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photo credit Mike Hazard

Juke Joint Named JAZZVILLE                   

Like Harlem

Birmingham

Atlanta

And DC nights

Chocolate people in vanilla town

Living chocolate

Old school and new school

Bumping up against each other

In a dim lit smoke filled aroma of

Slow smoked ribs

Catfish

Fried okra

Chicken legs thighs and wings

(And in those days) cigarettes

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Ancient Young Souls

Beneath

Tones

Floor

Vibrate ghosts 

Struggle is in evidence everywhere

So too are spirits we know

Bendable young tress

Skins of bovine

Gazelle

Buffalo and deer

Wooden box drums

Drawers of dressers

And shipping crates

Seashells

Ram horns

Elephant tusk

Reeds as weeds

In

Wind

Blown

Truth

And

Metals heated

Bent...

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Fiancé

by J. Otis Powell!

Engaged to Revolution

Committed to change and working

Toward visions of a new world

The relationship arranged

Calculated in time  

By his proximity

To struggle and malnutrition isms

From the diet of a junk food society

Fiancé to music and the ways

It made him move around the periphery

When it talked

Walked

K...

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photo credit Rush Merchant III

Octopus Ink

It’s too delicate to express 

Without risking failure

Danger of going too far 

Pulses in my chest like fright 

Pathos of saying nothing

Doing nothing

Procrastinating indicates how little 

I know 

I push forward anyway

Damming a river

Like a core of engineers

This river has flooded before

And flooding

(I believe...

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photo credit: Kari Musil

Tongue

I

Miss your mouth and 

Things it says

Wet fat kisses and

Flavors in your juices

Slow lingering movements across

Your pallet and the voice behind your

Kisses telling stories of Independence Day

Fireworks from your heart 

I miss your other mouth

With its distinctive smile 

Feel of warm silk

On my tongue

An...

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Knozz Moe King

People say he died young

But sixty-two

Sixty-three

Sixty-eight  

Isn’t young

For a poet

Poets are born old

Then age like cheese

Philosophers age more

Pensively and most are ambidextrous

Poet practitioner dreamer scrutinizer

Light heavy crawling flying

Swirling

He took it where he found it

Or where it found him

Then it dropped him

In...

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Pannonica

by J. Otis Powell!

Lavender encircles your eyes

And dares me

Love her as an equal

Though everything contradicts reality

The story in front of me plays like

Unrequited sagas that shattered heart

Felt adoration as porcelain on concrete

But on more luxurious mornings back rubbing

And smile kissing to Coltrane

We soak up medium roast Frenc...

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photo credit: Kari Musil 

ImproviXation #107 

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Album cover design by Oskaras Anosovas

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After The Fall

To deny her nothing

To be perfect

To love

(Like I love myself)

As she is

As she will

To want magic

To want more of her

Dreams don't phantom can't

Won't accept never

No

They gather together scattered bits

And build

In need and in too deep

In pebbles of a drying rose

Blues fall like darkness

Like warriors tired from battle

Like dre...

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photo credit: George Roberts

Politics

 by J. Otis Powell!

Emancipation stories told

One

By one

Can only add up

                           To a dysfunctional

                  Sum

When told in parenthesis

To explain woe

The parenthetical is divided

Conquered

The nouveau...

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photo credit: Kari Musil 

Island Life

Separated from the mainland

         Surrounded by a great sea

Nature has made an enigma of me

An aberration in space

         A time tempered metaphor

Like Galapagos Island where life is spontaneous

Unique life forms evolve undisguised and vulnerable

To the rage of a stormy sea

         To predators alien to me

Mine is an ecos...

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Amnesiacs

Blue moods can lie

Or amplify truth

Colloid in regions of a soul

Blues gives reflections  

Like broken mirrors

We live under the gaze of poets

Calling us to task

Whispering in our ear

To be unafraid

To subdue cheerful robots 

To deliberate with happy slaves 

To refuse to wear yokes of shame

A blue deep as purple leaves

Stains

What we suff...

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An acknowledgement of the type of psychic training and slavery

inflicted upon people today, an indication of their fear of a policed

state, occurs at the beginning of a piece called "APRIL IN PARIS,"

subtitled "The Creaking of the Word:  After-the-Fact Lecture/Libretto

(Aunt Nancy Version)" in _Djbot Baghostus's Run_By Nathaniel Mackey.

Jarred Bottle, sitting at a stop...

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Voices of the Andoumboulou

photo credit: George Roberts

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painting by Evamarie Juniper Bittleston

“Blues come after slavery cause blues got a life right here to sing about, real life not just in lost Africa or in the sky after we die; See the brothers say when we was in Africa blue was our favorite color but when we took that trip blue got bent then what it meant was something we lost something that made us sad (you blue Jim) or something beautifu...

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