARY ISSUE Jane Alberdeston Coralin   FOR BLACK GIRLS WHO DON'T KNOW Amiri Baraka at HR-57, Washington DC, 1995 I was a girl who knew nothing Of jazz. Just another girl in line, waiting for you to read The rest of a twenty volume suicide note. What did I know of your coming music, Your blue-banded heart, slit-gong tongue, Hepcat in all your bones. I was a girl Who knew nothing of love supreme, still stuck In her papi’s lounge-singer record scratches. How you would leave me shook, body A gourd in the hands of egun-eguns, dug up For song, rolled under my skins, Tripping me up, rocks in my soles, Forgetting me how to heel-toe. You walk in hot, Hot with flu, 103 degrees of hot And climbing mountains In your strut, hands fast and flailing, Flinging words with sweat, cool, But not yet hot like cool. You step up in that right knee strut, Heathens! Stage-stride in a broken line, Your body stamping out a long-lost morse code. Freedom Jazz, you call it and Throw your shoulders back, Back against the band’s yielding riffs, Bent back, as if your poem were a sax against your lips, Reaching towards the ceiling for legroom. What shaman in your staccato, hand smacking leg, As if all of you were made of word, Tapping the air, our ears, the wall with bop, Backbeat, timbale, crisp lettuce sound. You start the long Whoooooo towards eeee And I think of the dizzy ways we mourn. Blood confetti storms, scattering. Right there In that moment, I loved you. You with your eyes closed against the room, As if you could make that horn just be. PORTORICAN ANTHEM El esterio-tipico I am a puertorriquena spic in foreign tongue I brought the cockroaches to new york and ruined chicago slums the Caribbean’s footless black oyster sucking on neighboring juice I drink ron all day and lace these veins with poppy tea aye—Papi I prostitute for rice and beans yeah—I eat government cheese a true patriot to my red white and blue? I broke my ingles long ago and blew america up and like a conch-shelled demon I fell my legs parted one foot in the gringolandia sand the other in the wet crotch of my old San Juan     RIVER SILK: A SONG FOR MARIA She was mined from the mouths of worms, centuries gathered, then crated cross oceans to Paterson, that bustling city where she plaited her mother's hair, and her father's skin shone between the shadows of the Royal Machine Shop. In her bobby socks and poodle skirts, she was just a young girl reeling in the dream of cornsilk. All she knew breathed in Paterson's gills, the worlds between PS 18 and the 17th Street kitchen, Meyers Brothers and the pulp of rotting marigolds on neighbor's stoops. She grew to understand power plants and fish weirs, a city's promises and the legs of a father's labor. She read a rivertown's desire, once prehistoric and big as God, now skeletal, its ribs surrounding a whole city of dollar stores. Long gone are the ship odors of jasmine. Now it's the pulse of car horns and chickenwire that greet her, the tricks of a church spires' reach, the wintergreen songs of silk wrapped around women's throats. But still she tells the world of Paterson's sweetwaters, new immigrants of alcapurrias, their children that rise then fall and rise again, and those faces, like her Papa's, the old Societa. On the days she is not boro or back bay or northwest bend, the hours she is the quiet New Jersey drought, she stays put, near home, weaving ribbons. She is the lips of the Passaic, weaving through iron, stone to lowland swamp, but words are not all she looms in that bustling city. Find her in drainage ditches, in the wet tongues of Clifton's suburban curbsides, near Spruce Street or Ward, floating down Pennington Park, a lined paper boat, winding, climbing, navigating the dead to safety. I swear that if you lose her, all you have to do is knock on leaning oaks, or smoke out of a cave. Her words wings in the underworld that is the gut. If you look close, it is love's fibers she threads, wide and emergent with all her strokes, dancing in rooms reserved for slowness. Kneel, go ahead, just kneel to the ground, listen close to the Passaic passing by on the errand of her heart. In early 1994, Jane Alberdeston Coralin, poet and fiction writer, ventured into It's Your Mug. Once inside those brick walls, she learned about herself as an Afro-Latina, and a poet. She will always cherish her membership in that vibrant and vital African-American poetry community, whose reach continues to span the coastlines. Coralin is a professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico and is working on a children's book.   Published in Volume 10:2, Spring 2009.   Read more by this author: Jane Alberdeston Coralin Alberdeston Coralin on Reetika Vazirani: Profiles Issue