Evie Shockley‘s poetry appears in her chapbook, The Gorgon Goddess (2001), and her forthcoming book, a half-red sea, both from Carolina Wren Press.  She has also published in numerous journals and anthologies, including African American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blue Fifth Review, Brilliant Corners, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Fascicle, From the Fishouse, Hambone, HOW2, nocturnes (re)view, Poetry Daily, Rainbow Darkness, and Talisman. She was awarded a residency at the Hedgebrook Women Writers’ Retreat in 2003 and is a graduate fellow of Cave Canem.  An assistant professor at Rutgers University, Shockley teaches literature and creative writing and is at work on a project theorizing the relationship of innovation and race in African American poetry.

the city is american, so she
can map it. train tracks, highways slice through, bleed
            only to one side. like a half-red sea
permanently parted, the middle she’d

pass through, like the rest, in a wheeling rush,
afraid the divide would not hold and all
            would drown – city as almighty ambush –
beneath the crashing waves of human hell.

            the city’s infra(red)structure sweats her,
a land(e)scape she can’t make, though she knows
            the way. she’s got great heart, but that gets her where? egypt’s always on her right (it goes

            where she goes), canaan’s always just a-head,
and to her left, land of the bloodless dead.
 

pardon the glaring mirrors, blinding sheets
of two-dimensionality in which
            the glassy, glazed self, surface skimming, meets
the flattened, leadened, inner, under bitch.

they show what they must bitterly consume –
are tongues that lick whatever dirt is cast
           against them, that reflect unthinkingly, loom
unwillingly unwelcome, first to last,

like mute cassandras over ostrich lives.
do not throw stones. hurl boomerangs or drape
            a veil between you and the view that wives
you to your worst. forgive them, though they gape,

unawed and unashamed: they are compelled
to take it in, to hold what you have helled.

© Evie Shockley 2006.